Rod Whitworth wrote:
On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 13:00:53 +0100, Stuart Henderson wrote:
On 2009/07/04 20:05, Rod Whitworth wrote:
So which imap? Dovecot looked like a candidate. It can use sqlite as
does Roundcube and I know it can do authentication for Postfix so it
looked like a suitable candidate.
I haven't found any "perfect" webmail but Roundcube looks nice, is
easy to get running and works _reasonably_ well. ;)
I agree on the looks. Non-techy customers tend to be very "itchy" if
they find a mild snag in an "ugly" product. Not so harsh on eye candy.
maybe that's why lots of 'em like windows..
I've generally had the same experience, though if you have a skinnable
system the colors seem to be more of a factor than the layout as far as
my customers are concerned. I've run SquirrelMail and IMP/Horde
environments (never Roundcube though -- may have to try that one out)
and the responsiveness and customizations possible on squirrelmail were
more than enough to keep most customers happy ... until they started
demanding calendaring and "exchange-ish" features.
You might also want to look at squirrelmail and hastymail (not in
ports but fairly straightforward to setup - lots of squirrelmail
users add plugins, so making a port of it would only be partially
useful).
I have an account on a squirelmail server. It's clunky AND ugly. I
think its keeper doesn't update it because he is scared of creating
more problems. ;))
squirrelmail *can* be aweful. I don't know about your install. However
it's lightweight and scales fairly well... which is why it seems to be
used by many universities for their students' email accounts.
IMP is quite nice, it does a lot of things and seems more robust
than Roundcube, but setup is a real pain. It doesn't look as flashy
which is either an advantage or disadvantage depending on your point
of view.
See above.
Ditto. I'm not a fan of setting up IMP, but I am a fan of what my
customers will pay me to host (and configure) an IMP environment for
them. There are oodles of "enterprise feature" plugins for IMP/Horde.
Then I found out that Roundcube uses sqlite and Dovecot uses sqlite3. I
don't think I want to have to synch two databases all the time.
Roundcube's database is for user prefs (timezone, colours, address
book etc), it doesn't really overlap anything Dovecot needs, so there's
nothing to keep in sync there. I haven't needed to touch the Roundcube
db at all after setting up.
Most webmail systems I've worked with always maintain their own
datastore for user prefs (instead of trying to create some hidden IMAP
subdirectory and cramming prefs into an RFC822 email header or
whatever). The possible exception being systems that make use of Cyrus'
Sieve for storing filters server-side ... but in that case imapd and
sieved are still separate daemons that are controlled by the cyrus
'master' process. And it works well.
As long as your webmail system supports multi-server scalability of some
sort (either through prefs-DB replication or account "sharding") then I
wouldn't be too concerned what was chosen.... (barring something ugly
and Java-based of course).
I've run servers with Cyrus and Dovecot, and tried out UW and Courier,
at various times over the last ~10 years. Cyrus has some nice features
that Dovecot doesn't have yet, but Dovecot's auth setup is much simpler
especially with Postfix, and I find the whole thing a bit more admin-
friendly, so I'm using Dovecot for all my new setups.
I'm a big fan of Cyrus. Not because it's always the easiest to set up,
or because the documentation is retard-proof, but because it's
ridiculously scalable, and I've used it for many years without it ever
disappointing me. The more difficult (though flexible and configurable)
auth setup of Cyrus also required me to understand and troubleshoot it
better before rolling it into production, which really saved my bacon
when problems *did* occur and I would have been lost in a "one size fits
all, no configuration or understanding required" solution.
UW-IMAP and Courier are permanently banned from any environment I
administer. I still don't know why I ever used them.
Cheers,
Tico
Sounds like I'll be in good company then.
Thanx,
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