[Dovecot] [OT] Webmail Recommendation

[Chris Wakelin]

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cross-site scripting though, and is no longer actively maintained.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

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Christopher Wakelin,                           c.d.wakelin at 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