Archive for October, 2010

I’ve finally hopped on the bandwagon. I’ve tried several different types of web based email clients while working for a web hosting company (most free/open source and some proprietary) and all of them were horrid with SquirrelMail being the best of the worst. SquirrelMail is a very simple IMAP client that is mostly frame-based with some pretty nice plugins. While uncluttered and pretty fast it doesn’t have the elegance of some of the large email providers’ interfaces such as Gmail.

Not too long ago a fellow OpenBSD user recommended Round Cube to me on Twitter. At first I was a bit lazy to install it and now I realize the error of my ways. You’re probably wondering so far what the heck Round Cube has to do with OpenBSD since this is a site dedicated to it. That’s actually the nice part since Round Cube is available both as a package (roundcubemail) and is in the Ports tree (mail/roundcubemail). As of OpenBSD 4.7 the latest supported release is 0.3.1p1. It appears that 0.4.2 might be in -current/4.8 as OpenPorts.se has it listed as a download.

Round Cube has a very clean interface and is fairly reminiscent of most desktop email clients and Apple’s MobileMe web client. It supports folders, address books, and more. The address book feature even supports the import of vCards.

The installation was somewhat complicated at first. The application itself is PHP based but uses MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite to store user settings. The INSTALL file placed in /var/www/roundcubemail is pretty straightforward but incomplete in a couple places. I went with the MySQL installation for the database backend. Once you’ve created your database and roundcube user be sure that you then put the user’s password in the config/db.inc.php file on that line that looks like this where “pass” is the password:

$rcmail_config['db_dsnw'] = ‘mysql://roundcube:pass@localhost/roundcubemail’

You also need to enable the web installer in the config/main.inc.php by change the following line to “true”:

$rcmail_config['enable_installer'] = false;

There are also TLS and SSL options that you can turn on and probably will if you’ve read my previous posts on enabling these in Apache and sendmail.

The installer will run some checks to be sure that it can connect to your database and that you have the necessary PHP extensions installed and options enabled in php.ini. At the end it checks whether it can make an IMAP and SMTP connection.

So, check it out at http://roundcube.net/. The download link will first list the requirements as LAMP with a small link to the FreeBSD and OpenBSD versions. Be not afraid. You now know that Round Cube works on OAMP!