Hula had shown a lot of promise, but it withered away:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_(software)
It was forked though as Bongo: http://bongo-project.org/Main_Page
Ask HN: Open-source alternatives of Gmail?
21–30 of 55 posts
Re: Ask HN: Open-source alternatives of Gmail?
#22If something that is hosted by a 3rd party 'in the cloud' is open source, does it really help? Since someone else is still managing your data.
If it's open source, you can (presumably) download it yourself and host it yourself.
(I know technically with most FLOSS licences you don't need to share the code unless you distribute it, but it would completely miss the point to call it open source and not distribute the code)
Re: Ask HN: Open-source alternatives of Gmail?
#23I went looking for something suitable a while back, but I didn't find anything. The search is nice, but I'm really more interested in the mail interface. The features I use: Sending and receiving (duh) delayed mail (in case I make a mistake... And I will!) filtering (and tags/folders) keyboard shortcuts simple search, with folder/tag support browser-based, so I can access it anywhere
Google were smart when they implemented tags. I've used them immensely (several tags per e-mail). Most (?) IMAP servers doesn't support tags, that makes migrating from Gmail a hard decision for me right now.
Dovecot supports tags.
Re: Ask HN: Open-source alternatives of Gmail?
#24Any AGPL webmail clients like gmail? I prefer Free Software to Open Source
Re: Ask HN: Open-source alternatives of Gmail?
#25I have recently switched from Roundcube to Squirrelmail - the former worked annoyingly slow for me. I only had to tweak the source code a bit to get rid of these _ugly_ iframe borders. I don't use web interface too much though.
I seriously cannot believe that something that looks like it was designed for Netscape Navigator still exists. There must be a need for it over everything else, I'd love to know where it's still used.
Is this a styling objecting? I don't think these issues are trivial exactly, but if the deployers cared, it would not be too difficult to beautify.
Universities often use Squirrelmail. The most recent instance I saw was for Potsdam.
Re: Ask HN: Open-source alternatives of Gmail?
#26AFAICT the best alternative, interface-wise, is Roundcube, and it doesn't seem particularly exciting (it's also written in PHP... which doesn't necessarily have to count against it, but makes me a little wary). I've foolishly started to build my own, which at some point may become good enough to open source (I certainly don't want to commercialize it).
Roundcube is by far the most clean, intuitive and beautiful opensource webmail client out there.
> it's also written in PHP... which doesn't necessarily have to count against it, but makes me a little wary
why that?
Re: Ask HN: Open-source alternatives of Gmail?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google were smart when they implemented tags. I've used them immensely (several tags per e-mail). Most (?) IMAP servers doesn't support tags, that makes migrating from Gmail a hard decision for me right now.
Dovecot supports tags.
Dovecot supports it, but are there any good, stable IMAP clients that work with it?
Re: Ask HN: Open-source alternatives of Gmail?
#28AFAICT the best alternative, interface-wise, is Roundcube, and it doesn't seem particularly exciting (it's also written in PHP... which doesn't necessarily have to count against it, but makes me a little wary). I've foolishly started to build my own, which at some point may become good enough to open source (I certainly don't want to commercialize it).
Interestingly, I remember in 2006 Roundcube was already being touted as a gmail lookalike. Back when being able to move your emails from one folder to another using drag-n-drop in the browser made you feel /slick/ :)
Re: Ask HN: Open-source alternatives of Gmail?
#29AFAICT the best alternative, interface-wise, is Roundcube, and it doesn't seem particularly exciting (it's also written in PHP... which doesn't necessarily have to count against it, but makes me a little wary). I've foolishly started to build my own, which at some point may become good enough to open source (I certainly don't want to commercialize it).
Roundcube is by far the most clean, intuitive and beautiful opensource webmail client out there. > it's also written in PHP... which doesn't necessarily have to count against it, but makes me a little wary why that?
Because it's PHP. Duh.