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What are the top five webmail applications of the Open Source world

From Rich Price

Answered By: Kapil Hari Paranjape, Rick Moen, Thomas Adam

I have been toying with the idea of installing a webmail server on my Debian Linux system. While looking into Squirrelmail as a possible option, I came across this statement on the Squirrelmail web site:

............... While it may sound silly, my vision for the future of the Squirrelmail project can be summed up in the quotation, "I have a dream!" by Martin Luther King Jr. In this dream, Squirrelmail is THE number one, top-dog, leader of the pack, and mac-daddy Open Source Webmail project in the world. At this point in time, Squirrelmail has somewhat already achieved that goal, as it is firmly one of the top five webmail applications of the Open Source world. ...............

My immediate thought was "What are the top five webmail applications of the Open Source world?" I am unfamiliar with this field. What exactly are my options?

[Kapil] I would imagine that "apt-cache search webmail" would throw up some candidates and it did!

[Thomas] ...especially under Debian. There is also the use of freshmeat.

ilohamail - Light weight yet full featured multilingual web-based IMAP/POP3 client
imp - Web Based IMAP Mail Program.
imp3 - Web Based Mail Program
libroxen-webmail - Webmail module for the Roxen Challenger web server
openwebmail - WebMail based on Neomail
squirrelmail - Webmail for nuts
twig - The Web Information Gateway
camas - A versatile WebMail system for the Caudium WebServer
postman - High performance web based IMAP and NNTP client
sqwebmail - Courier Mail Server - Webmail server

[Kapil] Of these "camas" is restricted to the "caudium" web server and thus further restricted to those who would write their cgi-bin's in the language "pike".

SqWebMail is part of the "courier" suite which means that it depends on a whole bunch of other things being around.

Twig is described as a groupware client and is a bit feature bloated.

Imp (and Imp3) which we use here depends on "horde" and "php" so probably on "apache" as well.

Only squirrelmail and ilohamail have "lightweight"/"standard" dependencies ("php" and "apache") and restrict themselves to webmail.

Which might explain their popularity...with sysadmins!

But then who can blame those poor users who after getting mail on their browsers also want to have it as their calendar, editor, news-reader, .... Guess what application Marc Andreessen worked on before Mosaic and Netscape? Answer below!

[Rick] Squirrelmail is certainly awfully good. One could make a good case, also, for IMP, TWIG, and V-webmail.

What would be the fifth? I don't know, but here's my huge list of candidates: "Webmail" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Mail .

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