Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

roundcube.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 61 posts

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#11

Post by geuis »

Very, very happy to see this.

About 8 years ago, I was singularly managing my company's email. When I was hired, they had been using an awful php based mail system. My first major upgrade was to start using Roundcube. This was a very, very early version and one of the first open source mail projects to offer 'ajax' functionality.

When Gmail for business became available, we migrated to that, but for a while Roundcube was the best web interface for email there was to be found.

Sadly I haven't kept up with the project over the years, but my early memories still serve me well and I hope that the project has gotten much better over the years.

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#12

Post by nileshtrivedi »

pmx wrote: post #5

If I could find a way to filter spam as well as gmail does I would love to back to self-hosting my email. I just can't imagine a time when we'll get anything close to what gmail can do without their huge resources.

Here's a somewhat aggressive solution: Allow incoming emails only from previously approved senders.

Direct strangers to reach to you via Twitter.

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#13

Post by thaumaturgy »

[deleted] wrote: post #9

[deleted]

I cannot stress enough how difficult it is to build out a complete, working, featureful, not-buggy webmail client. There are tons of edge cases.

Roundcube has been around significantly longer than Mailpile. For a lot of people, stability is more attractive than great hair.

I'm not pooping on your preference for Mailpile though, which has a much sexier interface than RC's default skin, and I hope the Mailpile guys do well and are around for 10 years. But, saying, "ew, LAMP" is pretty shallow.

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#14

Post by thaumaturgy »

geuis wrote: post #11

Very, very happy to see this. About 8 years ago, I was singularly managing my company's email. When I was hired, they had been using an awful php based mail system. My first major upgrade was to start using Roundcube. This was a very, very early version and one of the first open source mail projects to offer 'ajax' functionality. When Gmail for business became available, we migrated to that, but for a while Roundcube…

> ...and I hope that the project has gotten much better over the years.

It has! They have made some significant improvements. There recently was a huge effort to separate the RC core code -- all of the stuff that talks to imap -- from the rest of the interface, so now people can easily build RC clones.

Also, relatively recently, they reworked their skinning system and got a new design professionally made ("Larry", now the default). You can get Roundcube skins for people who like Outlook, or want better mobile support, etc.

And if you've got managesieve installed, you can make your email do tricks that Gmail can't.

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#15

Post by kerneis »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #14
geuis wrote: post #11

Very, very happy to see this. About 8 years ago, I was singularly managing my company's email. When I was hired, they had been using an awful php based mail system. My first major upgrade was to start using Roundcube. This was a very, very early version and one of the first open source mail projects to offer 'ajax' functionality. When Gmail for business became available, we migrated to that, but for a while Roundcube…

> ...and I hope that the project has gotten much better over the years. It has! They have made some significant improvements. There recently was a huge effort to separate the RC core code -- all of the stuff that talks to imap -- from the rest of the interface, so now people can easily build RC clones. Also, relatively recently, they reworked their skinning system and got a new design professionally made ("Larry", no…

> And if you've got managesieve installed, you can make your email do tricks that Gmail can't.

Would you care to expand on that part? I know what managesieve does, but I thought gmail also had filtering capabilities.

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#16

Post by thaumaturgy »

kerneis wrote: post #15
thaumaturgy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...and I hope that the project has gotten much better over the years. It has! They have made some significant improvements. There recently was a huge effort to separate the RC core code -- all of the stuff that talks to imap -- from the rest of the interface, so now people can easily build RC clones. Also, relatively recently, they reworked their skinning system and got a new design professionally made ("Larry", no…

> And if you've got managesieve installed, you can make your email do tricks that Gmail can't. Would you care to expand on that part? I know what managesieve does, but I thought gmail also had filtering capabilities.

AFAIK (correct me if I'm missing something!), Gmail allows you to filter messages on From, To, Subject, "Has the words", "Doesn't have", "Has attachment", and Size. Roundcube, via managesieve, can filter on anything in an email message -- any header, any other attribute of an email message you can think of should be doable.

Gmail also gives you a useful but limited set of actions for matching messages: archival, applying labels, starring, marking as read, forwarding, deleting. managesieve gives you a lot more options, and possibly one of the nicer ones is the ability to auto-reply to specific messages with a specific other message. My managesieve prefs currently has, "Move message to", "Copy message to", "Redirect message to", "Send message copy to", "Discard with message", "Reply with messsage", "Delete", "Set flags", "Add flags", "Remove flags", "Send notification", etc.

Filters was for me the killer feature that moved me from Gmail to Roundcube years ago.

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#17

Post by uaygsfdbzf »

nileshtrivedi wrote: post #12
pmx wrote: post #5

If I could find a way to filter spam as well as gmail does I would love to back to self-hosting my email. I just can't imagine a time when we'll get anything close to what gmail can do without their huge resources.

Here's a somewhat aggressive solution: Allow incoming emails only from previously approved senders. Direct strangers to reach to you via Twitter.

But what about those who do not have (or want) a Twitter account?

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#18

Post by uaygsfdbzf »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #8
pmx wrote: post #5

If I could find a way to filter spam as well as gmail does I would love to back to self-hosting my email. I just can't imagine a time when we'll get anything close to what gmail can do without their huge resources.

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…

This is great, I use my own mail server but I was scared off when it came to trying to get SpamAssassin working with my Postfix/Dovecot setup, I'll have to give it another try soon!

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#19

Post by Yetanfou »

pmx wrote: post #5

If I could find a way to filter spam as well as gmail does I would love to back to self-hosting my email. I just can't imagine a time when we'll get anything close to what gmail can do without their huge resources.

I have always self-hosted my mail. When spam started to become an issue I began looking around for a solution. I happened upon the newly minted spamassassin project, made it work to my liking, sent in a few patches and never looked back. Now, many years later, I still run SA in combination with Exim and Dovecot, filing unrecognised spam into a 'SPAM-it' folder from where it is picked up every night to train the bayes filter. Everything which is 'definitely' spam is refused at the gate, everything which is most certainly spam is filed in a spam folder which is out of sight and mostly out of mind, everything which is probably spam is automatically dumped in the aforementioned 'SPAM-it' folder (with autolearning disabled to avoid erroneous positive feedback). There is a 'HAM-it' folder to tell the filter about mail I care about as well as a 'FORGET-it' folder to untrain the filter on given messages. I use sieve to file messages in their designated folders.

No other filtering is applied, no greylisting, no country blocks (I need to be able to communicate with people all over the world), no fail2ban, no nothin'. By keeping the filtering concentrated in one spot I avoid the trap of turning the mail system into a Rube Goldberg machine loaded with unintended consequences.

On average, one or two spammy messages make it through the portcullis per day. I simply dump them in the 'SPAM-it' folder and forget about them. False positives are exceedingly rare, fortunately. On the whole I consider my mail setup to be functional and above all manageable.

Everything needed to implement this is available in Debian. There is a handy Sieve editor available as a plugin to the Roundcube web mail client for those who like to click pretty boxes instead of writing filter scripts.

Post reply on HN