Web Mail from a Squirrel

Call me old-fashioned, but I've never liked web-mail. E-mail and the World Wide Web are two different applications (which both happen to run on the internet), and they shouldn't be confused. I never really liked the way Netscape bundled their mail client with their browser (they should be separate, like IE and Outlook, or Firefox and Thunderbird, or pick and choose the two of your choice). I've never seen a web-based mail interface that didn't suffer from the clunky page-based nature of the web. If I'm reading my mail, I want an actual mail client.

I still feel that way. But I've been playing with web-mail this weekend, and I like what I hath wrought.

I've always provided e-mail aliases for my web hosting clients. I'll happily forward fred@flintstone.com to your local ISP account, and that works nicely for most people. But I've got a new client who wants an actual e-mail account on my server, separate from his home e-mail. Talking him through the process of configuring Outlook or whatever other mail client he might have to access my server was something I wasn't looking forward to. Easy enough to do in person, not by e-mail or by phone... and he's in Arkansas.

So I punted. I went with web-mail. I did a little research online and found SquirrelMail, a PHP-based web-mail system that uses your existing SMTP and IMAP services, your web server, and about 5 minutes of setup to give you your own web-mail system. It's free (in both senses of the word) under the GPL, and works on both Unixy systems (OS X, Linux, BSD) and Windows.

It's nice. This would have been rather handy to have when I was on vacation, as a way to check my e-mail from the web browser in the local internet cafe, where I couldn't install and use a real mail client. It's still web-mail, so it's still clunkier than, say, Mozilla's Thunderbird or Apple's Mail.app, but it works. And it gives the client what he wants, with zero out-of-pocket expense, and just an hour or two of time to tweak and customise the code to work exactly like I want it. Just another demonstration of the fact that anyone who tells you that "open source" software is too risky to trust your business to it, is someone who has never bothered to take advantage of what it has to offer.