monline

A colleague of mine gave me the hint about RoundCube, a fairly new webmail client written in PHP. It uses MySQL (and supports a number of other databases) to store various data (sessions, user preferences, addressbooks, cache, etc.) and IMAP (with support for IMAP over SSL) to access the mail repository. It utilizes AJAX to add some extra over the standard HTML pages that so many other webmail clients already provide.

The project is currently at its infancy (the latest release is v0.1 beta2 ), but I'm most satisfied with it. I could set it up in approx. 30 minutes without any issues whatsoever. I definitely did expect several glitches during the install, but everything went just fine, which I find truely amazing.

RoundCube provides (currently) only basic functionality, so if you're looking for a feature-packed webmail client, than this not for you ... at least not yet. However I liked that it worked out of the box (from the first moment on), it was very easy to set up and I also like the simple and nice template they packed with it.

There're a number of webmail clients out there, but AJAX started only recently to appear in any of them. I hope that after major development RoundCube might become the open-source alternative to Gmail ... a software that I was looking for since Google introduced their popular mail service. This might sound quite visionary , but I try to be optimistic.

I've attached some screenshots of my setup (see below), but you can also visit the project website to get a closer look at the software.

Attachment	Size
roundcube_03_message_view.jpg	122.58 KB
roundcube_02_folder_view.jpg	150.12 KB
roundcube_01_login.jpg	58.5 KB