1 Topic by nsclick

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Topic: iRedMail vs. SOGo vs. Zentyal

Hello,

excuse my maybe provocative question, please.

Why should I use iRedMail instead of directly installing SOGo as described on their website: https://sogo.nu/files/docs/SOGoInstallationGuide.html or using Zentyal (https://doc.zentyal.org/en/installation.html) ?

I have spent a few days with comparing different groupwares, but the differences are still unclear. For my current understanding all of the above mentioned systems are more or less the same....Postfix, MySQL/MariaDB, Dovecot,... and SOGo.

Could you give me a hint, please on how these solutions differ and why iRedMail should be used?

Thanks a lot in advance.

----

Spider Email Archiver: On-Premises, lightweight email archiving software developed by iRedMail team. Supports Amazon S3 compatible storage and custom branding.

2 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

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Re: iRedMail vs. SOGo vs. Zentyal

I'm afraid that you have to compare them yourself, we don't have such comparison.

iRedMail integrates Postfix/Dovecot/Nginx/... with our best practice, including SOGo. smile

3 Reply by nsclick

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Re: iRedMail vs. SOGo vs. Zentyal

In this case, let me ask:
Why have you chosen iRedMail as Groupware solution instead of one if the other solutions? What are the "killer" arguments?


ZhangHuangbin wrote:

I'm afraid that you have to compare them yourself, we don't have such comparison.

iRedMail integrates Postfix/Dovecot/Nginx/... with our best practice, including SOGo. smile

4 Reply by Neutro (edited by Neutro 2019-10-29 17:50:47)

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Re: iRedMail vs. SOGo vs. Zentyal

Hello smile

I think you didn't notice that ZhangHuangbin who answered you earlier is not just a regular user, he's the founder of the iredmail solution so he didn't choose iredmail, he created it wink

Also you said you've been analyzing the different existing groupware solutions but iredmail is not a groupware solution. It's a specialized mail solution.

For my current understanding all of the above mentioned systems are more or less the same....Postfix, MySQL/MariaDB, Dovecot,... and SOGo.

Regarding specific mail services available i think you're right, the iredmail and zentyal solutions provide "more or less" the same features.

It would help if you could describe what exactly are the needs behind your question (small business, medium, personal usage?) and give as much details as possible about the context because so far you only talked about the how but not about the why, which is more important wink

5 Reply by nsclick

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Re: iRedMail vs. SOGo vs. Zentyal

Neutro wrote:

I think you didn't notice that ZhangHuangbin who answered you earlier is not just a regular user, he's the founder of the iredmail solution so he didn't choose iredmail, he created it wink

Thanks Neutro for this clarification. In this case I should have asked ZhangHuangbin what triggered him to do this huge effort big_smile

Neutro wrote:

It would help if you could describe what exactly are the needs behind your question (small business, medium, personal usage?) and give as much details as possible about the context because so far you only talked about the how but not about the why, which is more important wink

Regarding your comment, I'm looking for a groupware for personal use with the following features:

  • Open-Source

  • Actively developed

  • Free to use

  • IMAP

  • Active Sync

  • Microsoft Outlook Connectivity (Active Sync or Outlook Connector)

  • CalDAV

  • CardDAV

  • Large and active community

  • Webinterface for Mails, Calender, Contacts

  • Webinterface for administration (would be nice)

  • For outgoing mails: separate SMTP account for each user (Postfix "Sender-Dependent SASL authentication"?)

  • Collecting mails from different POP3 accounts and delivering them to user mailboxes (fetchmail / getmail ?)

At the moment the following solutions are in my short list:

  • iRedMail

  • Kolab

  • SOGo 4

  • Zentyal

I'm curious about your comments/proposals smile

6 Reply by Neutro (edited by Neutro 2019-10-30 17:28:47)

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Re: iRedMail vs. SOGo vs. Zentyal

You're welcome smile

A groupware is a software solution desgined to help multiple people work towards the same goal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_software

So by definition a mail system is a groupware, but there are multiple other kinds of groupware, like owncloud or skype, ect...

What you are refering to is a typical user mail solution so you should call it a "mail solution" instead of "groupware" to avoid ambiguity wink

In my previous message i asked you about the "why" of you wanting to use a groupware, and you still have not answered this so i cannot still help you further wink

In other words:

- who will be using your mail server?
- in which context: business, association, family, ...?
- how many people?
- who will maintain the server in working condition (install, updates, backup)?
- what hardware will it run on server side?
- where the server will be hosted? How fast will be the bandwidth?
- what hardware will it run on client side (PC, mac, iphones, android phones, ...)?
- give as much other details as possible

Also when you say "Collecting mails from different POP3 accounts and delivering them to user mailboxes (fetchmail / getmail ?)", do you mean that you want users to receive mails from other mail services to your mail service? Can you give more details about that as well?

Last but not least, about the solutions you described:

- iRedMail: sounds good
- Kolab: might be good from what i've checked but can't find support forum
- SOGo 4: sogo is not a full mail solution, it's a gateway between a mail server (backend) and the users (frontend). It's integrated in iredmail.
Zentyal: it's designed to be a all-in-one server solution including mail, which makes it imho not a right choice for what you're looking for.

7 Reply by hws

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Re: iRedMail vs. SOGo vs. Zentyal

nsclick wrote:

Regarding your comment, I'm looking for a groupware for personal use with the following features:

  • Open-Source

  • Actively developed

  • Free to use

  • IMAP

  • Active Sync

  • Microsoft Outlook Connectivity (Active Sync or Outlook Connector)

  • CalDAV

  • CardDAV

  • Large and active community

  • Webinterface for Mails, Calender, Contacts

  • Webinterface for administration (would be nice)

  • For outgoing mails: separate SMTP account for each user (Postfix "Sender-Dependent SASL authentication"?)

  • Collecting mails from different POP3 accounts and delivering them to user mailboxes (fetchmail / getmail ?)

At the moment the following solutions are in my short list:

  • iRedMail

  • Kolab

  • SOGo 4

  • Zentyal

I'm curious about your comments/proposals smile

For your needs you need to decide which e-mail server suite you like to install at your server. The "solutions" you name are different things. So it seems you do not have a lot of knowledge in this matter. ;-)

I would choose between iRedMail (the EASY version!) and Mailcow. For the regular iRedMail you need some knowledge about email servers and servers generally. So this won't be for you.

iRedmail EASY is not free, Mailcow is free. Both are fully maintained and actively supported.