Zimbra business email: your own mail server without the headache

The short answer is control and cost. With Zimbra you decide where your mail lives: on our infrastructure in the EU, in our Riga data centre, or on your own hardware, so the jurisdiction is your choice rather than a vendor's. Your messages are not scanned for advertising or profiling, and one contract covers the licence, hosting and administration. Users keep familiar tools, including Outlook and any IMAP client. That said, if your company is built entirely around the Microsoft ecosystem, Microsoft 365 can be the more natural fit, and we sell that too, so ask us which one suits your setup.

Zimbra is priced per company rather than from a single price tag, because the total depends on the user count, the country where your company is registered, the edition you pick and how much integration work is needed. The all-inclusive service bundles the licences, hosting on our EU infrastructure, administration, backups and monitoring into one per-user agreement. If you only need licences and will run the platform yourselves, the per-mailbox list prices for Latvia and the Baltics are 14.80 EUR a year for Standard, 30.23 EUR for Professional, or a perpetual licence from 34.50 EUR, supplied in volume packs from 50 mailboxes. Send us your country and user count and we will reply with an exact quote.

That is how the publisher distributes Zimbra Network Edition to partners: licence keys come in volume packs, and 50 mailboxes is the smallest pack we can order for a customer. In practice this sets the scale of the product: Zimbra makes sense for companies from around 50 mailboxes, whether you take licences alone or the full service with hosting and administration. For a smaller team the economics rarely add up, and we will honestly suggest our Exchange Online mailboxes instead, which we sell one by one. The per-mailbox price inside a pack is exactly the list price shown on this page.

The prices on this page are valid for Latvia and the Baltics. Zimbra licence list prices differ from country to country, because the publisher sets regional pricing, so the licence part of the bill can be higher or lower depending on where your company is registered. The hosting and administration part of our all-inclusive service does not depend on your location: the servers are in our Riga data centre either way, and we invoice in EUR from an EU company. Write to us with your country and the number of users, and we will reply with an exact offer for your case.

Zimbra Collaboration is a complete email and teamwork suite rather than just a mailbox. In one web client that works on any device you get mail, shared calendars, contacts, tasks and chat, plus Briefcase, Docs and Drive for working with files. Sharing, delegation and a global address list cover the everyday needs of a company directory, and open protocols such as IMAP, POP, CalDAV and CardDAV mean almost any desktop or mobile client can connect. It comes in two editions, Standard and Professional, which differ mainly in Outlook and mobile support. You can run it on our EU infrastructure in Riga or install it on your own servers.

Yes, on-premise is a fully supported scenario, not an afterthought. We supply the licences, then install and configure Zimbra on your hardware or in your private cloud, delivering the same feature set you would get in our hosted setup. After handover you can run it entirely with your own IT team, and we stay available with admin support when they need a second pair of hands. If you want more, a support contract lets us keep maintaining the installation, applying updates and helping with day-to-day administration. One honest caveat: on your servers, backups and monitoring are your responsibility unless we agree to cover them within that contract.

Yes, and this is exactly where the choice of edition matters. Outlook for Windows connects through the MAPI connector, which is part of the Professional edition, so users keep their folders, calendars and contacts inside the client they already know. Outlook for Mac works over EWS and is available on request. Mobile devices sync mail, calendars and contacts over ActiveSync, again a Professional feature. With the Standard edition, Outlook can still connect over IMAP, which covers mail but not full calendar sync. And every user always has the full web client as an alternative, so nothing forces the whole company onto one way of reading mail.

The key is that the old system keeps working while we prepare the new one. First we copy historical mail, calendars and contacts from Exchange, Microsoft 365, Google or any IMAP server into Zimbra, which can take hours or days depending on volume, without users noticing anything. We then agree a cutover window, usually outside business hours, switch the MX records so new mail flows to Zimbra, and sync the remaining delta that arrived during the switch. Because DNS changes last, no message is lost in between, and a mailbox is unavailable for minutes at most. You will need access to your DNS zone, and we guide that step.

You decide, and that choice is the whole point of the product. Hosted with us, your mailboxes live in our own Tier 3+ data centre in Riga, inside the EU, connected through our own network, AS58269, so data does not silently move between jurisdictions. This setup includes backups and monitoring as part of the service, and our team runs the underlying servers. Alternatively, the same Zimbra installation can run on your own hardware in your own premises, in which case the data never leaves your building at all. If regulators, auditors or clients ask where the mail physically sits, you can give them a specific answer either way.

Yes. Spam and antivirus filtering is configured during the initial setup, not left as homework, so the server starts life with sensible protection rather than factory defaults. The platform also supports two-factor authentication for accounts and S/MIME signing and encryption for mail itself. Filtering is never a one-time job though: rules need occasional tuning as spam patterns change, and when Zimbra is hosted with us that tuning, along with backups, monitoring and updates, is handled by our team in the background. Good deliverability also depends on your DNS, so set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC records; our guides cover this, and support can check your configuration.