Over the past few years I’ve used several of the open source webmail solutions to access my mail when I’ve been on the move. Squirrelmail, for example, is quite functional, but the size of my personal mailbox has grown so big that it took forever for it to load.
A few months ago the Atmail team announced an open source version of their webmail solution. I was interested in trying it out, but I was expecting the install process to be awkward and complex.
It wasn’t
A couple of minutes after downloading the software I had a fully functional webmail client up and running and it’s able to handle my mailbox without any issues.
The open source version of Atmail is a lot faster than Squirrelmail ever was and has some pretty slick features. You can right click on a message to delete it, or mark it as read / unread. Of course if you just want to delete the mail you can do so, but dragging it into the “trash” is kind of fun too!
The only thing that it seems to be missing, based on playing with atmail for a few minutes, is a method of selecting multiple emails to delete at once.
It’s the kind of software that I can see people making use of if they want a functional webmail client and are sick of some of the uglier alternatives.
What are the differences between the open source version and the commercial one?
For most people the differences probably won’t make much difference, as they’re more for larger organisations and businesses that want to integrate with other systems, but you can see a full comparison chart on the site.
I’ve always been a strong believer of using the products and services that we sell, so it’s only apt that I’d start using Atmail now, as we’ve just rolled out the full commercial version as part of our new hosting solution. Though I think our clients are getting a lot more features than I am!
Leave a Reply