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Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

roundcube.net

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Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#21

Post by alecsmart1 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #13
[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…

Can you enlighten me with some edge cases one might face while building an email app?

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#22

Post by drchaos »

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 do the following:

* don't accept mail for non-existing recipient adresses

* don't accept mail where the sender domain is one of my domains, except when whitelisted manually

* don't accept mail from hosts on the NiXSpam list[1] (unlike some others, NixSpam has pretty reasonable policies with automatic delisting after 12 hours)

These three rules together work pretty well, I get only a handful false negatives every day, and virtually no false positives, even though I publish my real mail address on many places in the web, and even used it in usenet, back in the days.

Next step would be using SpamAssassin, but [2].

[1] http://www.heise.de/ix/NiX-Spam-DNSBL-and-blacklist-for-down...

[2] http://xkcd.com/1205/

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#24

Post by oblio »

alecsmart1 wrote: post #21
thaumaturgy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you enlighten me with some edge cases one might face while building an email app?

Anything covering email on a production scale is going to be full of edge cases.

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#25

Post by stevekemp »

alecsmart1 wrote: post #21
thaumaturgy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you enlighten me with some edge cases one might face while building an email app?

One obvious one that many people fail at initially is sanitizing any HTML-formatted mail.

You don't want viewing the mail to result in an XSS attack against the mail-viewing application, stealing your login cookie for example.

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#26

Post by yogo »

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…

A basic filtering mechanism should be provided in addition to managesieve. The most common use would be to filter spam. It seems like roundcube is too sieve-oriented.

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#27

Post by thaumaturgy »

alecsmart1 wrote: post #21
thaumaturgy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you enlighten me with some edge cases one might face while building an email app?

Probably the Roundcube trac would be a good place to start. They've closed 5400+ bugs, feature requests, etc.:

http://trac.roundcube.net/query?status=closed&col=id&col=sum...

Here are some randomly-selected examples:

http://trac.roundcube.net/ticket/1485777

http://trac.roundcube.net/ticket/1486166

http://trac.roundcube.net/ticket/1489535

http://trac.roundcube.net/ticket/1489409

I don't have any personal anecdotes, sorry. The couple of very minor things I've worked on haven't been email-specific.

edit: Actually, there was one that bit me a couple of years ago. SpamAssassin by default will convert an original message into an attachment and append the attachment to the spam report if it determines the message is junk. This is reasonable, but you want a convenient way to undo this for your users.

SpamAssassin is supposed to mark these attachments with a specific MIME type:

    Content-Type: message/rfc822; x-spam-type=original
But on some configurations, for reasons I no longer recall, it doesn't. The attachment gets marked as text/plain instead.

So if you're writing code to unpack a SpamAssassin report, you can't rely on the MIME type being there. You have to fall back to doing some guesswork instead -- and if the original message also contained attachments, it can get kinda hairy.

Re: Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

#29

Post by thaumaturgy »

yogo wrote: post #26
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…

A basic filtering mechanism should be provided in addition to managesieve. The most common use would be to filter spam. It seems like roundcube is too sieve-oriented.

You're right. Most users aren't interested in advanced filtering. I've gotten around this by installing a default Junk filter for everyone, which seems to be a good enough solution.

But a simpler, easier-to-use filter system would be nice.

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