Re: [PLUG] open source webmail reviews?

[Randall A Sindlinger <rsindlin+plug@seas.upenn.edu>]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 10:59:20AM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote:
> 
> I haven't chimed in but this was a near-and-dear topic to me a few
> months ago.  
>
> I quickly found that Squirrelmail was not adequate as a daily driver.

OK, yeah - that was the impression I had gotten from looking at it, too.

> 
> I switched to Roundcube.  That was clearly superior to Squirrelmail,
> but it was still painful to use without a mouse.  

In my experience, just about anything on the web is pretty painful to use
without a mouse.  My question was "is anything as good as Gmail *was*
5-ish years ago.  IIRC, Gmail was mouse-centric back then, too, no?

>
> A few things about gmail that have changed my life:
> 
> 2.  The "archive" and inbox-is-a-tag concept.  I used procmail before,
> but I still had to delete emails or move them to another folder to
> declutter my view.  Hiding read messages wasn't good enough, because
> often I like to look at read messages.

So "Inbox" and "archive" are just virtual folders, then?  Or something 
a little more special?  Does RoundCube support virtual folders (really
hard for me to tell from looking at their web site, but I _think_ it
looks like it does).  If so, is RoundCube treating Inbox and Archive
differently?

> 4.  Key bindings.  I saved probably the best for last.  I can read
> email, and with one click of the keyboard handle 90% of my mail.  With
> Roundcube every email required the mouse.  With Gmail most emails
> don't need it at all.

That's funny.  Key binding are one of the really big reasons I use mutt.
I really have no desire to read email in HTML.  And, being a sysadmin,
I rarely get important mail that's illegible in mutt.  Oh, except for 
those Dell announcements that are urgent to read about their Premier
site going down for maintenance - those come out as complete garbly-gook.
But the "d" key handles those nicely.

> 
> The obvious downside to Gmail is that you can't use it without giving
> Google a copy of all your mail.  You also need to make sure you use
> fetchmail or something to backup your sent mail, and if you start
> using the gmail address directly your received mail as well.

Exactly.  We're pretty set on not outsourcing our email, but I'm well
aware that IMP is not fantastic (though its dynamic, DIMP, implementation
isn't awful, either).  I was about to say that IMP development seemed
stale, but I just checked, and found that IMP 5.0 is in Beta and due out in
April (albeit that that's a 4-year gap since 4.3).  As far as I can tell,
it's still not going to support virtual folders.  I feel like that's the
one big feature lacking that (I think) RoundCube could offer.

-Randall
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