Carbonio is a new email system with an open source version that is really quite good. The interface is modern and it is under active development. Some people may argue that Carbonio is like a branch off of Zimbra but it is quite different.

Zimbra which was the top open source email system that started 10+ years ago by Yahoo! is being mothballed because the company Synacore is not really actively developing and the support of it is being phased out. Because of this, a lot of users and system admin are looking for alternative solutions to Zimbra and Carbonio is an interesting candidate.

This is the web interface:-

This is the web interface for writing emails:-

After testing Carbonio I have to report that it is a very interesting candidate for replacing Zimbra. Here are some of the pros:-

• It is under active development – even in the last 3 weeks I have seen two new versions released and the team developing is are great and really on top of things
• It has dedicated mobile app which works great for calendars, emails, contacts management and this syncs in with everything
• It allows you to setup multiple virtual hosts
• The installation and upgrade is very simple and efficient

However there are a few caveats that as of writing people need to be aware of:-

• TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are not supported at all – which means Outlook 2010, Outlook 2016 and older versions will not work
• Windows 7 with Outlook didn’t work
• The mobile version of the webmail also didn’t work… because you are expected to use the mobile app instead of accessing mail through the web browser

To get Carbonio – you can go to https://zextras.com/carbonio-community-edition