Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

http://roundcube.net/news/2014/04/07/roundcube-webmail-1.0.0-released/

by weeha • 12 years ago

149 51 12 years ago

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

netnichols• 12 years ago

Congrats to them. I remember the days of running IlohaMail on a VPS for my family's mail and was very impressed when Roundcube came out.

I eventually decided that hosting my own email wasn't for me, but would certainly encourage any company or organization with a bit of sysadmin resources to take a close look.

mcv• 12 years ago

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.

thaumaturgy6• 12 years ago

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.

bluedino• 12 years ago

If a skin breaks or reduces functionality in an app...

pmx• 12 years ago

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.

thaumaturgy6• 12 years ago

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.

nileshtrivedi• 12 years ago

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

Direct strangers to reach to you via Twitter.

Yetanfou• 12 years ago

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.

drchaos• 12 years ago

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/

gog• 12 years ago

Please do not use NiXSpam or encourage others to use it.

If I remember correctly they are pretty trigger happy with honeypot email addresses that are pretty easy to find on the internet.

All your competition needs to do is register to your service using the honeypot email addresses and your legitimate email server/domain will be blacklisted on hosts that check NIXSpam.

baghali• 12 years ago

Your [2] link is awesome :)

carletes• 12 years ago

I'm very happy with dspam (http://dspam.nuclearelephant.com/), and the Dovecot integration plugin (http://johannes.sipsolutions.net/Projects/dovecot-antispam)

drzaiusapelord• 12 years ago

I half-assed this once and just made postfix check spamhaus and spamcop. Very little spam gets through.

I'm thinking about turning on greylisting as well, but right now its not needed.

rodgerd• 12 years ago

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.

jwdunne• 12 years ago

As part of managed hosting for non-technical clients, we often host their email. Out of the options, Roundcube is by far the best.

geuis• 12 years ago

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.

thaumaturgy6• 12 years ago

...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.

kerneis• 12 years ago

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.

yogo• 12 years ago

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.

philippbosch• 12 years ago

Awesome. Looks like they improved a lot during the last 8 years, but also it looks like they didn't update their about page during that time:

"The skins use the latest web standards such as XHTML and CSS 2."

arrc• 12 years ago

they've also introduced an official plugin repo at http://plugins.roundcube.net/explore/ which depends on composer

_asciiker_• 12 years ago

Thank you Roundcube! Have been using it since the early days!

jadc• 12 years ago

Can someone recommend hosting providers which offer RoundCube?

toxican3• 12 years ago

I believe any host that runs cPanel should have it. Or at least that's my experience.

nonuby• 12 years ago

But no one "sane" would recommend a cPanel host, don't shovel shit at friends..

work_account_2• 12 years ago

Gandi.net does.

fophillips• 12 years ago

Bytemark do.

aspidistra• 12 years ago

Gandi does, and you do not need to buy webspace from them. Just registering a domain there will get you 5 free mailboxes and 1000 forwarding addresses.

https://www.gandi.net/domain

darklajid• 12 years ago

I'm not on a crusade or something, but they were not for me.

Do better than I did, give them little money and take your time before you expect them to be the right company.

1: Just replied in a different thread, incident is fresh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7557887

Moto7451• 12 years ago

Namecheap

______1• 12 years ago

HostGator

toxican3• 12 years ago

I eagerly await update spreading to cPanel and then to my webhost!

bnycum• 12 years ago

I love Roundcube, use it everyday. The only thing I wish it had was some type of mobile interface. Didn't see anything in the plugins. There are really no good web mail solutions with a mobile interface. I'd prefer to leave this account off my phone if at all possible.

ciello• 12 years ago

Usually, people use dedicated apps to access mails from mobile, connecting directly to the IMAP server. Which is much more mobile-convenient.

arca_vorago• 12 years ago

Does it support GPG yet? I use squirrelmail simply for the vast array of plugins, but the GPG squirrelmail hasn't been updated since 07.

zargon• 12 years ago

There's a plugin, but I haven't used it yet. https://github.com/qnrq/rc_openpgpjs

duaneb3• 12 years ago

The best part of Gmail was never the interface, it was search, tagging, and spam filtering.

josefresco3• 12 years ago

The biggest feature at launch was the idea of "unlimited" storage (I think at the time it was 1GB) This was a huge departure from the existing Yahoo!/Hotmail models which had much more restrictive limits on storage.

That and the idea of one inbox and no folders. The concept of letting your mail flow into one box and not "filing" it was also a big change from the existing mindset.

nader• 12 years ago

Hm, if you would be running a saas business and after 8 years you only have come so far, you'd be dead. roundcube was great back in the days but there are quite a few alternatives now.

Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

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