[Hosting] FW: Webmail survey says...

Jon Carnes hosting@trilug.org
Fri, 9 Aug 2002 01:38:03 -0400


Here is another interesting testimonial for Openwebmail.  Looks like its 
catching up quickly to the Squirrel mail folks...

If you guys are tired of this, let me know. - Jon
===

I've been following this thread since my post. I missed out a couple of
things which worked in favour of Openwebmail for me.
1. Neat User interface. Looks better than SquirrelMail my other choice.
2. Excellent search and filtering facility. I did not look for this
feature when I chose openwebmail but it has turned out to be a killer
feature on use. Works Like the Find function on messages in Outlook.
3. Multi-domain support. I run a multi-domain mailing system and each
domain can have different defaults. It allows email id based login as in
such an environment, the <username> in the email id and the real
username are different.
4. I found the filter rule to weed out virus/ SPAM (when used with
Mailscanner) based om subject tag.
5. The best use of screen real estate.
6. Minimal or full header display toggle which allows a user to trace
mail origin in case he gets junk mail.

Many of these features helped me let users understand mailing better as
they did not have to go thro' the pain of editing with vi, seeing
maillogs, message transcripts etc.

While I did try IMP, I had problems installing it on a RH 6.2 m/c. Did
not go thro' easily on dependencies. As of now, I think only Openwebmail
provides multi-domain per domain configuration.
===

On Thursday 08 August 2002 11:15 am, Jon Carnes wrote:
> Here is part of message from another group that is debating the best
> webmail client.  I thought it would be of interest to all here.  The
> consensus of the group is that for small groups (<500 folks) Squirrel
> mail gets the nod. There is however, an interesting testimonial for
> Openwebmail which is highly integrated with Sendmail.
>
> Jon
> ======
>
> Here's the packages people mentioned using in no particular order:
> SquirrelMail http://www.squirrelmail.org
> IMP http://imp.horde.org
> IMHO (IMap HOst) http://www.lysator.liu.se/~stewa/IMHO/dev.html
> WebMail http://www.netwinsite.com (not open source)
> TWIG http://twig.screwdriver.net
> Openwebmail http://www.openwebmail.org/
> Joydesk <http://www.virtualtek.com>www.virtualtek.com
> Neomail http://neomail.sourceforge.net/
> sqwebmail http://www.inter7.com/sqwebmail/
> nullwebmail http://nullwebmail.sourceforge.net/
>
> For you Qmailers...there is a list of webmail packages on
> http://qmail.org/top.html. AFAIK Qmail will work with most (any?)
> IMAP/POP webmail too.
>
> SquirrelMail and IMP got the highest raves by far. IMP is generally
> acknowledged to have many requirements (I'll say -- just take a look
> at the FreeBSD ports dependency list for this package!).
>
> Matt Laney suggests SquirrelMail is good for small number of users
> (~500) and SqWebMail can handle "large undertakings". He also points
> out SqWebMail only supports maildirs (qmail, postfix,
> maildrop/courier).
>
> S Mohan has tried several and has his own (very helpful) summary. I
> hope he will forgive me for quoting him in full here:
>
> I've looked at - meaning installed and played around the following.
> 1. Popper.
> 2. Postaci.
> 3. SquirrelMail.
> 4. WWW Mail.
> 5. Jwebmail.
> 6. Horde/IMP.
> 7. atdot.
> 8. Openwebmail.
> 9. Neomail.
>
> I started with atdot, moved on to wwwmail initially. By then I had got
> used to web based email and then started doing a detailed search. My
> feedback is as follows:
>
> Popper has a Outlook97 like interface and runs on PHP/MySQL. Postaci
> also requires MySQL. WWWMail/atdot/Openwebmail runs on perl and standard
> flat files. SquirrelMail runs on PHP/MySQL.
>
> My criteria were the following:
> 1. Ease of standard install.
> 2. Folder support, personalisation support, multiple bag
> aggregation/popping, mail routing rules, inline attachment handling.
>
> I tried to avoid MySQL as I wanted my users to use webmail as well as
> pop their mailbags. I also found perl was faster than PHP. My pick of
> the lot was SquirrelMail and Openwebmail ( An tremendous improvement
> over Neomail). I chose Openwebmail as it did not require MySQL, was fast
> and in specific terms handled inline attachments the best. It also has
> passowrd change from within and thus obviated the need for me to set up
> a separate web page for password change.
>
> Good features:
> 1. Vacation/ Autoreply.
> 2. Icons/ styles.
> 3. Customised signatures etc.
> 4. Login history.
> 5. Filtering based on rules, faked smtp, javascript disabling.
> 6. Ability to turn on and off features globally.
> 7. Active mailing list, Good Support from T Chung - website maintainer.
> 8. SMTP, Sender blocking per user etc.
>
> Openwebmail is tied down to sendmail and uses sendmail features to
> implement a few things while SquirrelMail will work with both.
>
> There were a lot more but I did a feature scan, screenshot survey before
> I looked at the packages above.
>
> To echo S Mohan: "HTH" -- I know it did for me.
>
>
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