[Users] February 11, 2020 Zeta Alliance Conference Call Summary

[Randy Leiker]

Hello Zeta Alliance Community, 

Here is a summary of this week’s conference call. A few brief reminders: 


    * Conference calls are every Tuesday and open to all using either the FreeConferenceCall.com VoIP app or via a dial-in number: https://www.freeconferencecall.com/wall/zetalliance . 
    * Each week’s call agenda can be found at: [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uUUDJpwp2CAylU6lxtbEdVcUX_qSbciyes6gLTWw2fY/edit | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uUUDJpwp2CAylU6lxtbEdVcUX_qSbciyes6gLTWw2fY/edit ] 
    * A copy of each week’s summary is also posted to the Zimbra Forum: 
        * January 2020: [ https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=67572 | https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=67572 ] 
        * February 2020: [ https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=67726 | https://forums.zimbra.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=67726 ] 
    * Constructive feedback on these call summaries is always welcome. 

February 11, 2020 Conference Call Summary 

Synacor and Qumu Merger 
Mark S. reported that Synacor and Qumu have announced a merger that is expected to close mid-2020. Qumu provides enterprise video communications. Himesh Bhise will continue as the CEO of Synacor. Vern Hanzlik, who is currently CEO of Qumu, will become Synacor’s Chief Revenue Officer. Each company’s customer bases do not appear to overlap as they currently serve different markets. Synacor tentatively plans to embed the Qumu video conferencing product within Zimbra. It is unclear how this may impact Zimbra Connect. Noah P. asked if Mark thought this might cause Synacor to lose focus on improving the core Zimbra product, as happened with earlier mergers (Telligent, VMware, and Yahoo). Mark expressed the opinion that he felt this was a complementary acquisition that would likely be a good fit for Zimbra. The press release about the merger is available at: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200211005543/en/Synacor-Qumu-Agree-Merger-Creating-Global-Leader 

Introduction of IM Mail 
Leonardo Valença introduced an enterprise instant messaging product called IM Mail, which started in 2015. Leonardo explained that it is estimated that 95% of people use personal IM apps for work. His company’s product aims to address the security and compliance needs for messaging within enterprises. IM Mail operates as a freemium product with a paid monthly subscription option. A Zimlet for IM Mail is available at: https://zimbra.org/extend/items/view/immail---messaging-and-collaboration-for-zimbra . The IM Mail company web site is: https://immail.ca and a slide deck is available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dG-6Rh3XPdkdW_fySsyMht_gJXTRsaHW/view . Features included in the product: 


    * Manage employee messaging access 
    * Create messaging groups 
    * Search and organize messaging history 
    * Video conferencing 
    * File sharing 

Proposal To Add Support for ARC in Zimbra 
Mark S. suggested that Zimbra add support for ARC (https://arc-spec.org/), which is described in RFC 8617. ARC (Authenticated Received Chain) is designed to address an issue that occurs when forwarding a DKIM signed email, where the recipient of the forwarded email will no longer be able to validate the DKIM hash in the message, since the message content will have been modified from the original version of the sender’s message. This invalidates the DKIM hash in the original sender’s message. Gmail & Microsoft currently support ARC on their email SaaS platforms. Mark said that he has opened enhancement request ZRFE-374 with Zimbra and encourages everyone to add their support to this enhancement request. 

Mark S. & Barry D. discussed why the milter feature in Zimbra is disabled by default, since it is a crucial feature for managing access to distribution lists. John H. said this was a decision made back when VMware owned Zimbra. If a Zimbra admin enables the milter within their Zimbra install, this implementation (https://github.com/fastmail/authentication_milter) can be used to add support for ARC to Zimbra, however this implementation is not officially supported by Synacor. 

Proposal To Add Support for "Email Received From External Source" Warning 
Mark S. reported that he also encourages support for Zimbra enhancement request ZRFE-258 to add a "message received from external source" warning to the subject and/or first line of an email message, when a message originates from outside of an organization’s mail server, as a counter-measure to phishing and social engineering attacks. Several on the call expressed the concern that mailbox users may be tempted to ignore this warning perhaps due to being in a hurry to complete a task, from a lack of training, or not understanding the warning. It was mentioned that other email SaaS platforms currently support this feature and that it would be beneficial for Zimbra to support it too at least for feature parity purposes between platforms. Noah P. said that he supports implementation of this feature, but expressed that it is important that Zimbra makes this configurable so that Zimbra administrators can select how the warning appears and under which contexts. 

FIPS Compliance in Zimbra 
Mark S. asked if Zimbra might add FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) compliance in the near future, since the embedded OpenSSL version has been upgraded to 1.0.2t-fips in Zimbra 8.8.15 Patch 6. John H. said that he is not currently aware of plans to support FIPS in Zimbra, but suggested reaching out to product management at Zimbra to discuss the possible inclusion of official FIPS support. 


Randy Leiker ( randy at skywaynetworks.com ) 
Skyway Networks, LLC 
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