Following a presentation by new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz this week in which Bartz noted that Yahoo Mail was “becoming increasing critical to the company,” Hitwise compared data from the various Yahoo properties to see just how big a slice of the overall pie Yahoo Mail really took. The data shows Yahoo Mail receiving well over a third of Yahoo’s overall traffic, at 36.71 percent. The Yahoo home page comes in next with 25.48 percent, and the direct Yahoo Search page follows with 11.75.

Yahoo Mail, Hitwise also notes, is still the dominant Webmail provider. Stats from February put Yahoo Mail at about 56 percent of the overall U.S. Webmail market. Windows Live Mail takes 19 percent, and Gmail rounds out the top three with about 11 percent.

With that being said, Windows Live Mail saw a 25 percent drop in traffic from February ‘08 to February ‘09. Gmail saw growth of 88 percent in the same time period, while Yahoo Mail remained relatively constant with a growth of 3 percent from year-to-year.

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Zimbra’s main selling points are its abilities to manage conversation-based threads as well as to incorporate tags into e-mail, to allow for advanced search capabilities, and to allow for the incorporation of so-called “Zimlets” — or third-party applications — into the e-mail client. As such, it’s been described as a Gmail-meets-Outlook type of solution, or a setup similar to an Outlook-plus-Xobni configuration. Its creators recognize the comparisons but say their program does bring something new to the table.

Client Comparisons

Like Outlook or Thunderbird, Zimbra aggregates mail from different services into one centralized, client-based platform. All three have IMAP capabilities. While Outlook is limited to Windows-based systems, Zimbra — like Thunderbird — is open source and available on Mac or Linux platforms as well.

The bigger benefit, its creators say, lies more in Zimbra’s ability to bring traditionally server-based options — the ones you see in Gmail — to a locally-based application.

“Until now, [things such as] search indexing have been a property of a mail server,” Zimbra co-founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj told The Inquisitr. “We wanted to just bring that in.”

With both search indexing and conversation-based threads, Zimbra’s programmers see the common ground with Gmail. They point out, however, that their platform delivers the options online or off — and without you having to be logged into a web-based system.

“[It's] exactly like Gmail,” Dharmaraj explained. “Whatever Gmail’s doing on the server side, now we’re doing it from a desktop angle. You can collapse threads, delete an entire thread, tag an entire thread, or file an entire thread to a folder.”

Talking Xobni

So what about Xobni, the Outlook add-on that offers some of those same functions? The folks behind Zimbra are aware of the overlap but say it is not absolute.

“You can use Xobni on top of Outlook and get some of those things,” Dharmaraj told The Inquisitr. “But [it] does not bring the notion of conversations, does not bring the notion of Zimlets. You can’t delete an entire conversation that dealt with [a] subject, because that becomes a server-side operation,” he said.

The Yahoo Factor

There’s no question Yahoo’s influence and its competition with Google have played a part in Zimbra’s development since the acquisition. The Zimbra team, in fact, has spent the last year helping Yahoo play catch up with advanced e-mail functionality and deployment.

“Yahoo was nowhere in the scene — [it was] basically Google, Zimbra, and Microsoft. When Yahoo bought us, they bought an entry into mailboxes that are hosted by ISPs, by EDUs for students. We definitely brought them into those markets,” Dharmaraj noted.

Future Focus

Zimbra’s focus now is on finding ways to bring its features into the Yahoo Mail brand and begin expanding its capabilities.

“Search, Zimlets, conversation, and tags — everybody liked Zimbra because it helped in productivity because of those four things. What we’re doing is bringing those four things to non-Zimbra backing,” Dharmaraj said.

Projects in the works include an eventual full integration of Zimbra into Yahoo Mail, plus expanded options for synchronization — and what Zimbra hopes will be an online first.

“Later on this year, we’re bringing the Zimbra Calendar to Yahoo Calendar, so consumers will get probably the first CalDAV-enabled, iCal-enabled calendar client that’s out there,” Dharmaraj revealed.

“Hopefully — if Google doesn’t launch before that,” he added.

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The company says it obtained the domains to make it easier for people to get shorter and simpler addresses with the Yahoo Mail service, since every name imaginable is already taken at yahoo.com.

The new domains will function the same way as yahoo.com and will feature options of selecting “localized” versions incorporating your country name as well.

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