Two weeks ago I’ve decided to update my Zimbra Desktop Client 2.0 to the new beta version 7. All went well so far and I could see the new look and feel. Really nice changes to the UI. After a few days I had to change my domain password which is also my Zimbra password because the server is connected to the Active Directory. So good so far but I couldn’t open my Zimbra Desktop Beta 7 Client anymore. I always got the error message: service.FAILURE: system failure: Unable to unmarshal response for AuthResponse. I could find a thread in the Zimbra forums which helped me a bit and also a colleague was facing the issue and he could fix it. I’ve tried to fix the issue with his instruction but it didn’t worked.

He gave me the following hint:

Delete your email signature and reset the language to English via the Zimbra web interface.

In the forums I found some information which said:

If your signature or any of your other account settings in ZWC contain UTF-8 characters you will get this error. You can get around the problem for now by removing those characters from your signature.

Bug 56547 – Unable to sync account if signature contains UTF-8 content

I’ve tried that workaround and deleted the signature and set the language to English but still no chance to login via Zimbra Desktop.

After a few thought I came up with another idea! Checking the zdesktop.log file might be a good way to get more information on the issue. On Mac OS X you can find the file in the path /Users/christoph/Library/Zimbra Desktop/log. Of course it helped me. I found out that there where more UTF-8 characters in the AuthResponse. Both the signature and the Out-of-Office notification contained the UTF-8 characters. After deleting also the OOO-message I could login again. That’s a first workaround but I think this will be fixed in the next beta version of the Zimbra Desktop client. I hope this helps.