Jack Scott's Blog » IMAP http://www.jackscott.id.au Then, one day, I found myself all grown up with my own point of view... Wed, 04 Aug 2010 23:36:24 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Webmail in under 5 minutes?!?! http://www.jackscott.id.au/2009/05/webmail-in-under-5-minutes/ http://www.jackscott.id.au/2009/05/webmail-in-under-5-minutes/#comments Tue, 26 May 2009 01:47:09 +0000 Jack Scott http://www.jackscott.org/?p=470 Today, I am in awe. I decided I wanted webmail on my mail server, so that I could check my email on computers I don’t have a proper email client set up on. For instance, on a lab computer at my university. So I started looking around.

I’ve tried setting up webmail in the past, usually unsuccessful. IMP, Horde, squirrelmail, most people would be familiar with the horrors of webmail clients. Some of them even want access to the raw storage files in /var/spool/mail/etc. Which I don’t think is the proper way to go about things. But luckily today I stumbled upon RoundCubeWebmail, which I had downloaded, installed and configured in under 5 minutes.

Where’s the downside to this painless webmail? I’m yet to find one!

  • It looks nice (unlike some of the others, whose web design is stuck in 1995). A few small icons and a bit of CSS goes a long way.
  • It works via IMAP, so doesn’t require access to the raw mail files *yuck*.
  • It seems fairly configurable, but the defaults are sensible.
  • You can configure it to allow access to multiple IMAP servers, so a single installation on a web server can deal with multiple IMAP servers, no problems at all.

In all, I really like this software!

]]> http://www.jackscott.id.au/2009/05/webmail-in-under-5-minutes/feed/ 1 IMAP, Webmail, and the pain of Sysadmin http://www.jackscott.id.au/2009/03/imap-webmail-and-the-pain-of-sysadmin/ http://www.jackscott.id.au/2009/03/imap-webmail-and-the-pain-of-sysadmin/#comments Fri, 06 Mar 2009 12:20:47 +0000 Jack Scott http://www.jackscott.org/?p=111 Last night I succeeded in setting up on my server the IMAP protocol (with the help of my sysadmin friend Hamzah). It turned out not to be too difficult, once I fixed my silly configuration mistake (setting the mail directory to /var/mail instead of /var/spool/mail). I’ve still got a bit of configuration to do, mainly editing a few security settings and such. It seems Debian comes almost configured correctly out of the box. This seems to happen with quite a few packages.

Before setting up IMAP (which is, for those not in the know, an email protocol), I was accessing the mail on my server using POP3. POP3 works well, but only if you are always using the same computer all the time. Since the email messages are stored on the local machine using POP3, it is hard to track them across computers. IMAP stores the emails on the server, and each local machine uses the IMAP server as a reference.

Now that I am using IMAP, I can access my mail from virtually anywhere, without having to drag around my laptop. In the near future, I’m hoping to set up webmail on the server as well. I might even write my own, depending on how adventurous I feel. I mean, how hard can it be?

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