geek + red sox + cooking = peter ryan

Three weeks ago I migrated my webmail from trusty old Squirrel to RoundCube. I did this for a few reasons

• I was tired of squirrel mail not being more reactive.
• I was tired of errors reading HTML mail. The process to view in HTML mode would break a lot and when viewing the HTML portion of the email the “reply” button was lost. Generally I have no interest in reading the HTML version of an email but occasionally I do want to see the pretty pictures.
• I wanted an ajax preview pane so I would be able to more easily navigate from message to message without a lot of full page refreshes
• I was really tired of not having address book integration. I was constantly going through old email’s looking for addresses. Squirrel mail had some LDAP options but nothing that was accessible from the composition page. I use plaxo and would have loved integration with that but I didn’t need it. Roundcube promised an ajax address book lookup which sounded golden.

I installed roundcube easily enough. LAMP application and the configuration was fairly obvious. The look and feel was immediately snazzy. Aside from my browser shell roundcube gives the impression of a modern web 2.0 application.

I opened an email and was immediately bothered by the full page view. I was expecting the index page to split and see a message preview (I had looked at roundcube in the past and specifically recalled a screenshot showing this). I figured it was in the preferences somewhere but didn’t see anything. After digging through the roundcube roadmap and issue tracker I discovered the preview pane had been pulled out (due to it being buggy) and it was slated for a later release. This was a real bummer.

I said to myself “Well someone must have added a plugin for this” and set about looking for the roundcube plugin repository. To my shock there wasn’t one. On the trac ticket for the preview view I found a patch I could apply to my install and a few roadmap milestones away was the feature “Implement the plugin API with documentation.” under Milestone 3 Beta. Considering the application is in .1 RC1 and there are no timetables I was completely surprised. After the excellent design of roundcube and the ambitious ajax / drag drop feature set (which appears to be custom developed..no scriptaculous/prototype js files) the lack of a plugin architecture up front shocked me. Particularly after using wordpress with it’s outstanding plugin support I really was left speechless. I had no desire to apply a patch to my roundcube install (and the subsequent upgrade hell that follows).

The composition address completion worked great. Even adding addresses to the built in address is a breeze although checking to see if I already have the address and not presenting the “+” button next to the name would be nice.

I noticed a few inconsistent bugs when moving messages using drag and drop. The first few times I tried it the messages did not move. Later the problem went away and I had no issues moving messages among folders.

There is no empty trash button which was strange for an IMAP client.

HTML rendering of email is fantastic. Remote images are blocked by default like I would expect.

So overall I guess I am satisfied. The ajax features are excellent, the IMAP performance is improved, and I can’t say squirrel mail is any better at a preview pane. Roundcube still feels much like a beta application (which is what it is). It shows a lot of promise but I would be greatly concerned about its absolute lack of extensibility. I’d love to contribute (or use) a plaxo address book extension / plugin but there is no easy way to do so. An application like roundcube should be designued up front for drop in extensions and plugins - not a clunky diff / patch system.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 4:45 pm and is filed under webmail, geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.