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Open Source AJAX Webmail

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the future-of-web-design dept.

scrasher writes "It seems AJAX webmail is all the craze. Right on the heels of both Microsoft and Yahoo launching beta versions of their new AJAX webmail clients, an Open Source startup RoundCube has released an alpha of a GPLed AJAX webmail client. While there are still many features missing (like search!), the demo they have is completely cross-browser compliant and overall very impressive."

5 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. Foldername length patch. by suso · · Score: 4, Interesting

    For anyone who wants this fix, I made a q&d change to the folder listing code so that it truncates long folder names in the middle so that they don't run over and screw up your display. I submitted this patch to the author a month ago, but it hasn't made it into the trunk yet I guess.

    http://suso.suso.org/programs/roundcube/

    Roundcube is pretty neat, but it still has some bugs. The IMAP client caches everything so that it is faster on subsequent tries, but on large mailboxes it can be a real pain the first time. It makes for a good program to hack on though. Its just what I've been looking for to replace squirrelmail on suso.org.

  2. Zimbra by Cally · · Score: 4, Interesting
    There's also the Zimbra product, which is open source. It's on my list to eval - the Flash demo (see the webpage) looks pretty slick.

    Ajax is the first genuinely new thing I can think of this century.

    --
    "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
    1. Re:Zimbra by porneL · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Ajax is the first genuinely new thing I can think of this century.
      AJAX is not a new thing. It's new name for technologies of last century. Read Hixie's post about how old and inappropriately named AJAX is.
  3. Re:One comment and slashdotted! by sootman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Ack! The one time I'm around early enough to make a comment like that and it turns out it's not down. (Or if it was, they recovered quickly.) In any case, it looks great. And being MySQL-based, the big missing feature--search--should be pretty easy to add. In fact, all I've ever wanted was an SQL query window I can run against my email--`select * from inbox where (sender='mom' or sender='dad') and date>20041225 and date20041230 and subject like '%party%'`

    --
    Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
  4. Installed! Looks nice thus far... by nuxx · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I just installed it, and it seems pretty slick thus far. I think they still have a few things to add beyond search, namely:

    - Server-side sorting so that all messages don't need to be downloaded in order to view, say, the 15 newest.
    - Special folder support, such as Junk, Sent, Trash, etc. Currently send mail just goes off into the ether.

    Other than that, I'm pretty impressed. I personally currently use Squirrelmail for my webmail needs, but it feels a bit clunky. If they can meet Squirrelmail's features (at a minimum) I can see this being used all over the place. I find the use of a DB for things like user/session/whatever management to be a bit odd, but at least actual files don't have to be used then.