Robert Tomanek wrote:
Hello Peter,
Thursday, January 10, 2008, 8:17:15 PM, you wrote:
All the suggested ones have just one big FAT problem - they are all
written in that security bug ridden language that the hackers just love
to exploit - PHP. Running a web application available to the whole wide
internet written in PHP is just asking for someone to break into your
systems.
That's pretty much off-topic but for anyone interested just in web
mail systems and less so in holy wars & stuff: don't worry, it is not
that bad. It is not bad at all, actually :)
OK, let's try to get a bit more on topic and go back to the original
question of what's a good webmail client for Dovecot?
We went with Prayer Webmail (written by the University of Cambridge) as
it's killer feature was *persistent* IMAP connections.
This mattered hugely when we were using UW-IMAP and opening a mailbox
was very expensive in resources. Most of the PHP-based clients such as
Squirrelmail are fairly efficient, but still essentially open a new
connection for each message read. Some other webmail clients use POP3
(yuck!)
With Dovecot's caching and indexing, things are much better, but there
is still a significant overhead on opening lots of connections, I fear,
especially for mboxes (moving to maildir would help of course). I would
consider using imapproxy (designed to assist with this problem by
caching the IMAP connections) but I'm not sure whether it would help
significantly.
(Back off topic again :) - Roundcube is an "Ajax" application, which
potentially introduces a new class of vulnerabilities. Prayer has a
pretty old-fashioned interface, but is written entirely in C and is very
efficient in its use of resources. It's probably vulnerable to stored
cross-site scripting though, and is no longer actively maintained.
Cambridge are now using Cyrus IMAP and are thinking of IMP or
Squirrelmail, I think.)
Chris
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Christopher Wakelin, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
IT Services Centre, The University of Reading, Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439
Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094
