Ajax based Webmail
The RoundCube Webmail Project
My main email client is Thunderbird which is available for Linux and Windows so I can use it on my workstation and my notebook. My emails are stored on the server and accessed through IMAP. This works quite well but sometimes I have to look at my emails from places where I don't carry my notebook with me simply using a browser. Up to now I've used SquirrelMail with some custom patches installed on my server. SquirrelMail works well, has a whole bunch of options to configure but at the code level it's rather hacked and it looks not too pretty.
Now I found RoundCube, a very nice Ajax and PHP based webmail program released under the GPL. In contrast to many open source PHP applications its code looks well designed, setting it up was done in 5 minutes and its visual appearence is just great. You immediately notice that it has been created by Mac users :)
RoundCube offers very few options compared to SquirrelMail but everything I wanted has been in place:
- Integration with dovecot without any special configuration
- Integration with my public LDAP based address book
- Support for multiple identities and signatures
- Searching for messages
- Notification of new messages in the title of the browser
- Automatically saving draft messages so they don't get lost if your connection goes down