BrianJarrett.com

I’ve been using SquirrelMail now for a couple years on my web/mailserver to read my IMAP e-mail when I’m away from home. It works, but the interface is outdated and ugly. I’ve really been looking for something a bit better-looking and containing more advanced functionality (such as drag and drop and folder level message deletion). It doesn’t appear that the SquirrelMail development team has any plans on revamping the interface anytime soon so I’ve been searching for a replacement that will provide the functionality and appearance I’m looking for. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing SquirrelMail; it’s functioned well over the past couple years and it has allowed me to actually use my mail server for my primary e-mail (by providing remote access). Unfortunately SquirrelMail just seems to be stagnating developmentally.So, a couple days ago while searching for replacements I came across a new project called RoundCube. This project, although currently in beta, has made tremendous headway toward an attractive, modern, and useful user interface. It’s written in PHP and uses AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XHTML). Being a beta project there is still functionality missing, such as message filtering and address book import/export, but the basic functionality is there. Setup wasn’t very difficult but it was a bit clunky; again this project is still in beta so I’m not being critical. It uses a MySQL database backend that only required running a bit of SQL to create the tables. I modified two php files, one for database connectivity and another for server preferences and everything worked.

The interface is really something to behold; modern, simple, clean, and attractive. There are screen shots on the project’s homepage and I’ve included a screenshot below (click thumbnail) for illustrative purposes:

Although this project is not quite ready for prime time, at least for my purposes, it’s very close. I really need message filters since I receive so much e-mail and these are not included in the roadmap for verson .01 stable. This project was started back in May of 2005 so it’s coming along very quickly. I figure at this rate this project will be ready for full time use within six months to a year. I can always use SquirrelMail in the meantime.
So here are some links to get you started:

Round Cube Project Home Page

RoundCube Forum

Paul Stamatiou’s Setup Guide

Mark Boulton’s Review of RoundCube

I’ll be watching this project very closely and most likely writing about my experiences with subsequent releases.