After a hiatus of more than six years, the open source webmail solution AtDot is once again in active development.

by Jeff Goldman [October 12, 2005]

AtDot was first written in 1998. At the time, Jakob Kaivo, the project's developer, was working for an ISP that wanted to provide a simple webmail offering to its customers. "There were no open source webmail programs—at least that we were aware of—so I volunteered to do it in-house," Kaivo says.

AtDot http://atdot.org

When Kaivo first created it, he says, AtDot was a very simple POP3-based client. "Authentication was performed against a POP3 server, or you created an account which in turn authenticated against a POP3 server," Kaivo says. "There was only access to your Inbox—but you could also send messages, including replying to and forwarding messages from your Inbox."

That simplicity, Kaivo says, has continued to be a key strength of the solution. "There aren't a lot of extra features or external dependencies," he says. "It's also very easy to modify to suit it to your specific needs."

Renewed development
Later revisions, Kaivo says, included adding basic support for folders and an address book. The latest public release of AtDot was Version 2.0.1 in 1999, which added basic attachment handling to the solution. Soon after the release of 2.0.1, however, Kaivo went to college and then joined the Army, and development of AtDot was placed on hold.

Recently, Kaivo says, he's taken a new interest in the project, and has been working on a complete rewrite of AtDot in C++ (previous versions were in Perl), with greatly increased functionality. The upcoming Version 3.0 will offer enhancements including increased flexibility; blogging; mailing lists and newsgroups; personal web page space; quotas; integrated HTTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, and NNTP servers; and local (to the webmail server) mailboxes. "All of these are optional, so if all you want is a basic webmail app, it's there—but if you have bigger dreams, those are doable, too," he says.

The new version, Kaivo says, should be released in late October of this year (2005). And now that he's returned to active development of AtDot, Kaivo says to expect future updates every three to six months—or more often, he says, if bug fixes or security concerns dictate it.

Installation and support
Earlier versions of AtDot, Kaivo says, should run on any platform with Perl 5 installed—and versions from 3.0 onward should work on any system with a C++ compiler. "In addition to continuing to release the source code under the GNU GPL, I may make pre-compiled versions available for Windows if there is a demand," he says. "All other modern operating systems seem to come with development tools, so binary releases for Unix-like operating systems and Mac OS X are less likely."

Kaivo says AtDot should work with any MTA, though he only tested the older versions with sendmail. "The new version has an optional integrated SMTP server, in case you encounter any issues," he says.

While the solution doesn't include any functionality for spam or virus filtering, Kaivo says he's planning to make it easy to interface with external filters like SpamAssassin and ClamAV in Version 3.0.

Once Version 3.0 is released, Kaivo says public mailing lists and web forums will be available for support—and he's also considering offering commercial support contracts, if there's a demand for them.

— End

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