fucking the white bunny rabbit

This article will try to explain how to configure Zimbra calendar in Evolution, I get most of the informations from a Jesse Keating’s article with Google Calendar instead of Zimbra.

Few releases ago Evolutions had a specific Zimbra connector which is not needed today (and is not maintained anymore), because Caldav support in both end-points is enough stable to be used, the problem is that is not clear how to use it.

Open your Zimbra account and move to Calendar tab:

• right click on calendar then properties, you can see some information about the calendar
• click on “Share…”, you can change the visibility of the calendar, just if you want to share it with others. For your access default settings don’t need any change.
• On the bottom of the share window, you can find the addresses: ICS to access from Caldav or View to access via HTTP.

The ICS access is what we need: http://mailserver/home/user@domain/CalendarName/, depends on your configurations, sometimes you have to use http://mail.byte-code.com/dav/user@domain/CalendarName/ (with /dav instead of /home, you have to try with the browser). For my Byte-code colleague: use /dav/.

Now:

• Create a new calendar with Evolution
• Choose CalDav
• Choose a name and a color
• put http://mailserver/home/user@domain/CalendarName/ or  http://mailserver/dav/user@domain/CalendarName/ (don’t forget the lastest slash (‘/’))
• Check the SSL (if you use HTTPS)
• Put your username (only the usename) in the appropriate textfield

That’s all, it should be work fine.

I tested also meetings invitation from Zimbra to Evolution and vice-versa and works fine.

The only things that doesn’t work is then, from evolution to Zimbra is when you forward an appontment as ICalendar, Zimbra doesn’t recognize the format and don’t permit you to add to the calendar.

I hope I didn’t forget anything. Please feel free to report it in the comments.

I was looking for new information about Evolution planning and I found a IRC chat meeting of evolution team here.

The good news is that we will be a 2.24.5 release on February 25th, the bad (or sad, as you prefer) news is that Novell team will be reduced (about an half).

This is not encouraging me to continue to use it because the quality may be reduced without so many full-time developers. I’ll stay tuned and you too.

I took this photos five minutes ago.

<rant>

After this and this, I’m tired, I can’t update…evolution 2.24 sucks a lot!

</rant>

By the way, I’m not going to switch to Thunderbird or $random_email_client, I was satisfied by previous releases. I’m hopeful this version will be fixed.

Update 24/11/2008@11:25: probably I have a credit with emails

Update 04/12/2008@10:18: I’ve a lot of news I’m using the 2.24.2 since I found it on koji, few problems was solved but most of them remains, for example this and this The work to do is huge, I hope to see improvements next minor release in January 2009.

Update 08/12/2008@10:35: 2 hours to filtering message…what the fuck…I’m looking for an alternatives

Update 17/12/2008@18:27 Right now, I can say that there is no alternative to evolution. The answer to “why not?” is “Evolution implements a very good virtual folders idea”.

Why virtual folders are so important for me? because permit you to abstract you email trees and make it independent by accounts number, account type, etc…The classical approach suppose you use POP, download your mail and manage it in locale. But if you use IMAP, for example, every email tree is independent, and there is no way to work with email from each account at the same time. To be hones, this is not really true. Right now the most innovative feature is the possibility to save a search (supported by Evolution, KMail and Thunderbird) and this search may be performed cross-account.

What is lacking, and Evolution had it (for more information about my frustration read here), is a folder that collect all emails the searches didn’t match.

I’m sick to explain to every people who tell me “I have evolution and it works” so this is my situation: I have to manage about 4 email account and a lot of old local emails. I usually use IMAP. I use about 30 virtual folders and I receive about 150/200 email every day (this number depends of days and of how many mailing lists I subscribed).

Update 15/01/2009@21:46 I have to say that last Evolution minor release (2.24.3) is really better. Less noisy bugs, less crashes. Unmatched folder feature is still missing, but I think developers understand that is important and they will try to get it back in next major release. I hope also zimbra-plugin mantainer take care of bug I opened because I can’t use my online zimbra calendar.