Open Source AJAX Webmail
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."
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.
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
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.