Designed as a full-featured webmail client, Open WebMail provides an open source alternative to commercial webmail solutions.

by Jeff Goldman [December 9, 2004]

Open WebMail was created in 2001 by Chung-Kie Tung at Taiwan's National Cheng Kung University. Tung had been one of the original developers on Ernie Miller's NeoMail Project, but decided he wanted to branch out on his own and do things differently.

The main difference of opinion, Tung says, had to do with the balance between functionality and simplicity. "Ernie and I have different opinions on what webmail can do," Tung says. "While I think webmail can be used as an everyday mail client, Ernie thought of webmail as a temporary replacement for a regular mail client and thought it should be kept as simple as possible."

Open WebMail

Thomas Chung, part of the current Open WebMail Project support team, says Tung's efforts resulted in a rich feature set that includes a calendar, auto login, support for multiple languages, and full content search capability—along with a range of features to help users migrate smoothly from Microsoft Outlook to Open WebMail.

The solution can be fully integrated with both SpamAssassin and ClamAV, enabling a wide range of both virus and spam blocking, including Bayesian filtering. Both user and administrator have direct control over the filters. "The user can set how his mail is scanned in the user preferences," Chung says.

Outlook alternative
The main focus of the Open WebMail project, Tung says, has always been to provide a full-featured, Web-based alternative to Outlook. "We added features like HTML support, POP3 fetch, mail filters, and draft folder support at the beginning," he says. "And now, Open WebMail has more and more features, including Web calendar, Web disk, anti-virus / anti-spam support, and a vCard-compliant address book."

Open WebMail can be configured individually for each user, each domain, or each server. Tung says it can also be integrated easily with other existing systems. "It supports auto-login, which can be useful when Open WebMail is called from another system," he says. "The user just needs to log in to Open WebMail once."

Tung says the solution accesses the user's mail folder directly, without relying either on POP3d or IMAPd. "This gives better performance in large folder access, and makes it easier for Open WebMail to implement functions like Web calendar and Web disk," he says. "But the disadvantage is that Open WebMail must be installed on the mail server—or the sys admin has to set up NFS for Open WebMail."

Continuing development
Open WebMail works on most major Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Mandrake, and SUSE, as well as Solaris and FreeBSD. The team behind the project continues to develop the solution, and Chung says updates are released almost daily, with a major upgrade released about every three or four months. The most recent release, he says, focused on improving spam filtering and language support.

Chung says there isn't currently any company focusing on commercial support for Open WebMail, but he says many ISPs who work the solution choose to offer internal support for their own customers. "You can also receive good support from major Linux distribution companies' support mailing lists, such as Red Hat, SUSE, and Mandrake," he says.

And the developers themselves are also available for questions. According to Tung, the current development team consists of four members—one who maintains the Web site at openwebmail.org and the Web forums at forum.openwebmail.org, and three programmers. "We exchange information through the forum and through emails—and we all answer questions on the forum," he says.

— End

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