Re: [PLUG] Groupware Alternatives

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 12:16 PM, Julien Vehent <julien@linuxwall.info> wrote:
> Roundcube is not perfect, but I honestly find it a lot better than anything
> else I've tried, including thunderbird, outlook or evolution, for email
> management. And it has decent shortcuts too (see attached).

The one shortcut it lacks is to remove a message from the inbox ("e"
in Gmail).  It is the one button I hit about 500 times a day going
through email, and it requires either a click-and-drag or two clicks
in different places to do the same thing in Roundcube.  Sure, it is
just one thing, but it is a big pain.

>
> Gmail is clearly the most efficient webmail on the market. But it's no
> different than locking yourself up in an exchange server.

True enough, although all my email goes to my own mail server first
and gets forwarded to Gmail so that if they ever decide to just wipe
all my mail or something I shouldn't lose anything except my mail
tags.  I basically just treat them like an MUA and only loosely as a
mail server.

I really would prefer something that I completely control (nobody else
going through my mail, no ads, ability to use encryption, etc.), but
so far I haven't found anything better, and since Android integration
is very useful I haven't really found anything else that is comparable
either.  GMail has its faults too (poor message threading for
starters, though the fact that the ubiquitous Outlook doesn't respect
references doesn't help).  When I occassionally run into some headache
related to gmail I just wish that there was more competition.

If somebody came up with a web-based MUA that was comparable to GMail
and decent offline clients for Android I'd probably switch pretty
quickly.

> And if I had to
> choose, Exchange has a lot of very nice features for tasks/calendar
> integration and groupware management. You just can't beat the
> outlook/exchange couple that easily.

Well, when MS releases the free version of Outlook/exchange that does
all that stuff web-based I might consider them as a Gmail alternative,
but right now they aren't even in the free email competition.
Outlook/Exchange only makes sense if you predominantly access your
mail from Windows desktops - and if you have more than one of those I
can't vouch for how well it keeps them in sync without a bazillion
conflict resolution emails.

Rich
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug