> Howdy!
> I am just now catching up on reading the SM User's List digests, and
> I saw your mention of using SM in a 1000+ user environment. We've evaluated
> and chosen SquirrelMail to be our primary webmail interface here at Texas A&M
> University. Over the next several months, we will be transitioning from a TWIG
> application to SM, and I was wondering if you could offer an insights. Have you
> encountered any major hangups with the interface orbecome backend implementation?
>
> I would love to setup a list for large-scale SM environments if you've heard
> from other admins who'd be interested.
>
> Thanks!
> Court Sansom
> Senior Support Staff
> Help Desk Central
> Texas A&M University
Hey there!
SquirrelMail is still in the final phases of approval here at TI, the only
remaining thing we are waiting on is documentation and communication.. (30,000 users
makes deploying a new product a very time consuming effort) from my perspective,
this has been one of the best products we've brought in to TI so far.. our old
webmail reader (Java based) is *seriously* due to be replaced, and when I rolled out
a demo of SquirrelMail on my Sun workstation (a Blade 100, Ultrasparc IIe/500 MHz
512mb RAM), I never expected the results.. on word of mouth only, over 250 people
are regularly reading their e-mail from my "test" installation of SquirrelMail, with
no training or documentation (other than SquirrelMail's built in help system).
Picking plugins has been an interesting adventure - SquirrelMail in itself provides
some nice basic functionality, but there were a few that I have added that make
sense for our environment - since we're a mixed environment (Solaris/Cyrus/Sendmail
and Exchange 5.5/Exchange 2000), the attachment_tnef plugin makes decoding the
winmail.dat files easier.. Cyrus supports a server side filtering language known as
Sieve, and the avelsieve plugin makes managing rules very nice and speedy (the
SquirrelMail "filters" plugin tends to slow SM down quite a bit if you write more
than a few rules). Visual plugins like msg_flags and legend are helpful for
usability, and the IMAP quota_usage plugin gives the end user a good idea of how
close they are to having a full mailbox.
I'm also using timeout_user to keep people from staying logged in indefinitely, even
though you can't protect some users from themselves. One plugin I really want to
employ is the view_as_html plugin - since I have the default set to view as
plaintext (and I want to encourage non-HTML e-mail viewing) this gives the user a
quick way to switch to HTML on a per-message basis, in hopes that they will not
change their preferences to "View as HTML" by default. HTML e-mail really does make
things messy- for example, some embedded style sheets screw up the SquirrelMail
interface, and other messages that contain images become a problem to display (for
example, if the base url for images is in the HTML head tag, SquirrelMail strips the
head section since it has already generated one, so using embedded images (img
src="cid:MIME-content-ID";) or using a full URL becomes important for an end user to
actually see the message as the author intended.)
Using aspell (and configuring the squirrelspell plugin appropriately for aspell)
makes things very nice- I have 4 language dictionaries in place, and it works very
well. I had to clean up the timezones (locale/timezones.cfg and the 'zic' command to
generate "missing" ones), as well as the multiple SquirrelMail "interface" languages
make this one of the better products to support international users - since we have
a number of users in Asia that will be using SquirrelMail.. by the way, PHP 4.3.2
was needed to get some of the multibyte stuff working properly.
In an effort to squeeze as much performance out of SquirrelMail as possible, I've
been using the PHP accelerator (http://www.php-accelerator.co.uk/) and the IMAP
Proxy (http://www.imapproxy.org/) and this makes things lightning fast.. the only
concern I've seen here is some users complaining about the proxy server not working
well (IMAP connections being dropped?) - my workaround was to place the IMAP proxy
ON the actual IMAP post office, and I haven't had any noticeable problems out of
this.
For usability, I'm considering disabling some of the themes- I can see it now, some
user complaining all of their e-mails are blank, because of a whacky color scheme in
an HTML e-mail.. and while the rotating themes is a novel idea, this is sure to
really confuse someone.
The only remaining issue I'm investigating is trying to figure out how to store
preferences in a database and use the multilogin plugin so I can have a single
instance of SquirrelMail accessing all of our IMAP post offices (for an external
single-point webmail server) and sharing preferences with the internal instances of
SM - I believe this is possible, but it looks to be somewhat tedious.
Before investigating SquirrelMail, I spent some considerable time testing Horde/IMP
and while it may be "prettier" on the eye, I think Squi
rrelMail has IMP beat when it comes to their plugin architecture and organization of
the code.. not requiring 15-20 prerequisite plugins to PHP makes life nice!
The only thing I haven't seen in SquirrelMail is a plugin to use wvWare (and xlhtml)
to render MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint files as HTML in the reader.. sure wvWare may be
a best attempt (and knowing how MS behaves it probably won't work with the next
version of office), but not having to boot a PC to launch word or fire up StarOffice
just to read an attached .doc was a great time saver.
If there is interest from a few others, I would love to see a list (or wiki- doesn't
matter to me) with notes on large-scale rollouts of SquirrelMail!
--
Chris Winterrowd
Unix E-mail Administrator
Texas Instruments Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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