Tim Flight

Recently a friend turned me on to RoundCube Webmail. RoundCube is a web-based email program much like SquirrelMail. However unlike SquirrelMail, RoundCube has a stunningly beautiful interface. Lots of nice ajax implementations and best of all doesn’t use frames.
Installation of this alpha status project was a snap. I had users logging in within five minutes. I’m extremely impressed. No bugs to report yet but it has been running less than one hour.

My only complaint so far is integration with virtual hosts. And to be fair this is something SquirrelMail doesn’t handle elegantly either. I created one installation of RoundCube on my server which hosts several dozen domains. I setup a server Alias for each of the domains to point to the same RoundCube installation. When users login their profile is set so their email address appears like “loginname@serverFQDN”. However their email address is really “nickname@customdomain.com”.

Again, SquirrelMail does the same thing, however there is a plugin I used that runs the first time someone logs in, it asks them for their real name and their real email address. This solved the problem for me. With RoundCube when setting up new users I’ll probably just login as the new user myself, set the profile correctly, then turn over the account to the new user.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 14th, 2006 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Computer Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.