Roundcube Webmail Client

october 3, 2005

So, does the world need another webmail client? Yes, if it is as good as Roundcube. After reading Jeremy's posting that mentions Zimbra, I took a look at Zimbra. The flash demo was very well put together. The live demo was even more impressive (though a bit pokey and slow). So, I was intrigued. Was Zimbra something I could setup on my own? I went to the Zimbra downloads page and saw that the package was 150MB in size! Holy crap. Nevermind on that, too heavy for me. Plus, Zimbra wanted to replace all of my setup (Apache, MTA, etc), which was not cool because I have my stuff tweaked and tuned. I went over to Yahoo! Search and did a look up for "AJAX" and "webmail". The beauty of social searching on MyWeb 2.0 are the listings of links that are saved by people in ones Community -- it looked like Jeremy had found a webmail client named Roundcube. I checked out the site and the demo was great! I installed the webclient and started playing immediately. The software implements some cool features. The biggest being the drag and drop functionality. I like this a lot, it makes the webmail client feel like a desktop client -- no more checkboxes and "move to" buttons. It has MySQL and PostgreSQL integration for the addressbook. It is a very simple app that is a mere 230kb download. Granted, the software is in alpha stage, so there are a bunch of missing (basic) features and bugs. Some features that would nice are: Empty Trash button, Reply All button, Spam Report button, Search functionality, and some filtering functionality. The app is surprisingly well equipped as an alpha and I will be keeping my eye out on the development of this app. The guys at Squirrelmail have some serious competition with Roundcube, this is a great webmail app. It is missing some of the functionality that Squirrelmail has (some listed above), but once those features are added, I know I will be switching from Squirrelmail over to Roundcube.


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