Mark Boulton

47 Responses to “Goodbye SquirrelMail, Hello RoundCube”

1. 
   Paul Lloyd said on: October 26th, 2005 at 9:55 pm

   Wow, just wow!  Aqua looks + XHTML/CSS design. I will be keep­ing a close eye on this one!  Cheers for the tip Mark.

2. 
   Jeff Smith said on: October 26th, 2005 at 10:45 pm

   I’ve also been using this for a couple of weeks now, and it is one of the best web­mail cli­ents I’ve used.  I’m also anxiously await­ing sig­na­tures, as well as the mes­sage filters.

   Now..to get all of my old email trans­ferred over to IMAP from my local machine…

3. 
   Joshua Brewer said on: October 26th, 2005 at 11:00 pm

   I just installed it as well and am quite impressed for an “alpha” release.  One thing I am hop­ing for is some spam fil­ter­ing… and mes­sage fil­ters — THAT would be the icing on the cake. 

   And the icons by Stephen Hor­lander and Kevin Gerich are great!

4. 
   Kenzie Campbell said on: October 26th, 2005 at 11:01 pm

   Found round­cube a couple of weeks ago and was thour­oughly impressed. I’ve already installed it every­where I could. Be sure and post your vote to have it replace Squir­rel in the Dream­host “Suggestions”

5. 
   Boris said on: October 26th, 2005 at 11:36 pm

   If I hear the phrase “AJAX good­ness” one more time I’m gonna… ;) 

   Thnx for this pointer tough. :)

6. 
   brad said on: October 27th, 2005 at 12:05 am

   Okay, Round­Cube seems worth a look, but Dream­host sounds truly amaz­ing!!! I’m pay­ing $20/month for a measly 100 MB of stor­age with my web­host; I had no idea I could get nearly 5 gigs for $8/month. I’m gonna switch!!!

7. 
   Galen said on: October 27th, 2005 at 3:37 am

   Finally. I have been look­ing on-and-off for an altern­at­ive to Squir­rel­Mail for quite some time now (ever since I first set eyes upon it actu­ally I sup­pose) as, I feel, its lack of visual appeal makes really makes it unpleas­ant to use — even if it is packed with fea­tures. I would rather have a good, stable, clean web­mail sys­tem that is simple and with just the really neces­sary fea­tures. Thanks for point­ing this out. Keep up the good work. Galen

8. 
   Ryan Brill said on: October 27th, 2005 at 3:39 am

   Mmm… Def­in­itely going to check this one out! Much more pleas­ing on the eyes than any other web-based email apps I’ve used.

9. 
   Galen said on: October 27th, 2005 at 4:28 am

   Well. I’ve suc­cess­fully installed it and given it a quick test-run and am stoked with my first impres­sions. Need­less to say there are plenty of things I’d like to see it do but I will def­in­itely use it now instead of Squir­rel­Mail when I am away from my com­puter on the road.…

10. 
    crano said on: October 27th, 2005 at 6:53 am

    I don’t really like Squirel Mail either, and I want to switch.  But I am stu­pid! Is there any inform­a­tion on how to install it anywhere? 

    I am using Dream­host aswell and am very impressed.

11. 
    Gerard McGarry said on: October 27th, 2005 at 8:01 am

    Well spot­ted Mark! I’d love to have a play with Round­Cube — have you any notes on how you installed it? 

    Squir­rel­Mail does me fine when I’m out of the house, but I still use the trusty Out­look when I’m back at base.

12. 
    Mark Boulton said on: October 27th, 2005 at 10:12 am

    Brad — yeah, Dream­host are gen­er­ally excel­lent. Recently (a few weeks ago) I was in mid change over to MT (part of a 9rules deal thing). Any­way, it turns out MT offer nowhere near the amount of func­tion­al­ity as Dream­host. Oh, if you sign up with them dont for­get who referred you ;-) 

    Ger­ard — Install­a­tion was incred­ibly easy. I cre­ated a sub­do­main, then chucked all the files in there. Cre­ated a MySQL data­base and chucked all the SQL stuff into that. That was it! Got into work this morn­ing to dis­cover ses­sion prob­lems (the app logged me out every time it refreshed), so I changed the ‘remem­ber cli­ent IP’ thing to FALSE and it now works per­fectly. I’ll be keep­ing a close eye out for new releases…

13. 
    jason said on: October 27th, 2005 at 5:50 pm

    Ah!  I’m work­ing on for­sak­ing Squir­rel­Mail for Round­cube even as we speak! 

    You’re a bet­ter man than I for point­ing out Squirrelmail’s strong points.  If Squir­rel­mail were a guy, I’d chal­lenge him to a fight.

14. 
    Geof Harries said on: October 27th, 2005 at 7:34 pm

    In the INSTALL readme it says Round­Cube needs a user/db as Round­Cube. I’m also with Dream­host and this user/db is taken. Were you able to instead assign a dif­fer­ent name for both and it worked fine?

15. 
    Crano said on: October 27th, 2005 at 7:42 pm

    Hey Geoff: I am with Dream­host with the L1 plan.  I used a dif­fer­ent db, and then recon­figured the db.inc.php file to suit my pref­er­ences… but I have yet to get it to work. 

    I get an error say­ing, “DB Error: insuf­fi­cient permissions.” 

    I don’t know what to do from here.
    

    If you get it work­ing feel free to con­tact me from http://esenkay.com/index.php?contact

16. 
    Mark Boulton said on: October 27th, 2005 at 8:09 pm

    Geoff — As Crano, I used a dif­fer­ent db and then recon­figured the db.inc.php accordingly. 

    Crano — I’m not sure what your prob­lem could be there. Strange DB per­mis­sions. I didn’t get any of those kind of errors, just ses­sion errors with the dodgy prox­ies in work. IF you man­age to get it sor­ted, let me know though as you never know, this error could crop up with me.

17. 
    1981 said on: October 27th, 2005 at 8:11 pm

    I’m more intru­iged to find out what you (Mark) does at the beeb?

18. 
    Mark Boulton said on: October 27th, 2005 at 8:39 pm

    I’m a senior designer work­ing in the New Media dept. in BBC Wales. For my sins…

19. 
    Geof Harries said on: October 27th, 2005 at 9:02 pm

    I get this error when atttempt­ing to load the index.php file in the documentroot: 

    Warn­ing: main(include/rcube_shared.inc): failed to open stream: No such file or dir­ect­ory in /home/.harold/geofharries/roundcube.greenroomcreative.ca/index.php on line 66 

    Fatal error: main(): Failed open­ing required ‘include/rcube_shared.inc’ (include_path=’./:/dh/cgi-system/program:/dh/cgi-system/program/lib:.:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/.harold/geofharries/roundcube.greenroomcreative.ca/index.php on line 66

    Any ideas? I’m no PHP wiz :) 

    geof

20. 
    Crano said on: October 27th, 2005 at 9:11 pm

    I found you had to change the index.php: 

    FROM:
    
    require_once(’include/rcube_shared.inc’); 

    TO:
    
    require_once(’program/include/rcube_shared.inc’); 

    Do that for all of the require_once. 

    You know it is funny after work­ing on some­thing for a while, it doesn;t work, walk away from it and find that there was a simple spelling mistake.

21. 
    Galen said on: October 27th, 2005 at 9:12 pm

    Geof, make sure your files and folders (when uploaded) are read­able by the server (i.e. check their per­mis­sions). Also make sure you cre­ate a MySQL user with the neces­sary per­mis­sions for Round­Cube and assign that user (with GRANT or through your MySQL inter­face) to the Round­Cube data­base for all tables.

22. 
    Crano said on: October 27th, 2005 at 10:45 pm

    GREAT!! Now I get the login screen plus this error: “ Could not con­nect to rcube­mail at port 143: Die Adress­fam­ilie wird von der Pro­tokoll­fam­ilie nicht unterst?tzt.” 

    Any suggestions?

23. 
    Galen said on: October 27th, 2005 at 11:24 pm

    Crano, make sure line 21 of db.inc.php (in the con­fig folder) is set to
    

    $rcmail_config[’db_dsnw’] = ‘mysql://user:pass@localhost/dbname‘;

    Where user, pass, and dbname are replaced by those spe­cified when you added the MySQL data­base before run­ning RoundCube. 

    Per­haps you have spe­cified rcube­mail instead of loc­al­host?not sure. Hope this helps, though.

24. 
    Crano said on: October 27th, 2005 at 11:45 pm

    Galen: Thank you for the sug­ges­tions. I do have the user name and pass in there, and the dbase is run­ning off Dream­host, so it isn’t local. 

    I just noticed that my imap server is hav­ing some issues.  Maybe that is where the prob­lem lies.

25. 
    Galen said on: October 27th, 2005 at 11:52 pm

    Cool, no wor­ries; hope you sort it out. 

    P.S. Seems to be some­thing funny going on with my tags?they look fine in the Live Pre­view but break when I sub­mit?strange.

26. 
    Mark Boulton said on: October 28th, 2005 at 9:41 am

    Galen — The prob­lem seems to be the live pre­view is a bit more for­giv­ing than EE if you add extra spaces in your tags. In your case you had put an extra space in your clos­ing strong tag. If fixed it now.

27. 
    Paul Stamatiou said on: October 29th, 2005 at 10:49 am

    I just wrote a good install­a­tion and tweak­ing guide for Round­Cube here.  Please check it out if you are hav­ing any install­a­tion woes.

28. 
    Crano said on: October 29th, 2005 at 2:29 pm

    That’s awe­some Paul!  I am still hav­ing issues, I will try it your way when I get home later today. :)

29. 
    Josh Brandt said on: October 29th, 2005 at 8:43 pm

    Geof (and oth­ers with prob­lems with include paths), 

    If you are run­ning PHP as CGI, roundcube’s attempt to auto-detect its install loc­a­tion fails because it finds the path to the CGI instead of the path to index.php. 

    In your index.php, change line 48 from:
    
    <strong>$CURRENT_PATH=dirname($_SERVER[’script_FILENAME’]);</strong>
    
    to
    
    $CURRENT_PATH=dirname(__FILE__);

    (that should be double-underscores around FILE in the new line. Live pre­view at least is inter­pret­ing them as an <em>) 

    And now a ques­tion for Mr. Boulton (or any other Dream­hosters): I have round­cube installed suc­cess­fully but I can’t login. Could you share your set­tings for SMTP author­iz­a­tion, etc? Can you log in using your full email address, or do you need your mail­box login? (the dh-assigned m12345678 abomination)

30. 
    Gustavus said on: October 30th, 2005 at 6:19 am

    Yes, you’ve got to log in with the abom­in­a­tion. I can log into the primary account with my dh user­name — all other accounts use the mail­box login.

    It’s also a good idea to check your default iden­tity once you log in. My email address was set to [my_dh_username]@mail.[my_domain]

31. 
    Josh Brandt said on: October 30th, 2005 at 6:57 pm

    Gust­avus, I retried per your recom­mend­a­tion. No luck. I am get­ting this error:
    

    IMAP Error in (): Could not con­nect to jooke.net at port 143: Con­nec­tion refused
    

    I can con­nect to my mail server from thun­der­bird just fine on port 143. Any other dream­hosters see­ing this error msg?

32. 
    Marjolein Katsma said on: October 31st, 2005 at 1:46 pm

    I use Squir­rel­mail for one pur­pose only: to send emails to my travel blog to update it while I’m trav­el­ling. Ugly? I really don’t care about how it looks — as long as it works, fast and securely. And it does that.

    One of its strong points is the wealth of plu­gins, many that increase secur­ity, such as a vir­tual key­board to enter your pass­word and timeout after a con­fig­ur­able period. All of which are import­ant when work­ing at a com­puter with unknown soft­ware (key­log­gers? other spy­ware?) in an inter­net cafe in some far-away country. 

    When I hear “Ajax” — I think: won’t work unless with the very latest browsers. Which I can tell you are often not found in an Inter­net cafe in Asia, for instance. Squir­rel­mail doesn’t have that prob­lem — it works hap­pily with IE4 on Win98. Its “lack” of AJAX is actu­ally a strong point in these cir­cum­stances. The spellchecker plu­gin, while not a secur­ity fea­ture, is quite help­ful as well — typ­ing on strange, rick­ety key­boards with unfa­mil­iar lay­outs gen­er­ates a host of typos. 

    So — while Round­Cube may be good for a lot of pur­poses (and AJAX may actu­ally help), for mine Squir­rel­Mail is best.

33. 
    Mark Boulton said on: October 31st, 2005 at 8:24 pm

    Mar­jolein Katsma — I take your point, but it’s nice to have the option. I still have Squir­rel­mail for when I’m in the middle of the jungle and just a 386 with IE 2 to post on, but I also have Round­Cube for check­ing my email at work (which, if you read the post, is why I installed it in the first place) 

    ;-)

34. 
    Mark Boulton said on: October 31st, 2005 at 8:25 pm

    Paul Stam­a­tiou — Nice art­icle Paul

35. 
    Twaites said on: November 2nd, 2005 at 5:05 am

    The words ”…but BY GOD it’s been beaten with the ugly stick.” lol… so true so true… this email sys­tem looks sleek and sexy.

36. 
    Andrew said on: November 4th, 2005 at 3:41 am

    I am hit­ting the same wall as Josh, i.e. 

    IMAP Error in (): Could not con­nect to <mymailserver.com> at port 143: Con­nec­tion refused

    (where mymailserver.com = my IMAP server) 

    Can any­one shed any light on this?  I have tried enter­ing both the FQDN and IP of my mail server, and have also tried using drop­boxes for dif­fer­ent serv­ers, all with the same res­ult — the above error.
    
    The IMAP server is act­ive and con­tact­able, I can tel­net straight in from the machine run­ning roundcube.

37. 
    matt shobe said on: November 6th, 2005 at 3:11 am

    I can’t wait to get Round­cube up and run­ning, but at this point I must be PHP-challenged or have some­thing gorky going on with my install­a­tion. I’ve tried all the rem­ed­ies lis­ted above for index.php and still see: 

    Fatal error: Failed open­ing required ‘include/rcube_shared.inc’ (include_path=’./PATH_SEPARATOR/var/www/roundcube/programPATH_SEPARATOR/var/www/roundcube/program/libPATH_SEPARATOR.:/usr/share/pear’) in /var/www/roundcube/index.php on line 67 

    “PATH_SEPARATOR” sure seems sus­pi­cious. However,http://www.hookturns.com/setting-up-roundcube-on-dreamhost/ men­tions a fix for a sim­ilar prob­lem on Step 6 and that var name is unchanged. (That fix didn’t work either, dangit.) 

    I’d be grate­ful to hear from any­one who’s got my issue pegged.

38. 
    roj said on: November 8th, 2005 at 1:48 am

    Ok, so people who still are hav­ing prob­lems with the imap 143 error. If you’re with dream­host try this: 

    user­name:  the “m.…. “ one without the “@yourhost.com”
    
    pass­word:  your pass (obviously)

    server:  mail.yourhost.com 

    this worked for me anyway.

39. 
    josh said on: November 8th, 2005 at 2:01 am

    Yeah, roj, I can con­firm that those set­tings worked for me yes­ter­day WRT dreamhost/port 143. I had wiped and rein­stalled my round­cube install, so any other con­fig­ur­a­tion tweaks that I might have made were also undone. So a clean­ish install and roj’s set­tings should work.

40. 
    roj said on: November 8th, 2005 at 9:26 am

    Unfor­tu­nately my work has turned off the XML­Ht­tpRe­quest func­tion (which I knew before installing this — no nice google­ness) but I didn’t real­ise it would render round­cube com­pletely unusable…possibly they’ve just dis­abled other javas­cript, though some stuff works. 

    I can get in and see the email list but no links work. 

    oh well. Just so you know before installing it.

41. 
    luxuryluke said on: November 9th, 2005 at 3:42 am

    Roj: Doesn’t this mean that Round­cube isn’t actu­ally using AJAX? 

    AJAX means ‘asyn­chron­ous’ which, in the best pos­sible envir­on­ment would be degrad­able. If it’s not degrad­able javas­cript­func­tion­al­ity (xml­ht­tpre­quest or not) then is it really AJAX?

    Answers?

42. 
    Cetixx said on: November 10th, 2005 at 1:21 pm

    Just want to men­tion that Round­Cube now support’s PostgreSQL :-)

43. 
    mandrl said on: November 14th, 2005 at 12:54 am

    Thanks for the pointer. The demo looked really neat for a web­mail script. 

    Another Dream­host cus­tomer here. I can recom­mend them, they’re great! :)

44. 
    Dan Bailey said on: November 16th, 2005 at 8:21 pm

    Round­Cube is the nicest web­mail I’ve ever used. Once it has the planned GPG encryp­tion sup­port I’ll def­in­itely use it instead of Thunderbird/Enigmail.

    By the way, Dream­host users can <a href=“https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=home.sugg&category=Mail — Webmail”>vote</a> for Round­Cube to replace squirrelmail.

45. 
    Alex Hutton said on: November 24th, 2005 at 3:54 pm

    You might want to take a look at Hula.  I haven’t played with it, but anec­dotal evid­ence is AJAX-y good­ness, iCal integ­ra­tion, and it has the back­ing of Novell.

46. 
    Phil Underhill said on: January 10th, 2006 at 11:24 pm

    Hi all!

    I tried out Round­cube the other day, and it’s look­ing good, but I have a huge problem. 

    I can log in okay, and it gets the mails from my IMAP server (Kerio 6.1.2) but next to each folder it con­tains the num­ber of mails and all the folders are in bold text. 

    I’m not sure if this is a design fea­ture but it makes you believe you have, say, 8 unread e-Mails in a folder whereas they are actu­ally mails already read. 

    Any ideas?

47. 
    Simon said on: February 1st, 2006 at 7:19 pm

    unfor­tu­natly i dont have a email server installed… as my web­server is hos­ted from home :p I have how­ever installed it, now all i need is a small mail server to test it on