Yahoo is taking advantage of its $350 million investment in Zimbra and finally bringing a beta version of the desktop email application to market. It aims to organize the many email accounts people accumulate and make them available to read, compose, and organize offline.

With competition from email-organization start-ups like Xobni and ClearContext, they’re hoping being a part of the widely popular Yahoo Mail with its 250 million worldwide users will boost its use past that of its competition, according to USA Today.

Along with making your email available offline, Zimbra is also “mashed up” to work with other online applications. When viewing an e-mail, for example, users can mouse over text to launch digital maps, currency conversion services and more.

Zimbra goes in a different route than its Xobni counterpart, by way of being an all-inclusive desktop application rather than an add-on to popular email apps like Outlook. While I agree an all-inclusive solution would be nice, I don’t see users scurrying to a whole new email application when they can simply add the organizational aspects to Outlook, Thunderbird, or whatever else people are already used to.

E-mail management is a large part of Yahoo’s new strategy. At CES in January, CEO Jerry Yang showed off a prototype version of Yahoo Mail that would transform it into an “ultimate” communications tool. The newfangled mail software would tap into social networks, giving higher priority to messages from senders who are friends, for instance. Seems anywhere social networking can be included is at the top of the priority list for most companies, including Yahoo.

The demo highlighted how Yahoo’s services could be overhauled to open them to the rest of the Web — a strategy successfully undertaken by Facebook and others. “The goal is to turn Yahoo into a primary online “starting point” for consumers,” Yang said. With the amount of new mobile application launches and contracts with mobile carriers, Yahoo seems to be carrying out that plan effectively. At least on the mobile front.

A comment on USA Today outlined my view on Zimbra and its offline email capabilities perfectly when he said “offline email is what the US Post Office delivers to the metal box in your front yard.” I have to agree, the whole point of email is the fact that it’s ON-line, not off.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 8:32 am under Open source, Yahoo!.

Read more entries by Justin Montgomery.
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