Robert Tomanek wrote:
Hello Peter,
Thursday, January 10, 2008, 8:17:15 PM, you wrote:
All the suggested ones have just one big FAT problem - they are all written in that security bug ridden language that the hackers just love to exploit - PHP. Running a web application available to the whole wide internet written in PHP is just asking for someone to break into your systems.
That's pretty much off-topic but for anyone interested just in web mail systems and less so in holy wars & stuff: don't worry, it is not that bad. It is not bad at all, actually :)
OK, let's try to get a bit more on topic and go back to the original question of what's a good webmail client for Dovecot?
We went with Prayer Webmail (written by the University of Cambridge) as it's killer feature was *persistent* IMAP connections.
This mattered hugely when we were using UW-IMAP and opening a mailbox was very expensive in resources. Most of the PHP-based clients such as Squirrelmail are fairly efficient, but still essentially open a new connection for each message read. Some other webmail clients use POP3 (yuck!)
With Dovecot's caching and indexing, things are much better, but there is still a significant overhead on opening lots of connections, I fear, especially for mboxes (moving to maildir would help of course). I would consider using imapproxy (designed to assist with this problem by caching the IMAP connections) but I'm not sure whether it would help significantly.
(Back off topic again :) - Roundcube is an "Ajax" application, which potentially introduces a new class of vulnerabilities. Prayer has a pretty old-fashioned interface, but is written entirely in C and is very efficient in its use of resources. It's probably vulnerable to stored cross-site scripting though, and is no longer actively maintained. Cambridge are now using Cyrus IMAP and are thinking of IMP or Squirrelmail, I think.)
Chris
-- --+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+- Christopher Wakelin, c.d.wakelin@reading.ac.uk IT Services Centre, The University of Reading, Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439 Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094