Accessing Zimbra Collaboration Server with Thunderbird

Accessing Zimbra Collaboration with Thunderbird

This guide shows you how to access to your Zimbra Mail, Contacts and Calendar using Thunderbird 102.

This guide assumes that you have already installed Thunderbird. For more information on downloading and installing this software, go to Mozilla's Thunderbird page, https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/ .

You will need:

• Your Zimbra email address and password.
• Your Zimbra mail server domain. This is usually in the form of mail.domain.com. It is likely the same as what you use to sign-on to Zimbra web interface.

Your system administrator will be able to give you this information if you do not already have it.

Adding your Zimbra Email to Thunderbird

To add Zimbra mail to Thunderbird follow these steps:

Please note this is an example video, this means:

• You have to replace zimbra10.barrydegraaff.nl and admin@barrydegraaff.nl with values provided by your administrator or provider.
• In most cases you can leave the port fields empty and Thunderbird will find the correct ones! I only typed the SMTP port value as in my case port 25 would work, but for most people it would not. Which is why I typed 587 in the above video.

Adding your Zimbra Calendar to Thunderbird

Once your calendar is added in Thunderbird you can

• Create appointments
• Edit appointments created from the Web Client or another device
• Delete appointments
• Move appointments
• Dismiss appointments
• Accept and send calendar invites

To set up your Zimbra calendar in Thunderbird follow these steps:

Please note this is an example video, this means:

• You have to replace zimbra10.barrydegraaff.nl and admin@barrydegraaff.nl with values provided by your administrator or provider.

The URL to use for the default Zimbra calendar is:

https://zimbra.example.com/dav/<YOUR USERNAME HERE>/Calendar

If you use multiple calendars or have accepted calendar shares from other users, you can subscribe to them all at once or select the calendars you want to subscribe to by omitting the calendar name. In this case Thunderbird will ask you what calendars you want to subscribe to. Use the URL as follows:

https://zimbra.example.com/dav/<YOUR USERNAME HERE>/

Adding your Zimbra Contacts to Thunderbird

To add your Zimbra Contacts (Address Book) to Thunderbird install the CardBook Add-on for Thunderbird. If you have trouble installing the add-on please read the help document provided here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/installing-addon-thunderbird

Once it is installed add your Zimbra address book to Thunderbird following these steps:

Please note this is an example video, this means:

• You have to replace zimbra10.barrydegraaff.nl and admin@barrydegraaff.nl with values provided by your administrator or provider.

The URL to use for the default Zimbra calendar is:

https://zimbra.example.com/dav/<YOUR USERNAME HERE>/Contacts

Shared Calendar & Tasks in Thunderbird

This section has not been verified in Zimbra 10 and/or Thunderbird 100+.

You can use as well all the Zimbra sharing power with Thunderbird and CalDAV, for example: Imagine that you are the Responsible Person for one Department and you want to create a Calendar per each Technician, and a Tasks List, like in the next diagram:

The Responsible must create each Calendar or Tasks List and share with the rest of Technicians, giving them the read-only or read-write permission. You must be careful with the location of the Calendars, or Tasks List, for example if you create the Tasks List called Technician Bob, inside your own Task List, the URL to share will be > https://zimbra.example.com/dav/RESPONSIBLEUSERNAME/Tasks/Technician%20Bob You can see here an example:

In this example, the Responsible creates a Tasks List for Technician Bob, is the same procedure for Calendars as well. Go to the Responsible Tasks, and right-click > New Task List

Then, write the name for the Tasks List, in this case Technician Bob, you will need later the %20 in the URL, if you can, it's much better to use - or _ instead space.

Edit then the new Tasks List with right-click > Properties and select Add share

In the email field, select the Bob's emails address, and select the role you want for Bob, read-only or read-write.

Now, you can tell to Bob the URL that he must use to connect to the shared resources, Calendar, Tasks, etc. The URL will be the Responsible one, like https://zimbra.example.com/dav/RESPONSABLEUSERNAME/Tasks/Technician%20Bob even if the URL points to the Responsible, because Bob has access to that concrete resource, Bob just need to write his credentials when Thunderbird asks about them.