Over the last few years I’ve tried several different webmail products, and I’m currently pretty happy with RoundCube.
I’ve tried squirrelmail, which I never really liked but is included in the package repositories for most Linux distros, so it was the easiest to set up. It does the basics, but it can be a pain to use now that UI standards have been significantly raised (specifically in the webmail arena, by apps like GMail).
Then I went to IMP, which was quite a bit better, but to some degree I think it tries to do too much and therefore seems unnecessarily complex to set up and configure if all you really want is a web based IMAP client with a decent UI. Also, the UI still wasn’t quite what I was looking for.
RoundCube, which I’m currently using now, is the one I like best so far. It doesn’t have a huge list of features, but what it does have it does well. It handles all the basic web based e-mail functions pretty well, along with some AJAX-y user interface pieces to make it look and feel nice to use.
For non-web mail, I still use both Thunderbird and PINE, but there are still times when it’s convenient to have a web based system as well. I also sometimes use GMail for some things, and while it’s really good it has enough negative aspects (for me) to cause me to not use it as my primary webmail application.
If anyone has any recommendations for this type of application (that you can run on your own server, not a hosted service), feel free to let me know.
3 Comments
The best are the exchange alternatives like Zimbra which wasn’t hard to setup, especially if you know what you are doing.
Here is a full list on wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collaborative_software
Forgot to give you Hula which is in alpha stages but it looks really good.
Hula does look good. I may check that one out. I’m not really looking for systems that are overloaded with features, mostly just basic webmail, so I’d already ruled out products like Zimbra and other “collaboration” software, which I think are trying to do too much for my usage.