Why do all open-source Webmail systems stink?

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: xtknight
Are you going to make it available to the public? I'm interested to see what you come up with.

Yes, if I can really do it, I will make it available as an open-source project.

 

[DaiShan]

Originally posted by: Kaido

Originally posted by: xtknight
Nobody's preventing you from writing a better open-source one. It can't be that hard.

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

Importing contacts from outlook is easy, as they can be exported as CSV. Squirrelmail uses pipe delimited values for contacts, so it wasn't difficult to write a script to import all of my users contacts into their webmail

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: DaiShan

Originally posted by: Kaido

Originally posted by: xtknight
Nobody's preventing you from writing a better open-source one. It can't be that hard.

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

Importing contacts from outlook is easy, as they can be exported as CSV. Squirrelmail uses pipe delimited values for contacts, so it wasn't difficult to write a script to import all of my users contacts into their webmail

Hrm, is there any kind of universal import/export format, like a .txt that has commas or something? I don't want to work on anything overly complex because I'm not really interested in talking to other systems, but if may help if you want to migrate from Gmail, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.

Also is there a common email format, or does each app handle it differently?

 

[secretanchitman]

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...

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

lol we were using it for months...we were using squirrelmail before that. roundcube had some annoying quirks and far less options (beta of course), like refreshing a page if you dont type for a couple of minutes (it was never like that in squirrelmail for me) so if i typed a long email and i came back to it later, it would be all gone.

but yes, roundcube looks nice ill give you that. once it comes into the RC stages, we'll probably go back to it.

 

[lozina]

Originally posted by: Kaido

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?

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

I see... I ask because I too wrote my own webmail application and was wondering how the others out there handled the server side of things. I was wondering if they expected users to run web application servers and database servers for the webmail app or if the webmail app was stand-alone.

The webmail app I wrote is very rudimentary. I kind of went overboard on the POP3 side of things because I even wanted to parse the e-mails myself so I got caught up in reading these RFCs on POP3 e-mail formats to learn how to parse MIME attachments and it was justgetting pretty crazy. It worked though and I was happy with it at the time but that was a few years ago if I did it now it would be much better and I'd use AJAX now like Gmail uses for slick fast interface. My interface was just simple crude tables with their default border it looked ugly Oh and I'd probably try use 3rd party libraries for handling the e-mail parsing & the POP3 client/server communications now.

 

[tfinch2]

Originally posted by: Kaido

Originally posted by: DaiShan

Originally posted by: Kaido

Originally posted by: xtknight
Nobody's preventing you from writing a better open-source one. It can't be that hard.

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

Importing contacts from outlook is easy, as they can be exported as CSV. Squirrelmail uses pipe delimited values for contacts, so it wasn't difficult to write a script to import all of my users contacts into their webmail

Hrm, is there any kind of universal import/export format, like a .txt that has commas or something? I don't want to work on anything overly complex because I'm not really interested in talking to other systems, but if may help if you want to migrate from Gmail, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.

Also is there a common email format, or does each app handle it differently?

uhh, csv

 

[cleverhandle]

I would think that if your primary concern is aesthetics that it would be far easier to hack up Squirrelmail or IMP to suit your fancy rather than code everything from scratch. Even though most of the client-server communications and mail processing functions will be encapsulated in some kind of PHP function, it's still going to be a lot of work just to get the infrastructure down.

 

[Nothinman]

Hrm, is there any kind of universal import/export format, like a .txt that has commas or something? I don't want to work on anything overly complex because I'm not really interested in talking to other systems, but if may help if you want to migrate from Gmail, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.

Commas wouldn't work without special handling because the full name of the contact may have a comma in it, i.e. Smith, Joe.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: tfinch2

Originally posted by: Kaido

Originally posted by: DaiShan

Originally posted by: Kaido

Originally posted by: xtknight
Nobody's preventing you from writing a better open-source one. It can't be that hard.

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

Importing contacts from outlook is easy, as they can be exported as CSV. Squirrelmail uses pipe delimited values for contacts, so it wasn't difficult to write a script to import all of my users contacts into their webmail

Hrm, is there any kind of universal import/export format, like a .txt that has commas or something? I don't want to work on anything overly complex because I'm not really interested in talking to other systems, but if may help if you want to migrate from Gmail, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.

Also is there a common email format, or does each app handle it differently?

uhh, csv

Thanks, I don't ever import/export contact lists

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: cleverhandle
I would think that if your primary concern is aesthetics that it would be far easier to hack up Squirrelmail or IMP to suit your fancy rather than code everything from scratch. Even though most of the client-server communications and mail processing functions will be encapsulated in some kind of PHP function, it's still going to be a lot of work just to get the infrastructure down.

Yeah, I'll spend a couple weeks doing some serious research on this to see what the best option is. It's not critical that I have my own webmail service, but I'd really like to have one do what I want it to do. Modification of an existing system may prove to be a better route to go.