With the new Zimbra Desktop Beta launched by Yahoo, the 263 million Yahoo Mail users have been given offline access to their mail and calendar accounts. Those using the @ymail and @rocketmail domains can also benefit from the application. It seems Yahoo’s paying $350 million for acquiring Zimbra turned out to be quite a good move.

Satish Dharmaraj, co-founder of Zimbra and a vice president of Yahoo, said Zimbra is all about bringing "communication and collaboration solutions" in order to facilitate the use of traditional e-mail; one of the biggest problems was considered to be the switch between several email accounts some users have to go through every day.

Once the software is installed, it allows users to import Yahoo, Gmail, AOL or any other IMAP / POP email account information into the Zimbra client.

Yahoo’s Thursday release puts the company ahead of competitor Google in the race to come up with email that can also be accessible offline. The latter is currently working on a way to provide users with offline access through its Gears project, which is a plug-in that inhances the browser’s capabilities.

Zimbra Desktop, working with a special browser interface technology named Ajax and using Java software for locally storing information, can run as a standalone application.

Zimbra features Yahoo Shortcuts, Zimbra Briefcase (useful for uploading and storing files), Zimbra Tasks (with the help of which a to-do list can be put together). It was made available for Windows, Mac and Linux and can be downloaded for free at http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop_download.html.