Some time ago I stopped using Gmail. I was criticising it increasingly regularly and it seemed only right that I should explore alternatives. The alternative I’ve been settled on since then has been IMAP, in combination with Thunderbird on PC and Mail.app on the Mac. That’s worthy of a separate post at some point, but one big step backwards I did find was the occasional need for webmail access.
Now, SquirrelMail I’m not a fan of. With that in mind, I’d been meaning to install Roundcube for a while. It’s a beautiful new webmail system using quite lovely modern mark-up with a smattering of Ajax, drag & drop and a lovely mac-esque Pinstripe theme. It’s reasonably responsive, as much as IMAP ever seems to be, and can load up larger IMAP folders without any time outs of memory overuse (a problem I have with SquirrelMail). Certainly it makes for a lovely interface to use when I’ve away from my main machine.
Disappointingly the JavaScript-licious UI doesn’t degrade gracefully which means I can’t use Roundcube in Opera Mini. It’s a big downside for me, since SquirrelMail sucks in Opera Mini (all the header fields get cleared when you reply to a message).
So, I’m still looking for a fast, clean and tidy IMAP webapp that functions purely in HTML and CSS. I’m tempted to see if Roundcube’s core code is robust enough to build a static HTML interface from, but that requires time I’m unlikely to find. Recommendations?
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.