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• Rock-solid FreeBSD base
• qmail + CourierIMAP + qmailadmin (for easy web-based admin of e-mail accounts) + tie-ins to tarpitting, SpamAssassin or other anti-UCE measures
• Very secure -- Matt has set the whole thing up to be more secure than what most users would configure on their own. E-mail accounts don't have corresponding system accounts, POP-before-SMTP is enabled and a host of other lock-down measures are in place.
• Works with both IMAP and traditional POP services
• Comes with either SquirrelMail or SqWebMail as a default webmail client, although I've gotten it to work with Horde's Imp project as well.

I know you spec'd Gentoo, but this is a great solution backed by an active user community/e-mail list. It's worth a look.

There is no reason for a consumer level access user to need to run their own mailserver, and in fact almost none do (on purpose).

Speak for yourself. I've got a cheap $35/mo. consumer-level DSL connection through SBC (it's down to $30/mo. now) with a dynamic IP. I would like to be able to create an arbitrary number of mail accounts (for family and for spam protection; by running ``useradd -m username''; no hassles, please) and run my own web server, with my own plugins (eRuby, etc.) and with as much storage as I am willing to put on the machine, with root access on the box so I can install whatever I feel like using, while avoiding any recurring monthly fees with any ISP.

I use Dyndns to handle the DNS mapping for my domain to whatever my IP happens to be (it changes fewer than 3 times a year anyway). I picked up a $29 Pentium II machine from a discount electronics store and put Debian stable on it over a weekend. A script (ddclient) does automatic updates with Dyndns when the IP changes. It serves as my firewall/NAT server, my mail server, and my web server. I have Squirrelmail running on the thing with apache-ssl to provide secure web access to my account. I don't have to use Hotmail or Yahoo to have web access to my e-mail, with their tacky advertisements at the bottom of the messages that are sent from them. I am running uw-imapd with stunnel to allow remote IMAP access to e-mail for my family members who want it, but I usually just SSH in and use mutt.

It runs cron-apt and is configured to do automatic security updates from Debian's security apt repository. SBC's DSL connectivity, at least in my area, is outstanding. I don't recall ever having downtime. I like being able to handle my own domain and to have no middlemen messing with the e-mail messages sent to me. I like not having to pay recurring fees to ISP's to provide servers; I can do it all from my own $29 server for no additional charge.

In fact, I would not be surprised if there were a market for $49 boxen that could easily be set up on peoples' DSL lines to do exactly why my own custom-built box does (firewall/NAT, mail, web) with no recurring ISP fees.

Not when you manage a webserver and mailserver yourself, and can put a free webmail program on the webserver. I couldn't live without webmail sometimes, especially on the go. It's actually easy to set up even if all you have is the webserver portion. If your mail server supports imap and authenticated smtp, then you just need a machine that can run php/apache with a static ip.

I've been using webmail exclusively for a year now, so I agree. We use SquirrelMail. It's a great webmail program with tons of plugins (calendars, weather, spellcheck, translators, virtual domains, etc...) Most of our customers use it for access to their e-mail--though it doesn't stop them from using POP3 or IMAP clients if they prefer. Definately worth a look if you're interesting in providing webmail services. Oh yeah, GPL of course.

One word of warning--many of the plug-ins don't seem to work well with the 1.4 series yet. You may want to stick with the 1.2 series for a while if you need a lot of the plug-ins. Otherwise, 1.4 works great and is a bit faster.

Just to chime in with my 2 cents, I highly recomment SquirrelMail over IMP, as I've found it easier to install and maintain than IMP. IMP was ok in earlier versions but the Horde stuff is completely bloated and poorly written.

Pine and Mutt both suck. I used Mutt for a long time. I could never remember the key neumonics. Then I used Sylpheed for a while but I started using IMAP on the server which was too slow with Sylpheed. That compelled me to switch to Pine because it has good IMAP support. But after using Sylpheed for a while configuration drove me stir crazy. When I set up IMAP on the server I also setup SquirrelMail. I didn't think I would convert entirely because I much prefer to use vi as my editor but I find myself using it more and more. Another user on the same machine converted to it entirely shortly after I installed it. Webmail for Nuts!

Good points, but I would prefer a combination of SquirrelMail (or SSH / PuTTY & Mutt) and a dynamic DNS domain over a "freemail provider". :)

Apparently you haven't looked at the squirrelmail plugin page very closely. If you had you would have seen the Filters and Spam section that has things as a SpamCop, Spam Assasin, and my favorite, BayeseSpam. Of course I haven't seen any spam plugins for Twig, so maybe that would be a better example.

What happens if you want to check your email with something like SquirrelMail? No filters, so your spam gets in.

The answer is, as always, Procmail combined with SpamAssassin.

Client-side filtering is for sucks.

To plug bluebottle.com. Their 'smart' spam filtering system includes a challenge-response type system to verify the legitimacy of the account and an allowed list. I've been using it for about 2 weeks and like it so far (I get over a hundred pieces of crap a day at my old account).

Couple of nits are it is slow as hell to log into (they are in Australia and supposedly upgrading their system to fix this) and it uses Horde as the actual email interface (I'm a much bigger fan of SquirrelMail and always thought Horde needed a serious facelift).

Of course the upside is I haven't had a single piece of spam and I really like logging in and knowing that if I have new mail its from people I want to hear from.

Here's their marketing spiel:

Bluebottle stops spam.
Bluebottle's open-source technology is 100% effective in blocking unwanted email. It is the only system that can effectively protect a user from spam while ensuring all legitimate email is received.

Bluebottle is easy to use. When Bluebottle receives an email from an address or domain not on your âAllowed' list, a verification request is sent asking the sender to verify themselves in one of two ways. The required response to these verification requests automatically places the sender's address on your âAllowed' list, and the email is delivered to you without delay.

Once the sender's address is on this list, they can email you as they would normally. The advantage is that you ONLY receive email from allowed senders.

Effective.
To avoid identification, spammers commonly use forged or fake addresses. Consequently, the verification request is never seen or responded to, so spammers can't infiltrate your allowed list. That means you'll no longer receive annoying, unwanted email.

Manageable.
Bluebottle is easy to manage. Simply add your known contacts to your âAllowed' list so they can avoid verifying themselves. And even if legitimate senders do need to verify themselves, it's quick and easy to do so.

If you're sending an email, Bluebottle automatically adds the recipient's address to your allowed list to avoid a request being sent when they reply.

Protective.
Bluebottle applies the verification process to your existing email, including Hotmail, by checking your accounts through its servers. Email from known senders is delivered to your account without delay. Unknown email is placed in the pending queue to await verification. You can access your spam-free email through Bluebottle's webmail interface or via pop using any email client.

Now, that being said, I run an ISP in St. Louis, and spam is a problem, but for the precise reason mentioned on the submission, I can't use a challenge-response system. The reason is that our support staff equals myself plus 1. If I want to answer phone calls all day from people complaining about not being able to get mail from their daily spamming of mailing lists, I best allow all. The problem is that these same people complain about all the spam they get...ugh. The above solution is elegant and leaves the ability to control the filter to the end user via webmail. If they don't like it, set the threshold high and it's 'off'. Been using this for months without a complaint.

Now if you don't use lists, and it's for your own mail server...go for it. That has to be the most effective method available, but not appropriate for wide scale use.

Now, that being said, I run an ISP in St. Louis, and spam is a problem, but for the precise reason mentioned on the submission, I can't use a challenge-response system. The reason is that our support staff equals myself plus 1. If I want to answer phone calls all day from people complaining about not being able to get mail from their daily spamming of mailing lists, I best allow all. The problem is that these same people complain about all the spam they get...ugh. The above solution is elegant and leaves the ability to control the filter to the end user via webmail. If they don't like it, set the threshold high and it's 'off'. Been using this for months without a complaint.

Now if you don't use lists, and it's for your own mail server...go for it. That has to be the most effective method available, but not appropriate for wide scale use.

Also, I dont use pop or imap myself at all. I still use pine (and no i will not change heh)

Switch to using maildir anyway. Seriously. Pine will work with maildir format, but now you can also hook other stuff on top : courier to provide imap service (I always do it over ssl myself), and web access (again over ssl) with either sqwebmail or squirrelmail. Best of all worlds!

Yup, I can vouch for this excellent setup. I use Postfix with Cyrus. Cyrus is an amazingly fast IMAP server, which is a good thing, seeing my mail server is a pokey 200 MHz machine.

On the client side, I use Mozilla mail whenever I'm behind my own desktop machine. When I'm logged in remotely, I'll use Pine (which supports IMAP) or through a browser with Squirrelmail, an excellent webmail client, which also talks IMAP. I also have my IMAP port open to the world, so I can use Mozilla mail when I'm at one of the computers at my university.

I have all my mailfolders the same everywhere, which is really nice. Now if there only was a nice way to share bookmarks and address books...

Cheers,

Costyn.

Yep, IMAP is truly liberating. Doesn't matter what OS or email client I want to use - all my mail with it's many folders are available at an instant. Best of all, when I am not at my own computer, then checking my e-mail is just a matter of opening a browser, and going to my squirrelmail site.

Check out http://squirrelmail.org.

I think that this is a pretty successful example of what you are trying to do.

It does take some effort on the part of the "core" people to keep it sane. And it is probably less than ideal in terms of organization and not having any "questionable" entries. And it isn't a nice DocBook "1.2.2 Configuring SquirrelMail for your IMAP server" type doc. But it does largely get the job done.

-Peter

I find this is just a programming paradigm not dependent on any programming language. As you can do object oriented programming in C, you can do aspect oriented one in languages other than Java or C++. An excellent example of this implemented in PHP is Squirrelmail plugin architecture. It provides so many hooks for plugin developers that you can do amazing things with mail headers, body, addressbooks etc.

The unclarity of code will always remain a problem for maintainers, as suggested by Minna Kirai.

We have used SquirrelMail for som time now, and our users are very happy. Stay with open standards (IMAP/SMTP/LDAP), and you can replace components in a system (eg. Exchange) without changing everything.

What is SquirrelMail?

SquirrelMail is a standards-based webmail package written in PHP4. It includes built-in pure PHP support for the IMAP and SMTP protocols, and all pages render in pure HTML 4.0 (with no Javascript) for maximum compatibility across browsers. It has very few requirements and is very easy to configure and install. SquirrelMail has a all the functionality you would want from an email client, including strong MIME support, address books, and folder manipulation.

We have used SquirrelMail for som time now, and our users are very happy. Stay with open standards (IMAP/SMTP/LDAP), and you can replace components in a system (eg. Exchange) without changing everything.

What is SquirrelMail?

SquirrelMail is a standards-based webmail package written in PHP4. It includes built-in pure PHP support for the IMAP and SMTP protocols, and all pages render in pure HTML 4.0 (with no Javascript) for maximum compatibility across browsers. It has very few requirements and is very easy to configure and install. SquirrelMail has a all the functionality you would want from an email client, including strong MIME support, address books, and folder manipulation.

Have no fear about SM itself, though. I believe that well over half of the SM installations out there are non-english. XS4All.nl was the "biggest" user for a long time, probably still is.

OK. I have no fear...

But I did find an entry in the wish list, that UTF-8 support should be added in the future:

http://www.squirrelmail.org/wiki/en_US/WishList

So, is there Unicode support, or not, in SM?

SquirrelMail [squirrelmail.org] has handled this [squirrelmail.org] for years.

Thanks for the tip! I'll check it out.

I did however get a little suspicious when I found the following page:

http://www.squirrelmail.org/wiki/en_US/SquirrelMai lRequirements

The character encoding is a total mess on that page. Maybe it's the Wiki's fault. I've seen that kind of mess on Wiki pages before.

SquirrelMail has handled this for years.

It is totally paranoid about HTML email.

Even comes with a bunch of translations.

So, either set up your own mailserver (like a real man!) or find a provider that uses SquirrelMail. I use Fairplay Communications here in Colorado. They rock, and provide SquirrelMail. (And the only affiliation I have with them is that I am a paying customer.)

SquirrelMail is where it's at. (But I am a little biased ;-)

-Peter

SquirrelMail has handled this for years.

It is totally paranoid about HTML email.

Even comes with a bunch of translations.

So, either set up your own mailserver (like a real man!) or find a provider that uses SquirrelMail. I use Fairplay Communications here in Colorado. They rock, and provide SquirrelMail. (And the only affiliation I have with them is that I am a paying customer.)

SquirrelMail is where it's at. (But I am a little biased ;-)

-Peter

SquirrelMail is a WebMail client implemented in PHP. I use the client, but not the plugin (I use Razor).

SquirrelMail is a WebMail client implemented in PHP. I use the client, but not the plugin (I use Razor).

Not to be rude, but this is hilarious.

FIrst no mention of single instance storage. The money you save in licensing you'll spend in increased storage costs.

Please tell me you're joking. How much space do you think the average email server saves using this? At any rate Cyrus supports this, see http://winnie.acsu.buffalo.edu/doc/overview.html#s ingleinstance . Now I really wish people would stop bringing up that stupid buzzword.

Second where is the server based mail storage? Again the money you save on licensing you'll spend backing up mail downloaded on users' computers or home folders.

Thats a basic function of IMAP . You really should research this stuff.

Third, I didn't read anything about a web interface to read your mail like Outlook Web Access.

Ever heard of IMP or squirrellmail? http://www.squirrelmail.org/ How did you get moded +5??

Backups are the same scenario. Actually with Cyrus, you can simpley change the ACL on the mailbox to admin only if you want to prevent access and not delete it. Cyrus has it's entire admin functionality exposed as a PERL module so that you can script the server directly to do what the hell you want when a employee is terminated.

OpenLDAP is just as easy to back up. A simple LDIF dump, or copy the db files.

Both these packages are rock solid. I mean months and months with absolutely *zero* downtime, except for upgrades, and even then with failover the users never notices a thing. I've managed several. Including Cyrus in an ISP environment.

+5 ??!! LOL

As far as I'm concerned, there is no point in even using a mail client anymore. With SquirrelMail connected to an IMAP Server and displayed over an SSL connection, I can see no reason to use anything other than webmail. And it has the added advantage of being accessible from anywhere with internet access (and a browser).

That's where SquirrelMail Lite would be good. Just browse your way to your IMAP folders. http://rumkin.com/sm-lite/patch/readme.html.

Well, I submitted the following to Ask Slashdot and it was rejected, so I guess I will ask here. With all the stupid-assed, inane questions that frequently get asked of Slashdot I thought mine would be a shoe-in, as it's an actual real-world issue whose answer is not available in the first ten lines of a Google search, but I guess the retardedness factor was too low in my post. Can anyone either a) help with the questions below, or b) help me make the question stupid enough that Slashdot will approve it?

Ask Slashdot: Using Webmail for a Company's Main Email Client?
Posted by SmartSlashdotEditor on 9:01 Saturday 21 September 2002
from the slashdot-too-stupid-to-really-post-this dept.
Evro writes: "I work for a small company and this week I finished setting up the IMAP server that is expected to replace our Exchange 5.5 system. I had really high hopes for the new system, but it seems to be acting very quirky. Everyone wants to continue using Outlook 2000 as the mail client, and it gives us nothing but problems when trying to use imap-ssl - users can check their mail, then 5 minutes later it says they can't open messages that are already in their inbox; even regular IMAP gives problems from time to time. Plus there's the annoyance of Outlook not saving sent mail to the server's Sent folder. I personally use Mozilla mail and it works pretty well, but I don't think these people are quite ready for Mozilla's quirks yet, though the fact that Mozilla works as well as it does is what leads me to believe the problem is with the clients rather than the server. I've set up Squirrel Mail as a webmail interface, and that's been received much better than Outlook, Outlook Express, or Eudora (which worked well technically, but nobody liked the interface) as mail clients. Squirrel Mail (over https) seems to do everything I would expect a mail client to do, does it pretty well, and is extremely easy to use and set up. My question is, has anyone setup a mail system for their (or any) company in which the main interface is a webmail client such as Squirrel Mail? If so, what problems have you encountered, and/or what pitfalls can you foresee?"

.. is Bayesspam 2.x for Squirrelmail. Its an easily installable plugin for a php-based webmail system, that uses MySQL to store the Bayesian corpus. It's also got options to limit the size of the messages to be filtered, and displays the spam probability and the 'mark as spam/nonspam' links in each email header.

.. is Bayesspam 2.x for Squirrelmail. Its an easily installable plugin for a php-based webmail system, that uses MySQL to store the Bayesian corpus. It's also got options to limit the size of the messages to be filtered, and displays the spam probability and the 'mark as spam/nonspam' links in each email header.

Paul's article lists a few of the bayesian spam filters, but here's a short list of the ones I've tried:
Gary Arnold's bayespam is implemented in perl and geared towards qmail using maildir storage.

Brian Burton's spamprobe, written in C++, tries to remember already-seen messages, so that you can dump your spams/good mails on separate folders, have spamprobe learn from them, and delete them afterwards. Spamprobe remembers which ones it already processed, and won't reprocess a message if it's already seen it.

Eric Raymond's bogofilter is a typical ESR tool: concise, with a baroquely written man page, and quite simplistic, but does its job and does it well. ESR even uses some funny terms, like "spamicity", and "ham" (the opposite of spam). I don't like its dependency on the Judy libraries for dynamic arrays but what the heck.

Matthew Walker's BayesSpam plugin for Squirrelmail provides squirrelmail users with bayesian spam filtering capabilities, no longer restricting use of the technique to those with access to procmail/mailfilter systems.

If I have time I'll write a formal HOWTO and maybe submit it to /. In the meantime, here's a synopsis:

You need a Linux machine with a static IP address. If you can't have a static IP I suppose you can play games with dynamic IP addresses to access the server. Get a DNS entry to make it easier to access.

Set up fetchmail . Fetchmail is a simple program (written by ESR) which downloads mail via POP or IMAP. You configure it with your mail server, username, and password, and it downloads mail to the local machine. Actually, it re-delivers your mail locally. Your remote email might be chris2912@earthlink.net, and your username on your Linux server might be ces; fetchmail delivers the mail it downloads to ces@localhost.

At this point, you can use pine or mutt to read your mail. By default, they read mail from your local spool. Note that your "inbox" is /var/spool/mail/username, but other mail folders are usually under your home directory. Configure pine or mutt to put your mail folders in ~/mail.

Install procmail. Procmail allows you to set up filters for handling mail. It will let you move mail to a folder based on sender (something like various mail client's rules) and more importantly, it will let you run SpamAssassin (or junkfilter, but I recommend SpamAssassin). Set up procmail to run SpamAssassin on each email, and then either delete the spam or move it to a certain folder. The SpamAssassin documentation is pretty clear on how to do this. Make sure procmail is configured to use the folders in ~/mail.

Install an IMAP server. I use the standard UW server; there are others. The UW server runs via [x]inetd. I recommend setting up the SSL support (imaps).

What IMAP does is allow you to access your email remotely, without downloading it like POP. Mail is kept on the server, in folders. Through an IMAP client, you "subscribe" to a certain set of folders; these are the only folders IMAP clients will see. You want to configure your IMAP clients to use ~/mail as your root folder; otherwise you will see any other folders in your home directory (IMAP isn't limited to email).

When you set up an IMAP client (Outlook will work, though Outlook 2000 has an annoying bug, always reporting "server dropped connection", I use Mozilla mail) you provide the IP address of your server, and your username and password on that server.

IMAP is strange about deleting. Many IMAP clients by default want to move deleted messages into a folder. That's okay if you want to do that, I prefer to actually delete them. Even if you actually delete a message, it is only marked as deleted; it's still there until you purge it. Pine asks if you want to purge messages when you leave a folder; other clients do similar things.

Finally, install a web email package. IMP is the best, but it can be very hard to set up. I resorted to another package called squirrelmail before I finally got IMP set up. Squirrelmail is perfectly fine. Configure the package to use IMAP, using localhost as the server.

That's the basic points. Email me at ceswiedler@mindspring.com if you want any further help.

At that point, you can use imap(s) and horde/IMP [horde.org] to create your own webmail service...

Don't bother with horde. Get Squirrelmail and you won't regret it.

I recommend SquirrelMail. I use it myself, and am quite happy with it.

...integrating e-mail and calendaring into the same window?

I understand the legitimacy of being e-mailed new/change meeting requests, etc., but WTF is this irrational draw towards Outlook? Why isn't WebCalendar (or Meeting Maker for that matter) and your favorite desktop mailer (or SquirrelMail and your favorite browser) an equally good solution? Please don't tell me it's because of those gawd-awful blackberry things.

SquirrelMail is a web-based IMAP client. Among its many features are . . . LDAP address book (RW).

You could use this for adding addresses and using your IMAP server remotely, and use any other IMAP client(s) for all other purposes.

-Peter

I also agree that a server makes the most sense. I would amplify these recommended transport mechanisms to include a few others that will allow remote connectivity.

First is a secure IMAP server for centralized email. This will allows any SSL-enabled IMAP client to access your mailbox. Also, Squirrelmail running on an SSL web server can give your access to your centralize mail repository from any web browser.

SMB and NFS are the obvious choices for LAN-based access, but WAN access needs more care. I think that a VPN setup using CIPE is a good approach. One the CIPE links are build, you can use most services as if you were located on your wired LAN.

The other need might be for file access from "arbitrary" locations. In addition to the normal scp and sftp apps in OpenSSH, there is a nice SCP client for windows, WinSCP. Lastly, if you have a SSL web server there already, Web-FTP will give you access to your files via https.

This sounds like a lot. In the end, you would need to expose SSH, SSL IMAP, SSL Apache, and CIPE servers. I am midway through this deployment myself, but it has stalled a bit because one of primary Internet access points started disallowing outgoing SSH.

I don't think that the whole email thing is a particularly good solution to the original question, but why should he pay for microsoft exchange when he could do this with any IMAP email server?

I have a cyrus imap server with webmail install that does exactly that. Also Courier MTA comes with a the pieces needed to do this btw.

Shared folders, server-side mail storage, SSL/TLS security are all part of the IMAP/IMAPS protocol that many ( most? ) free email servers support very well?

So why should he pay the $10-$40* per user license for microsoft exchange? *( lost track of the price )

hmmm, that web interface look suspiciously like squirrelmail.

IMAP Rules, plain and simple. Take an old PC, throw Debian on it, and use courier+postfix+squirrelmail+procmail+spamassassin +maildirs and all mail problems tend to disappear.

External variables (from the environment, the HTTP request, cookies or the web server) are no longer registered in the global scope by default.

Umm... I'm not sure about others but to me this sounds like a *very* radical change in PHP's behaviour. I updated to PHP 4.2.0 on my server and not a single script worked because PHP simply ignored the variables. For example SquirrelMail didn't even show the login page.

Does someone know how to enable the old behaviour?

I read about the embedding in Konqueror but couldn't get specifics because of the slashdotting. Here is an idea that I have for a potential use of kvim:

I use SquirrelMail, a web-based IMAP client, to read and send mail. It would be super cool to be able to use kvim in place of the usual browser-provided TEXTAREA editor when I send mail. This would also work well here on slashdot, for editing comments like I'm doing now.

Chris

First, don't overlook webapps. I used Squirrelmail for all my email for quite a while. It was great to be able to get all my mail (and archives) securely from ANYWHERE that had an SSL capable browser and an internet connection. PHPGroupWare is another great example. Webapps are BY FAR the most flexable from the client perspective.

Beyond this there are two more strong options.

As about fifty people have said, VNC. VNC has the advantage of working on many platforms and being able to re-direct an entire desktop. VNC "becomes" a webapp via its ability to provide your desktop via any Java capable browser. This is a strong option for your situation.

Xfree86 is a good option for serving up individual apps, and is really handy when paired with ssh (-X option). This option is better suited to a large number of fixed clients (i.e. workstations) using a small number programs (i.e. X clients (geez I hate the X terminology.)) regularly. Not so great for your situation.

Good Luck!

-Peter

Pity that their first reply was to sue, before even considering the case. It's a pity that ORBZ let itself be SLAPPed out of existance first.

Unfortunately, there really isn't any way to stop this sort of behaviour apart from instuting very harsh penalties for threatening to sue and not following through with the threat or reaching an adequate mediated position with all affected parties.

A$#*holes I say - even if they have recanted now, it's too late to fix the damage. For example the mail-filters plugin for Squirrelmail has had orbz removed - even if it comes back up, people running that code won't be using it.

It would be easier for his friends to use web based email instead. He could install SquirrelMail with SSL authentication instead, for example. His friends would be happier, and he wouldn't be causing a problem for others. He also wouldn't be running his mail server and bandwidth flat out processing spam. No infringment on his rights, and he's not being used as the tool to infinge on the rights of others. Win-win.

-I have yet to see webmail that allows me to filter mailing lists, family members, and business mail into their respective folders.

I can think of at least one Webmail client, the one I'm switching the ISP I own to. It's called SquirrelMail . To quote from the About page:

"SquirrelMail is a standards-based webmail package written in PHP4. It includes built-in pure PHP support for the IMAP and SMTP protocols, and all pages render in pure HTML 4.0 (with no Javascript) for maximum compatibility across browsers. It has very few requirements and is very easy to configure and install. SquirrelMail has a all the functionality you would want from an email client, including strong MIME support, address books, and folder manipulation."

Supporting plugins, you can spell check (using ispell or aspell) in two languages, filter spam, use black hole lists, etc. It's also GPL'd. It's also available in lots of languages so it isn't just US centric.

-Webmail is slower and kludgier.

It certainly can be slow like it was for me when I was syncing several thousand messages, but it's acceptable for hundreds of messages in multiple folders. And I like lower support requirements as a previous poster stated. Plus I think SquirrelMail is pretty elegant and it's easily brandable.

-I can see my POP mail when I'm not online, which is a great bonus for laptop users.

This is very true, but please remember that MediaOne/ATTBI is a residential service. I've got service from them and have for the last about 2 years. I work from home alot and have been unable to work frequently. Since I do and can't afford to not be able to work, I'm suckiing up the cost of the loop charge for a T-1 starting in a couple of weeks or as soon a Verizon can get off their ass.

"I have yet to see webmail that allows me to filter mailing lists, family members, and business mail into their respective folders."

You have obviously never tried SquirrelMail.

Please do, you'll be pleasantly suprised.

I am the system administrator for a moderatly sized private elementry school. When I started, the school had very few computing resources at it's 2 campuses. After making a list of what I wanted to accompish in 2 years, I added up the costs and found that they it would be beyod my budget to buy new workstations and build a dedicated server all based on commercial software.

Here's what I've been able to create for the school:

1 workstation for every 4 children
So when a class is in the library there is 1 student per computer. They all run win98.

I am working towards 1 laptop for each teacher
So far there is 2, they are wirelessly 802.11b connected to the network.

A dedicated Red Hat 7.2 server
Squid proxy, web page filtering and monitoring Squirrel Mail IMAP web based e-mail, samba, LDAP student/teacher contact and vital information, a MySQL powered bookmark database, Apache Web server, and a digital picture gallery.

Everything on the server is open source and works flawlessly. All of this would have cost a fortune to buy and maintain on a NT server.

I am very interested in what software other people are running if they are doing the same thing that I am. Reply to this comment or e-mail me with what you run, I'd love to share tips.

postfix,
cyrus-imapd,
squirrel mail,
and procmail

Now for all your backup stuff, write a procmail line to save a copy of all mail. Its really easy. You could extend these tools to do everything exchange does in an afternoon, and continue supporting your outlook clients.

• 
  SquirrelMail.
• NeoMail
• Horde IMP