Zimbra has 40 Million Paid Mailboxes

Venture Beat is reporting that Yahoo’s Zimbra has 40 Million Paid Email boxes, which is gives it more paid mailboxes than Google’s Free Gmail and it’s paying Apps (Gmail) For Your Domain customers, and puts it close behind AOL and Microsoft’s Hotmail services. While Zimbra’s users are not the same type of users as Gmail, AOL, and Hotmail’s users, in that Zimbra is not offering basic web mail services like the aforementioned services, they are offering something more significant in a full Groupware system with Calendaring, Email, Contacts, etc., and they are getting companies to pay for it, whereas the others, not so much. Much of Zimbra’s new found user base is due to the fact that Comcast has deployed Zimbra as it’s new email system for all of it’s broadband subscribers.

While Zimbra has made significant headway in aquiring new customers, they still have a lot to do to compete with Microsoft Exchange, with their biggest hurdle being acceptance by non-technical “office-type” users of using their own web mail interface over the traditional Outlook Interface. I ran into this head on when I replaced our existing Exchange 2003 Server with Zimbra. While the system was fairly stable, but less so than our Exchange server, their Desktop Connectors that linked with Outlook, Entourage, Apple Mail, and Apple iCal left much to be desired. These connectors were down right buggy and feature incomplete. With that said, if you can get your users to use their Zimbra Desktop Client or Web Client, the system was rock solid, and their Connector for Active Sync worked flawlessly.

I hope this milestone gets them noticed within the Yahoo corporate structure and gets them some more resources so that they do not get lost in the current Yahoo re org mess. I am still not convinced that Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra was a good move for either of the companies. As I have said before I still think that Apple should have bought Zimbra instead of creating their iCal Server.

It should be noted that I own stock in Yahoo.