I installed Carbonio CE yesterday and have been experiencing several visual issues with the desktop UI.
The most noticeable problems are in the Admin Panel:
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The fonts appear inconsistent throughout the interface.
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Overall, the font size seems too large.
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In some cases, button labels (for example, "CREATE") are oversized.
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Many form elements have fonts that are too large and don't seem to have enough margin or padding. For example, input fields or dropdowns with a title inside the element (such as "Status") have the selected value almost touching the title, making the layout look cramped.
I've tested this in several browsers, and the issue is present in all of them.
Is this the expected appearance of the Admin Panel, or is there something wrong with my installation?
I also see similar issues in the webmail client. While it allows the font size to be reduced, that doesn't resolve the oversized UI elements. For example, the "NEW" button still has excessively large padding and doesn't look properly proportioned.
So far i have not tested the actual functionality. Apart from the UI, i also found that zmcontrol no longer works (ubuntu). That's detailed in the documentation, but there seems to be no way to view the status of all internal carbonio services (it's also not present in the admin panel).
After performing a test migration from Zimbra to Carbonio CE and spending more time testing the platform, I've noticed a number of issues and missing features that concern me. I also found older forum posts where other users raised the same questions but never received a response.
Some essential features appear to be missing from the webmail interface:
- Accounts / Delegation is completely absent from the web interface.
- Mail forwarding is also missing.
- Users can see the number of unread emails, but there is no indication of the total number of messages in a folder or mailbox.
- We're living in the year 2026. Two factor authentication should no longer be a premium only feature. This is essential for account security.
I also needed to change the hostname of my Carbonio test server to import my data. On Zimbra, this is a straightforward process, but on Carbonio it proved to be unnecessarily complicated and, in my experience, the documented procedure does not work correctly.
For example, the documentation instructs you to stop all services before changing the hostname. However, once LDAP is stopped, you can no longer update the LDAP values because the server is no longer available. After changing the hostname, LDAP also refuses to start because it still expects the old hostname stored in its configuration. Even after I managed to update the hostname in LDAP using the provided command, the remaining services still failed to start because there was another LDAP entry that still referenced the old hostname.
At that point I decided to reinstall Carbonio, but even that turned out to be far more difficult than expected. After removing the packages and deleting the relevant directories, there still appeared to be configuration or state information left behind that prevented several services from starting correctly during the setup/bootstrap process. I had to completely reinstall the server from scratch to get it to install Carbonio again.
This brings me back to another issue I mentioned in my original post: service management.
With Zimbra, "zmcontrol status", provided a simple, clear overview of all services and their status. On Ubuntu 24 with Carbonio, which relies on systemd, there no longer seems to be an equivalent command. The documentation mentions only four systemd services, but in reality there appear to be many more Carbonio-related services running, any of which can fail. Troubleshooting becomes much more difficult without a single command that provides a complete overview of the platform's health.
At this point, Carbonio CE feels significantly less mature than Zimbra in terms of administration and usability.