Some weeks after the official Kolab 3.4 release we finally released the Gentoo packages for Kolab 3.3 including the usual benefits like the CalDAV/iCAL ready calendar plugin and the Getmail plugin which allows fetching mails from any external email account right into your Kolab Groupware. During this release some things required much more work than we've expected. To speed things up for the next time we plan to cooperate more closely with the Kolab developers and the community. For example we finally requested the multi-driver support for the calendar plugin to be pushed upstream. The required patch is currently pending and waiting for approval. Further we had some great release planning meetings with the Kolab guys where they announced to also keep focus on quality assurance and upgrade paths for the

Mail Address Tags or Mail Address Extensions are meant to allow a user to extend his or her email address. The user can add a tag (or extension) to his address and will still recive mail in his standard inbox. Lets make an example: the email address of Robert may be robert.paulson@example.com. Using address tags, Robert can add the name of the page where he has registered himself with his mail address, for example robert.paulson+twitter@example.com. The seperation with a plus sign is not a must, but it is the common use. In fact you could use any valid email string to indicate mail tags. When Robert now recives an email with such a tag, he can easily create a filter rule for example to move all tagged emails to a

The Kolab groupware is a great open source alternative to well known closed source groupware solutions. For example, the Kolab groupware has most of the features of Google Mail including mail, calendar, contacts and supports sharing of those entries between users. Since Kolab 3.1 there is also CalDAV and CardDAV support included via a SabreDAV based protocol layer called iRony. This turns Kolab into a CalDAV/iCAL server that enables synchronization of Kolab stored calendars and contacts with any CalDAV/CardDAV supporting device, e.g. Android or iOS based smartphones and tablets. However, Kolab still has no CalDAV/iCAL client support, meaning that adding external calendar resources such as holiday calendars, birthday calendars, shared Google Calendars or any kind of external CalDAV/iCAL calendars is not possible so far. Therefore

Kolab is a free groupware based on Postfix, Cyrus IMAP and Roundcube. The groupware includes email, calendars, addressbooks, task management and a wide variety of clients. Since version 3.1 Kolab also supports the standardized CalDAV and CardDAV protocols so that all data can be synced to a phone, tablet or any CalDAV/iCAL client. More than enough to have a closer look. Kolab is community driven and has enterprise support by Kolab Systems AG. Next to the enterprise version, they also provide community packages for RHEL and CentOS. The source code is available from their Git repositories. An openSUSE Build Service provides additional testing packages for Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. Unfortunately, the Gentoo support for Kolab seemed to starve for some reason. We only found