It’s rare these days when I come across any app that makes me say, "Wow, now this is useful!" Yahoo’s Zimbra Desktop is one of them.

When it comes to email, there are many who prefer the convenience of web-based mail but wish there was a local application that looked and acted like a mail client. Zimbra Desktop is it. This software absolutely nails it in terms of friendliness, ease-of-use, convenience and everything in between.

First of all, it’s multi-platform. Windows, Mac or Linux. Any truly good application these days supports all three, and this does.

Second, it has support for multiple types of email:

Zimbra, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Mail, two types of IMAP and POP.

It always pleases me when I see an offering by a major player like Yahoo! that is willing to support a competitor’s product like Hotmail or Gmail because it shows confidence in their own offering.

It should be noted however that only some Hotmail accounts are supported due to compatibility issues. Most will be, but if yours doesn’t connect, the software will explain why.

Third, look at this interface:

Slim, clean and super-easy. Look at the tabs on top. Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Documents and so on are all just a single click away. Folder support is easy too.

Oh, and speaking of which, did you ever want your Gmail account to have accessible "normal" folders like all other webmail does? It will when you use Zimbra. Simply add a folder via a connected Gmail account, and it will create nested folders that look and act just like normal ones – and yes they’re completely accessible via the regular Gmail interface as well.

Fourth, although this sounds a bit dopey I really dig it – a mail indicator icon in the taskbar in Windows when new mail arrives:

The yellow envelope is the new mail indicator. This seemingly insignificant feature is just so nice to have.

Fifth, yes it has multiple account support. In the screen shot above, look on the left sidebar. Your other accounts are listed at the bottom and can be accessed easily with a single click. If there is any new mail in accounts lists there, there is a small number in parentheses telling you how much new mail there is.

Sixth is the synchronization features. Using Yahoo Calendar and Contacts? It will sync seamlessly. Using Gmail’s version? It’ll sync that too.

It goes without saying that Yahoo! Mail users will appreciate Zimbra the most because it FINALLY brings a true native client to the desktop. This is Yahoo’s equivalent of Windows Live Mail and it does a fine job even though it’s beta software.

And yes, it’s beta. That means some things may go buggy from time to time. But in my use of it I’ve encountered no issues as of yet.

The way Zimbra works in Windows is by installing itself as a service. You will see a small red icon in your taskbar (when no new mail is present) like this:

This is not a bad thing whatsoever, because when the Zimbra client is minimized, it goes completely out of the way and shrinks to this little icon, which can be clicked to bring the client back up. In addition, it can be right-clicked to completely shut down the service.

Zimbra Desktop was definitely done right the first time. It is the only software I’ve seen that offers a true alternative to Windows Live Mail (especially if you don’t use Hotmail) and the feature set is just plain great.

Oh, one last note. This may be a frilly feature but still worth mentioning. It has 12 different themes you can use:

This is available via the Options tab.

Let’s say for example you want Zimbra to look like Gmail. You would choose "Zmail." This is what it looks like:

Looks pretty close to Gmail, doesn’t it?

Zimbra’s dev team really thought this product through.

As said at the top of this article, this is a product that accesses web-based mail but still retains the total look and feel of a local mail client – and has the very-super-awesome-cool sync features like Windows Live Mail does, so it isn’t an island unto itself whatsoever.

Two huge thumbs up for Zimbra Desktop. You’d be very hard pressed not to like this.

The folks at Yahoo recently released a new email client which works on Windows, Mac or Linux. It is called Zimbra Desktop.

Yahoo continues to hold sizable market share when it comes to online email accounts. Yahoo bought Zimbra in 2007. It was a good union because you could see Zimbra entering into the foray with Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Calendar to create a really nice desktop solution based on open source software.

The new public beta of Zimbra desktop is based on Mozilla Prism. Prism is similar to Google Gears, a solution which allows web apps to run in offline environments. So, Zimbra Desktop looks like a web application except that it is running on your system locally. Of course, the fact that all of that software is being moved to your computers adds up to a relatively sizable download. I installed the Mac OS X version and it was just over 40 MB in size. Installed, we’re looking at around 170 MB.

Oddly, when I installed the Mac version, it wanted to install itself to a folder other than the usual Applications folder. I had to specifically tell it to install in a sub-folder off of Applications. I do not know how it works with the Windows client as I did not install that one.

Once installed, I set up an email account. You are not forced into using Yahoo mail. You can use any account you wish. I set it up using my Gmail account. Setting up the account made it fairly obvious that this works like a web app. The screens looked more like a web app than a completely native application.

Setup of my Gmail account automatically went in using IMAP access. Interestingly, Yahoo has also jumped on board with IMAP access, so Yahoo users can now use their email inside of Zimbra using IMAP.

The client also supports Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Documents, Briefcase and options. While you can do all that in the client, there does not appear to be a seamless sync experience between the client and the Internet. There was no sync capabilities, for instance, with my Google Calendar and reports are that there isn’t such a sync with Yahoo’s own cloud as well.

All in all, this is a cool little mail client. But, is it an Outlook or Thunderbird killer? No. If you’re going to use web-based email, it is better to keep it web-based. Zimbra Desktop looks to be a polished, offline version of Yahoo Mail.

The email client is free, so try it and remove it if you don’t like it. And credit goes to Yahoo for beating Google to the punch – they are the first to provide offline support for their online email service.