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Why do all open-source Webmail systems stink?

Kaido

Kaido

Elite Member & Kitchen Overlord
I've used everything from Horde to SquirrelMail to NeoMail and I despise all of them. None of them are anywhere near the quality of Yahoo! Mail or Gmail. Is it really that hard to writeup a nice email display list or display an email in a webpage? What's the deal?
 
It's simple. With that being said, how does one configure an email client like Outlook, Thunderbird or Evolution Mail to send/receive email from webmail accounts?
 
I rather like Horde/IMP - what's your beef with it? The only thing I might change is that the delete and mark-as-spam links could be a bit more prominent, since they're commonly used. Given that it's all PHP, I could recode them if I felt that strongly about it, which I don't.

The other OSS offerings I don't have that much experience with. As for the commercial sites, I know that GMail uses quite a few fancy tricks for keybindings and such - it would probably be nontrivial to work up a clone of it. But it's layout kind of bugs me on the rare occasions I use my account. My wife uses Yahoo mail pretty frequently - seems like any other webmail to me.

Dunno... to each his own I guess.
 
I've never really liked them either. Too...ugly and they just don't feel very streamlined. Horde is especially ugly IMO.
 
Well, I'd love to have kind of a slimmed-down Gmail webmail system. I'm personally not too concerned with importing/exporting to other apps or any of that. You can always use IMAP if you want to work with your desktop clients.

Is it overly difficult to writeup a webmail system from scratch? I'd be willing to do it if it's really doable by one person. The Gmail concept wouldn't be too hard to implement using PHP; I'd ditch all the keyboard shortcuts and whatnot (except for sending emails, press CTRL-B for Bold is great!) and just have a simple, fast-loading GUI. No calenders, chats, or anything else - just your email and address book.
 
Originally posted by: LoKe
It's simple. With that being said, how does one configure an email client like Outlook, Thunderbird or Evolution Mail to send/receive email from webmail accounts?
Click to expand...

There should be a wizard to set-up a imap or pop/smtp identity on the mail client.
 
Originally posted by: tfinch2
Originally posted by: LoKe
It's simple. With that being said, how does one configure an email client like Outlook, Thunderbird or Evolution Mail to send/receive email from webmail accounts?
Click to expand...

There should be a wizard to set-up a imap or pop/smtp identity on the mail client.
Click to expand...

I'm just wondering about the POP/SMTP servers. pop.domain.com? I've got my own domain with CPanel and Webmail. I didn't notice any documentation.
 
Originally posted by: LoKe
Originally posted by: tfinch2
Originally posted by: LoKe
It's simple. With that being said, how does one configure an email client like Outlook, Thunderbird or Evolution Mail to send/receive email from webmail accounts?
Click to expand...

There should be a wizard to set-up a imap or pop/smtp identity on the mail client.
Click to expand...

I'm just wondering about the POP/SMTP servers. pop.domain.com? I've got my own domain with CPanel and Webmail. I didn't notice any documentation.
Click to expand...

In cPanel, click the "Mail" icon, then click on Manage/Add/Remove Accounts. For each mailbox, there should be a link to "Configure Mail Client". On that page it will give you the manual settings for configuring the mail client, including username, incoming, and outgoing mail server addresses, and supported protocols.
 
I've used everything from Horde to SquirrelMail to NeoMail and I despise all of them. None of them are anywhere near the quality of Yahoo! Mail or Gmail. Is it really that hard to writeup a nice email display list or display an email in a webpage? What's the deal?
Click to expand...

If it's so easy why not write your own?

Personally I really like Horde IMP but I don't use them all that much, I just use do IMAP over SSH and use my normal MUA.
 
ive used squirrelmail for the longest time. you're right...doesnt look that great compared to yahoo or gmail in aethestics.

we used to use round cube mail, but my brother finally put back squirrelmail because its actually in a STABLE release...
 
College uses squirellmail... Is it squirrels fault or the colleges that all characters after the initial set of letters are ignored in passwords? Example: password is abcd1 You can enter abcd, abcd34 abcd111 and they all work...
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
I've used everything from Horde to SquirrelMail to NeoMail and I despise all of them. None of them are anywhere near the quality of Yahoo! Mail or Gmail. Is it really that hard to writeup a nice email display list or display an email in a webpage? What's the deal?
Click to expand...

If it's so easy why not write your own?

Personally I really like Horde IMP but I don't use them all that much, I just use do IMAP over SSH and use my normal MUA.
Click to expand...

That's what I'm asking - is it overly difficult to create a webmail system? It's not like I'm planning on rewriting sendmail or exim or anything, I just want a better online client. I'm not big on desktop MUAs because it's just easier to have everything online so I can check it everywhere. With that said, IMAP plus Thunderbird and a better webmail system would be most welcome 🙂
 
Originally posted by: secretanchitman
ive used squirrelmail for the longest time. you're right...doesnt look that great compared to yahoo or gmail in aethestics.

we used to use round cube mail, but my brother finally put back squirrelmail because its actually in a STABLE release...
Click to expand...

Wow, Round Cube mail is gorgeous! When was the last time you tried it? I hope not recently because it looks great, I'd love to try it 🙂
 
Originally posted by: Kaido
Originally posted by: secretanchitman
ive used squirrelmail for the longest time. you're right...doesnt look that great compared to yahoo or gmail in aethestics.

we used to use round cube mail, but my brother finally put back squirrelmail because its actually in a STABLE release...
Click to expand...

Wow, Round Cube mail is gorgeous! When was the last time you tried it? I hope not recently because it looks great, I'd love to try it 🙂
Click to expand...


I ran it on my home box for a while, cool little package, was pretty stable at the time (3 months ago or so) but I run Linux on my main desktop and just leave Thunderbird open, there's never a need to reboot, so I always have access to my mail heh.
 
Originally posted by: DaiShan
Originally posted by: Kaido
Originally posted by: secretanchitman
ive used squirrelmail for the longest time. you're right...doesnt look that great compared to yahoo or gmail in aethestics.

we used to use round cube mail, but my brother finally put back squirrelmail because its actually in a STABLE release...
Click to expand...

Wow, Round Cube mail is gorgeous! When was the last time you tried it? I hope not recently because it looks great, I'd love to try it 🙂
Click to expand...


I ran it on my home box for a while, cool little package, was pretty stable at the time (3 months ago or so) but I run Linux on my main desktop and just leave Thunderbird open, there's never a need to reboot, so I always have access to my mail heh.
Click to expand...

Aside from the demo being dog slow, it's pretty neat. What I'd really like to have is a fast-loading version of Gmail that has nestable Labels. I'll do some research for the next few weeks to see how difficult creating a webmail system from scratch really is; if it will take me under a year I'll probably do it 🙂
 
I love Yahoo webmail but for some reason they only have POP access and not IMAP. I use IMAP to remotely download my email to my phone which threw out Yahoo.
 
Why not IMAPS (or IMAP/TLS)?
Click to expand...

Because I use the SSH forwarding for other things so that would be double the encryption for no reason.

That's what I'm asking - is it overly difficult to create a webmail system? It's not like I'm planning on rewriting sendmail or exim or anything, I just want a better online client. I'm not big on desktop MUAs because it's just easier to have everything online so I can check it everywhere. With that said, IMAP plus Thunderbird and a better webmail system would be most welcome
Click to expand...

Depends on you, personally I couldn't create a decent looking website to save my life so I doubt I could do any better asthetically. Writing the IMAP/POP code shouldn't be too difficult since there's usually modules for that and you could steal that code from one of the other webmail programs.
 
About these webmail apps, where is the server? You supposed to install the server at your house or do they provide the server for you?
 
Originally posted by: lozina
About these webmail apps, where is the server? You supposed to install the server at your house or do they provide the server for you?
Click to expand...

You can do either one. I just have a plain-jane cable connection at my house, and since it's slow for uploading and not 100% reliable, I have a host elsewhere that I use. If you're interested, HostDome offers NeoMail, SquirrelMail, and Horde/IMP on their server by default and have pretty good rates:

http://www.hostdome.com

I use them for a number of sites (I do web design professionally) and they've been great. I'm just not happy with the open-source offerings and I want something better 🙂
 
Originally posted by: xtknight
Nobody's preventing you from writing a better open-source one. It can't be that hard. 😀
Click to expand...

Working on it now in fact 😉 I'm in Phase 1, R&D. I am going to exclude a lot of the "normal" features - it's going to be soley a webmail system. No ads, rss, calendar, and so on. It won't talk to Outlook or any other mail client - you won't be able to import/export your contacts or email from within it. I just want a basic webmail system that looks nice, works fast, and is reliable. It will support both POP3 and IMAP and will be written in PHP. From the looks of it, it will take me at least 6 months to completely design, create, and test, but I'll have a good email system forever if I can actually manage it. Until we get holographic video emails, I don't really see the email system changing anytime soon, so I think I should be good to go 🙂
 
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