Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

Between Squirrelmail, Horde, and Roundcube, I always liked Roundcube the most. It was more polished than the others, at least, and was far easier to support end-users with. Glad to see the project is still alive :D

My ISP recently switched to roundcube for their webmail. Looks pretty slick, though I'm not really convinced it's as good as it should be. It's slow to fetch my email, and searching for specific emails doesn't work very well.

Good news. I've been using it since fairly early on, and it's a very impressive bit of work, especially considering the pressure to give up hosting mail.

Yeah, Gmail has probably the best spam filtering of any mail service in the world.

But! You can do pretty well at it, too, if you feel like putting in the effort. I host email for some clients, and most of my sysadmin time these days is spent dealing with spam in some fashion or another.

1. Greylisting. Greylisting is fantastic, and the package you're looking for here is sqlgrey. It's easy to use and admin and it has sensible defaults. You can pretty much just drop it in and immediately get an 80% reduction in spam.

2. Use the right MTA stack: currently I think that's Postfix and Dovecot. Postfix and Dovecot go together like ice cream and apple pie. Postfix is far easier to admin and configure than Sendmail, and Dovecot has good support for managesieve, which'll be important in a moment.

3. Install SpamAssassin and AMaViS. Getting it working correctly with Postfix in a multi-domain environment, so that each user can have their own SA settings, is a little bit tricky, but totally worth it. AMaViS by default wants to manage SA's settings. Don't let it.

4. Install the managesieve, password, and sauserprefs plugins. Now you can change your email password, your filters, and your SpamAssassin preferences right from the webmail interface.

5. Configure SpamAssassin to label messages "[SPAM]" (it also sets the X-Spam-Flag header) on junk messages, and then set up a default filter in managesieve to redirect those things to Junk folder. Bam, no missing emails, no cluttered inbox. Use imap on your favorite devices.

6. A couple of extras, like Fail2Ban, will help too. You can modify Fail2Ban to watch your mail.log for frequent attempts at nonexistent user accounts and then iptables those spammers.

As with most things, you can spend as much additional time as you'd like fine tuning this, writing some custom software, and so on. But, the above will get you about 98% of the way to Gmail's level of spam filtering in about a day's worth of work.

> It's slow to fetch my email...

Yeah, there can be a couple causes for this. Sometimes it's the skin being used. Some Roundcube skins are quite a bit faster than the default; you might check with your ISP to see if they support additional Roundcube skins. (They are very easy to install, and users can select an RC skin from their settings panel.)

> ...and searching for specific emails doesn't work very well.

There should be a tiny dropdown arrow next to the magnifying glass icon in the search box. (This is not great UI.) Click that, and you should get a menu like the following:

Subject, From, To, Cc, Bcc, Body, Entire Message.

Make sure Entire Message is selected. It's not by default. RC will remember your setting for each folder. This will make your searches slow on folders with lots of messages, but it improves the search results quite a lot.