Share Your Opinion of Webmail Alternative

[nhouse]

Hello People!

I have read a lot of posts here about the how, why and should we use a different webmail program than Horde. I am more used to SquirrellMail because of a former server setup and I kind of like it... but I am not sure about how practical it may be to try and remove Horde as the webmail client. I will say this... I would like to have a webmail client to use IMAP folders.

Please take a moment and share your experiences, insight about using a different webmail client... with these points in mind:

Your personal preference in a webmail client... focusing on user friendliness and available features.
The ease of "replacing" Horde and instituting a different webmail client in it's place.
"If" you have installed the 4PSA products... Clean Server and SpamGuardian (and I have), does this make switching more difficult?
Have you had experiences with preformatted "skin sets" from places like !http://www.nutsmail.com or http://www.razorskins.com (http://www.razorskins.com/shop/Scripts/prodView.asp?idproduct=24) ? If so, what was your experience with them?

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts!

[sieb]

We use a customized version of Uebimiau. Its just a drop in POP3 client. But I am load testing @Mail currently as a replacement for Uebi this fall.

I don't advice "replacing" Horde, its easy to disable it and keep it on hand as something to fall back on.

[jamesyeeoc]

I have noticed that many hosts are now offering multiple simultaneous IMAP clients, usually Horde/IMP, SquirrelMail, and NeoMail. All 3 are integrated and the mail user can pick and choose at will which one (not sure how), but I do have a number of consulting clients who now have this option at different hosts.

I agree, I would not uninstall Horde/IMP, I would just leave it or disable it, just in case.

4PSA's CleanServer and SGuardian work at a different level and should not care what webmail package you choose to run.

As to SquirrelMail, the last time I installed it on a Plesk server while Horde was still active, it replaced the redirect for webmail.domain.com to itself, so that was rather a nice thing, I didn't have to do anything to Horde/IMP at all. Luckily this was on a test server, I had forgotten I had installed SM and when I browsed to webmail.domain.com, SM came up and I thought I was going 'nuts' (pun intended).

User friendliness - I have seen posts by some that say SquirrelMail is much better than Horde. To me they both look the same. I guess it all depends on if you stick with the default 'skin' or customize it.

I keep meaning to try uebimau since the time I saw seib's first post about it, but haven't found the time.... nor for testing NeoMail either....

[nhouse]

Thanks for the input... I suppose what I would really like to do is have a webmail client that looks more like the Plesk interface... personally, I don't really like the techno look of Horde. I think the "skin" that nutsmail.com is showing off just caught my attention... well, more comments welcome from everyone....

...anyone tried customizing Horde? If I did get it "skinned" the way I like... would updates to Plesk wipe out the custom stuff?

[Cranky]

Originally posted by nhouse
If I did get it "skinned" the way I like... would updates to Plesk wipe out the custom stuff?

Yes, it would typically overwrite changes.

[steve0]

Originally posted by nhouse
Thanks for the input... I suppose what I would really like to do is have a webmail client that looks more like the Plesk interface... personally, I don't really like the techno look of Horde. I think the "skin" that nutsmail.com is showing off just caught my attention... well, more comments welcome from everyone....

...anyone tried customizing Horde? If I did get it "skinned" the way I like... would updates to Plesk wipe out the custom stuff?

Check this new thread:
http://forum.sw-soft.com/showthread.php?threadid=26091

[ProfiTiger]

My preffered webmailer is openwebmail (http://openwebmail.org/), an extended version/derivate of neomail. It looks great (modern skins...), is easy to configure, has all inside you wish (adress-book, calendar, webdisk, support for different languages, fetching mails from other pop3-accounts, autoresponder, forwarder and much more).
The only problem (from http://openwebmail.org/openwebmail/doc/faq.txt):
---------------------------------------------
Q: Does Open WebMail support maildir and vpop3mail user by Qmail?
A: The official release does still not support maildir, however,
Laurent Frigault, lfrigault.AT.users.sourceforge.net has made patched
Open WebMail 2.01 to support maildir. It is available at
http://www.agneau.org/openwebmail/openwebmail-2.01-storage-20031027.tgz

Q: Will maildir be merged to official release of Open WebMail?
A: Yes, but we need to reorganization the code of openwebmail first
so the maildir patch could be merged into smoothly.
This would take some time...
---------------------------------------------

The patched version as rather old and not running on my plesk-box. We use owm on our "old" Sun Raq4, but I could not bring it to work on our plesk-server with SuSE and qmail.
Hope, there will be a wonder some time... My greates wish for an add-on / extension is a working openwebmail-Installation...

[dietcheese]

I just happen to log into a potential client's current webmail system:

http://www.smartertools.com/Products/SmarterMail/ScreenShots.aspx

This made every open-source webmail client that 've seen look like crap (that says nothing for function).

I don't know how extensive the features are but I know 90% of my clients just want to check their webmail when they're on the road. It's Windows-only but the interface is so concise and easy-to-use it makes you wonder why they can't do the same sort of thing with Horde/Squirlemail...

dc

[flosoft]

Well I use Roundcube Webmail. It is an IMAP client and supports Ajax.

As far as I have seen it is the best Webmail I have ever seen!
SW-Soft should use this one in their Plesk 8.

Greets,

Florian

EDIT: http://www.roundcube.net/

[Cranky]

The new Ajax interface for IMP looks good:
http://janschneider.de/cweb/home/index,channel,25,story,252.html

Will be good once that's available within Horde/IMP.