Posted on June 26th, 2011
Squirrel Webmail
For website administrators and hosts, the most important thing is to stay in contact with people over things which involve their sites. This connection is important regardless of who it is with, it could be anyone from potential business partners to customers, and even people visiting the websites and giving feedback.
A third party webmail service provides the advantage of not asking you to save the entire information onto your hard drive, which frees up a great deal of your disk space. For those concerned with hosting services, having an effective link with a simple user interface is very important. You save both time and resources.
Webmail, contrary to an email, can be used from any place where you have access to a web browser and Internet. A webmail service, apart from being offered on their own, also is provided by many hosting providers through their hosting packages. Having a webmail service that meets most of your requirements proves to be a great help with your hosted sites. Also remember that now almost all of these third party clients have easy access to mobile apps, regardless of them being for Android or iOS.
Some advantages and comparisons between the 3 most widely used third party webmail providers such as Squirrel Mail, RoundCube, and Horde are discussed below.
Squirrel Mail, Price: Free
The first on the list is Squirrel Mail. The service is free of cost and supports most of the platforms available. It is the most widely used service which has been in use since 1999. With the help of HTML4, the Open Source can function easily with a number of web browsers. You can also personalize your webmail service according to your needs with the help of the 200 plus plugin features provided by Squirrel Mail. A few of the plugins provided by Squirrel Mail are: Bug Report, Reply Buttons, Secure Login, Server Settings, Download All etc. The complete list is available at the official website of the service.
RoundCube, Price: Free
Next up is RoundCube. Having PHP, it can support databases like MYSQL, postgre, and SQLite. It is provided by some of the leading hosting companies like HostGator, Media Temple, DreamHost and many others. Developed especially for servers like Apache and Lighttpd, RoundCube is offered in almost 67 languages and also has the ability of linking with IMAPv4 servers.
One of the finest characteristics of RoundCube is the drag and drop organization of messages. RoundCube is also considering development of its own address book on VCard.
Very similar to Squirrel Mail, RoundCube also has a number of plugins, like Autologin, Import Messages, Captcha, Drag and Upload, Taskbar.
Horde, Price: Free
Horde’s email service has been developed on the Horde’s application infrastructure. It is also based on PHP therefore has support for cPanel. It also includes a number of addresses like address book, calendar and notes. Also available is a newsreader and a filter. The service provides an effective mail filtering frontend known as Ingo, allowing users to escape confrontation with unnecessary content.
Extra advantages of Horde include: Quota Supports, shared IMAP folders, ZIP file compatibility and keyboard navigation.