i thought squirrelmail would be way too much of an overkill for my needs also but i went for it. i'm using debian and i got the squirrelmail package installed and working within 15 minutes. what really makes life easy is that squirrelmail comes with a configuration utility (squirrelmail-configure). it was very easy to get things configured without worry about a lot of conf files :) i also like the many plugins that people have created for squirrelmail. it's also very simple to add these plugins into squirrelmail using squirrelmail-configure.
i had originally been ssh and mutt to check my mail, but i decided it be nice to have a web front-end and squirrelmail /apache /dovecot /procmail /spamassassin /gotmail /getmail /fetchyahoo have been a good mix for me.
the hardest part for me was figuring out procmail and not squirrelmail :)
my 2 cents, dan
I've been hunting around for a webmail application other than squirrelmail for reasons that really don't matter.
But I'm seeing that a lot of these applications tend to sometimes access servers via IMAP, but they always seem to have a touch more information needed than might be for an IMAP session.
An example is openwebmail. It authenticates very similar to how dovecot authenticates, with a userdb and passdb specifications. It reads directly off the disk for some of it's activities.
As for squirrelmail, they seem to want a lot of information regarding the mail architecture (mbox, maildir, folder locations...) and I don't really see where this could come into play with an IMAP implimentation.
So, not actually having read all 82 pages of RFC 2060 (but I did print them!), I'm trying to see what I might miss if I were to attempt a web mail application that was based entirely upon IMAPv4 with the only information known prior to connection is the server name. Kind of like my mail client.
Will I get into trouble with mail directories/folders if I start accessing different IMAP servers other than dovecot? Can I discover this without any hints from the user?
I'm not sure exactly what I'm asking for here, other than some thoughts on what I might have to watch out for or do without (when comparing to squirrelmail as an example). I know I'll have to do something different if someone wants an addressbook, but I'm not there yet.