Webmail survey says...

[Todd Martin]

Thanks for all the great (and surprisingly plentiful) responses.
Julian and others asked for a summary report back to the list -- I
guess the question wasn't as OT as I thought...

Here's the packages people mentioned using in no particular order:
SquirrelMail http://www.squirrelmail.org
IMP http://imp.horde.org
IMHO (IMap HOst) http://www.lysator.liu.se/~stewa/IMHO/dev.html
WebMail http://www.netwinsite.com (not open source)
TWIG http://twig.screwdriver.net
Openwebmail http://www.openwebmail.org/
Joydesk <http://www.virtualtek.com>www.virtualtek.com
Neomail http://neomail.sourceforge.net/
sqwebmail http://www.inter7.com/sqwebmail/
nullwebmail http://nullwebmail.sourceforge.net/

For you Qmailers...there is a list of webmail packages on
http://qmail.org/top.html. AFAIK Qmail will work with most (any?)
IMAP/POP webmail too.

SquirrelMail and IMP got the highest raves by far. IMP is generally
acknowledged to have many requirements (I'll say -- just take a look
at the FreeBSD ports dependency list for this package!).

Matt Laney suggests SquirrelMail is good for small number of users
(~500) and SqWebMail can handle "large undertakings". He also points
out SqWebMail only supports maildirs (qmail, postfix,
maildrop/courier).

S Mohan has tried several and has his own (very helpful) summary. I
hope he will forgive me for quoting him in full here:

I've looked at - meaning installed and played around the following.
1. Popper.
2. Postaci.
3. SquirrelMail.
4. WWW Mail.
5. Jwebmail.
6. Horde/IMP.
7. atdot.
8. Openwebmail.
9. Neomail.

I started with atdot, moved on to wwwmail initially. By then I had got
used to web based email and then started doing a detailed search. My
feedback is as follows:

Popper has a Outlook97 like interface and runs on PHP/MySQL. Postaci
also requires MySQL. WWWMail/atdot/Openwebmail runs on perl and standard
flat files. SquirrelMail runs on PHP/MySQL.

My criteria were the following:
1. Ease of standard install.
2. Folder support, personalisation support, multiple bag
aggregation/popping, mail routing rules, inline attachment handling.

I tried to avoid MySQL as I wanted my users to use webmail as well as
pop their mailbags. I also found perl was faster than PHP. My pick of
the lot was SquirrelMail and Openwebmail ( An tremendous improvement
over Neomail). I chose Openwebmail as it did not require MySQL, was fast
and in specific terms handled inline attachments the best. It also has
passowrd change from within and thus obviated the need for me to set up
a separate web page for password change.

Good features:
1. Vacation/ Autoreply.
2. Icons/ styles.
3. Customised signatures etc.
4. Login history.
5. Filtering based on rules, faked smtp, javascript disabling.
6. Ability to turn on and off features globally.
7. Active mailing list, Good Support from T Chung - website maintainer.
8. SMTP, Sender blocking per user etc.

Openwebmail is tied down to sendmail and uses sendmail features to
implement a few things while SquirrelMail will work with both.

There were a lot more but I did a feature scan, screenshot survey before
I looked at the packages above.

To echo S Mohan: "HTH" -- I know it did for me.

~Todd