Re: [SLUG] Online Mail Clients

From: Kwan Lowe (kwan@digitalhermit.com)
Date: Thu Jan 22 2004 - 19:29:48 EST


> Hello Folks,
>
> First, sorry I missed yesterday's meeting. Now, with the guilt gone
> from my shoulders, I need to solicit the opinion of my fellow Sluggers.
>
> Those of you who administer servers hosting a multitude of domains,
> which of the following mail clients do you (as an administrator) prefer
> and which do your clients seem to prefer or use the most? I am curious
> about security, easy of use etc.
>
> Anyone, who has tried/suffered-with/danced-a-jig-because-of any of these
> particular clients feel free to pipe in also.
>
> NeoMail
> SquirrelMail
> Horde
>
> Personal Experiences, Rants, Criticisms, Banter, Comments, Diatribe or
> Bruhaha of any kind, regarding those clients, is fine by me. Feel free
> to beam me your personal opinions, if you feel they are not appropriate
> for the list.
>

I've used all three and installed the first two. Neomail had some glitches
with installation, but most were related to the franksteinish hodge-podge of
parts I was running on the server at the time (Mandrake 6-something with lots
of later RPMS hammered together). Squirrelmail was easy to install. I'm
running it on my servers now and use it as my main mail client. SquirrelMail
has some interesting plugin features (spam blockers, calendar, appointments,
etc). I don't normally enable them, but the event calendar is useful for a few
folks on my servers. You do need to bump up some PHP memory limits for
Squirrelmail to function happily. Also, there's a glitch where deleting
entries from the middle sections of a list doesn't work properly (fixed in the
most recent version, I believe).

General rant about web clients in general -- they tend to bog down when there
are lots and lots of messages. I figure I have about 6K to 7K messages in all
my folders. The larger ones take a while to load (bottleneck is the server,
not the bandwidth). Also, my personal server runs on a 500MhZ AMD K62, 384M.
This is usually fine but the webmail features can bog the system down
sporadically when multiple users are checking mail, accessing calendars,
filtering, etc.. The tipover point seems to be about 10 simultaneous users
before the system gets annoyingly slow. I'd normally say a hardware upgrade is
in order, but this same box can service 50 users via imap or pop without
sweating.

-- 
* The Digital Hermit   http://www.digitalhermit.com
* Unix and Linux Solutions   kwan@digitalhermit.com
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