It's still early days for RoundCube Webmail, but this user-friendly AJAX client is already attracting attention.

by Jeff Goldman [April 19, 2006]

Thomas Bruederli first developed RoundCube Webmail in October of 2004 for his own personal use. He says that's about as far as the project would have gone, but for the fact that some friends of his who saw it persuaded him to continue developing the solution. "Once the very basic functions worked on my server, I decided to make it open source—without any further expectations," Bruederli says.

Thinking that SourceForge would be a good place to start, Bruederli says, he first published the Alpha version of RoundCube there in July of 2005. He started to get feedback from that, he says—and then, in October of 2005, a post about RoundCube on Slashdot increased public interest in the solution dramatically.

RoundCube roundcube@gmail.com RoundCube Webmail Forum

The Slashdot post stated, "Open Source startup RoundCube has released an alpha of a GPLed AJAX webmail client. While there are still many features missing (like search!), the demo they have is completely cross-browser compliant and overall very impressive."

Clean and user-friendly
Bruederli says his initial aim in developing the project was to extend the interface of an existing OSS webmail solution to make it more application-like—and to play around with AJAX. "But soon, I failed, because most of the common PHP-based webmail systems are not based on XHTML and CSS, which makes it even harder," he says. "Then I decided to create my own app, and took the IMAP library of Ilohamail as a base."

A full demo of the solution is available online. What's immediately apparent from a look at the demo is the cleanliness of the interface (see image at right). "It was a main target to create a nice-looking webmail client," Bruederli says. "Most open source projects lack a clean and user-friendly interface. Since I'm not a designer, I was looking for some nice icons, and I found the free icons of Mozilla Thunderbird designed by Stephen Horlander and Kevin Gerich."

Still, Bruederli says, that look does come with some challenges. "The big disadvantage of having a clean interface is that most people expect to get a complete application and not an early alpha version," he says. "Then they complain about the lack of features even more."

Early days
RoundCube is currently in Beta, and as such, Bruederli says it's too early to recommend that ISPs use it to replace their current webmail system, because all the features aren't yet in place. Still, it does have some strengths. "The main advantage is its AJAX-based architecture, which make it fast and functional," he says. "Users will get more and more familiar with Web-based apps that work like their desktop counterparts, and this will surely make RoundCube an interesting option once it has reached a stable state."

At this point, Bruederli says, he's still doing most of the work on the project. He does get emails from other developers interested in helping out, and there are currently 12 developers registered—but he's had trouble keeping them involved. "I'm new to open source development, and I still have to find out how to coordinate such a project best," he says.

And he'd love to have the help: as it is, Bruederli says he always wishes he had more time to put into the project—but currently, new releases come out about once every two or three months. "The latest Beta release brought some basic changes and improvement concerning the stability and compatibility," he says. "Now we have a stable base, and we can concentrate on adding more features."

Looking ahead
The project's development roadmap includes plans for a number of additional features, from spell check to search functionality. There are no spam or virus filters currently integrated with the solution, though Bruederli says he does plan to add the ability to create filters based on e-mail headers and content.

Bruederli says the solution works with most common mail servers, and the solution can be installed on any system with a working PHP installation. "Apache web servers are recommended, but it should also run in IIS," Bruederli says. "People can choose between MySQL, Postgres, and SQLite databases for their installation."

For support, there's an active web-based forum, as well as a number of different mailing lists.

Still, Bruederli is quick to caution that the project is still too new to be used in a large production environment. "Many features are still missing, and there are known problems while parsing certain messages," he says. "I'm not sure if it can stand a real comparison with other stable systems such as Squirrelmail or Horde. Nevertheless, the huge interest (also caused by the current Web 2.0 hype) is amazing—and I'm looking forward to having a slick and functional webmail solution ready for tomorrow's web."

— End

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