[Cialug] Open Source Webmail

[Daniel A. Ramaley]

Since you mention your hosting account, i'm guessing this is for 
personal use.

I used to administer a Horde/IMP installation. It isn't hard to get 
running, but takes some time and attention to detail as it has a lot of 
dependencies. Security and functionality updates come out fairly 
regularly and require some effort to install properly if you've 
customized anything. For personal use, i'd say the time required to set 
up and maintain an installation is probably excessive. In a business 
setting where you are partially or wholly responsible for e-mail and 
can dedicate some time to it, then it might make sense.

Zimbra is what we migrated to, from the Horde installation. For a small 
installation, Zimbra would be fairly easy to set up. We've only updated 
once so far, but the update process is smoother than Horde's. Zimbra 
also provides a much slicker web application than IMP does. I haven't 
tried the new Horde/DIMP (Dynamic IMP) that is all AJAX and Web 2.0 
buzzword compliant, however.

I've heard good things about RoundCube but not used it myself. I've not 
heard of AtMail before.

Between Horde and Zimbra, my advice would be Zimbra. I can't speak for 
the other options. Horde does have one advantage i can think of 
though--if you intend to customize it or write your own modules, the 
architecture for Horde is simpler. It didn't take me long to figure out 
how to patch Horde to add minor functionality we needed or make small 
changes to how features worked. I've not yet learned how to do the same 
with Zimbra. On the other hand, so far the need to customize Zimbra has 
not been so great as it was with Horde since Zimbra is a better match 
for our needs.

On 2009-03-26 at 10:10:04, Todd Walton wrote:
>Anybody have any recommendations on an open source webmail program?
>I'm looking for something a little more sophisticated than the
>SquirrelMail that came with my hosting account.  Searching the
>Internets I count:
>
>Zimbra, AtMail, RoundCube, Horde IMP
>
>I kind of like the looks of Horde, because they have all the other
>crap I can add on to do neat stuff.  But I also want something that's
>going to work simply and going to work well and maybe I don't want to
>start adding crap if I'm just gonna get myself in trouble.
>
>But anyway, what's a real-world real-good set up?
>
>-todd
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-- 
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Dan Ramaley                            Dial Center 118, Drake University
Network Programmer/Analyst             2407 Carpenter Ave
+1 515 271-4540                        Des Moines IA 50311 USA