[ILUG] webmail choices

[Stephen Shirley]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Morning all,
	Yesterday I finally got around to setting up webmail on a debian box
for some users. I asked around on #linux beforehand for recommendations,
and squirrelmail was spoken quite highly of, and i've used it before as
an enduser, so i installed it, and indeed it is quite decent, plenty of
useful features, very nice config script, and looks quite nice.
	As i was feeling extra productive, i decided to install a few more
webmail packages just to see what they looked like. We're using
courier-imap + postfix + maildir on debian sarge btw, with about 15
users, so not a very large setup at all.
	Sqwebmail is a package that the courier folks have written, it doesn't
use imap, it just accesses the maildirs directly, and is designed to be
lightweight and fast. Of course, as i wasn't thinking clearly, i decided
to try it out. Then i realised that it was going to need a setuid root
binary, and who needs another one of those?
	Ilohamail is written by a japanese guy, in php, mainly because no
existing webmail package he could find would handle japanese characters
properly. I'm smitten (well, as much as one can admit on a public
mailing list anyway). It's fast. Really fast. Some quick tests involving
timing how long it takes to open 2 folders sequentially showed it coming
in at ~2s whereas squirrelmail was ~5. It feels really responsive, it's
very nicely laid out, and it allows you to use it in conjunction with
any imap server. What i mean by this is that the login screen allows you
to enter username, password, and _server_. Very neat. The only real
niggle here is that it doesn't appear to support secure auth for imap
(tho it does support imap-ssl...).
	I plan on trying out imp4/horde later on today, just to see, but so far
Ilohamail (http://ilohamail.org) seems to be a winner. Just to clarify,
both ilohamail and squirrelmail are both connecting via imapproxy to the
courier-imap server, but i may well remove imapproxy from the equation
if it doesn't affect iloha much, as memory is quite limited on the box
in question. Anyway, just thought some other people might be interested
in the above. If not, seeing as you've read this far, it's too late to
hit the del key and save yourself the bother now ,-)

Steve
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFCvA1nQq9mXIYi5w4RAqk1AJ4jqW3/SEUWxgURjFpw74C2pmtcOQCeOEEQ
naW3fNzMQWaFkaAwJBbE6Mk=
=3g3x
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----