
SquirrelMail is being removed from cPanel - perch56
https://blog.cpanel.com/the-death-of-squirrelmail/
======
jlgaddis
I'm honestly surprised to find out that it was still being ahipped.

It was the first webmail application offered at a .edu I worked at and that's
been 15 years ago. It was -- or so it seemed -- "dead" _then_.

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martin1975
Suppose one was to write a decent webmail front-end, how exactly does one make
enough money to sustain its development, even if it's a one or two person
effort?

I love open source but there's also a need for developers to live off what
they make.

Who has successfully made a webmail front end that they could sell?

~~~
m-p-3
What about [https://sogo.nu](https://sogo.nu) ?

~~~
newsat13
sogo stable builds are closed.

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walrus01
For those looking for good fully self hosted alternatives, two options:

Roundcube

Rainloop

Squirrel mail is dead, but self hosted webmail is far from dead. Some .EDUs
with student populations of 12,000+ use roundcube for their https interface
student mail.

~~~
gascan
> Squirrel mail is dead

I didn't even know... crap.

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rcdmd
Spam domain filters virtually killed self-hosted e-mail and what I presume was
their major use case.

~~~
rhizome
I've run my own email out of my closet for close to 20 years and have no
problem sending. I think DKIM/SPF probably help a lot, but I really can't say,
as I've never been blocked (to my knowledge).

~~~
walrus01
Assuming you have a clueful and attentive upstream ISP and a static /29 or
something, running your own mail out of your closet with proper rDNS, spf and
dkim probably has better chance of delivery success than the same software
setup, but on a dedicated server sharing a /24 of IP space with clueless and
occasionally abuse-generating neighboring customers in the same netblock.

~~~
rhizome
I have all that except for delegated reverse DNS, but that hasn't been a
problem (again, to my knowledge!).

~~~
jlgaddis
You don't really need rDNS _delegated_ to you (and I'm pretty sure that's not
what _walrus01_ meant), just so long as you can set (or have your ISP set) the
PTR RRs to match.

Correctly set PTR RRs can (will) make a huge difference (lots of MTAs will
reject if FCrDNS fails).

~~~
walrus01
Functionally from an smtp perspective it doesn't really matter if the rDNS is
delegated to you, just that it's set correctly... ordinarily it's something
you only have to set the PTR record for once, even if you need to manually ask
your upstream to do it for the /32 that is your server, get them to set it to
mail.whateverdomainname.net

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passthejoe
Roundcube is good enough. The only problem with my cPanel-powered shared
hosting is that filtering isn't part of the Roundcube application but is taken
care of by another cPanel app(let). I'd rather have it all in Roundcube.

~~~
BeetleB
Roundcube doesn't handle large inboxes well.

Squirrelmail had this nice option where I could set a BCC for every email - I
BCC all my emails to myself (hack to get around another problem). Roundcube
has no such option.

In my experience, I have seen no benefit that Roundcube has (feature-wise)
other than being prettier.

~~~
teddyh
> _Squirrelmail had this nice option where I could set a BCC for every email_

I can see such an option in Roundcube 1.2.3. Under
Settings/Identities/[WhateverIdentity] there is a “BCC” field, which seems to
be exactly what you want.

(This is not an endorsement of Roundcube – I use Gnus myself.)

~~~
BeetleB
My provider must be using an older Roundcube. I don't have that setting.

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ejrv
There was talk about integrating Mailpile into cPanel years ago[1] - I
remember discussing it with an acquaintance who worked at cPanel at the time.
I wonder why it never gained traction with either them, or any other web
hosting/control panels? Plesk for example, which is probably cPanel's biggest
competitor, exclusively bundles Roundcube.

[1] [https://features.cpanel.net/topic/add-mailpile-as-webmail-
op...](https://features.cpanel.net/topic/add-mailpile-as-webmail-option)

~~~
rurban
I did some mail ui work while at cPanel. We have three options, the old
Squirrelmail, the recently updated Horde, and Roundcube. That should be
enough.

Squirrelmail was unmaintained, hence it's deprecated. I did maintain some
patches decades ago, but don't work with PHP anymore for several years. And
not with cPanel anymore either. Dropping squirrel was discussed 5 years ago
already.

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tehabe
I kinda developed a little dislike about Horde, but I heard good things about
Kopano, which also works as workgroup software.

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drdeadringer
I host my websites and have subsequent email via DreamHost.

When I first signed up right around their billing fiasco ~10 years ago, they
where on SquirrelMail with a hardstop "convert to gMail" option. They have
since switched to a different email default [AtMail] about 1.5 years ago.

On one hand I miss SquirrelMail. On the other hand, I now understand the
change [ageing tech]. There has been a learning curve along with A/B testing,
for example having the "hardcore delete all emails in your primary inbox"
button right next to your "refresh your primary inbox" button... bad times
which have been solved.

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upofadown
The headline is misleading by itself. SquirrelMail is still getting security
fixes and is under active (but slow) development.

~~~
badsectoracula
Is it in a fork? The official site isn't updated since 2013 and Debian removed
it in recent versions (jessie is the last to have it) because of that. Do you
happen to know where the new versions and development are? Squirrelmail is by
far my favorite webmail setup, i use it for almost 15 years now and exactly
what i like about it is that it has remained pretty much the same all these
years, so i'd like to make a manual installation over a recent version (Debian
seems to have an svn version from 2012) once i upgrade.

~~~
upofadown
My, perhaps incomplete, understanding is that you can just run the old thing
if you can support PHP5. Otherwise you can run the eternal dev version, but
you will have access to fewer plugins.

Added: It appears there is some version 1.4.23 (the old thing) that will run
on PHP7. I am currently running 1.4.22 on PHP5 under OpenBSD with no problems.
The problem seems to be in figuring out what version to run.

~~~
badsectoracula
I do not use any plugins so i'll probably try the "eternal dev" version.
Hopefully it'll be fine.

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stingraycharles
The article is pretty clickbaity. While the assertion that Squirrelmail has
died is probably correct, the title makes it sound like it would be an
explanation on what happened. Instead, it’s just describing the motivations on
why cPanel is removing Squirrelmail, while trying to proclaim the death of
Squirrelmail in the process.

~~~
mi100hael
I'd wager cPanel accounts for the vast majority of Squirrelmail installs these
days. If they quit shipping it, its remaining user base is going to quickly
dwindle.

~~~
eclipticplane
Or not so quickly, given the number of ancient cPanels out there, though those
are all likely compromised by now.

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jrq
There's a headline from ten years ago...

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sciurus
Is cPanel itself still widely used?

~~~
Gygash
Yes:
[https://www.shodan.io/search?query=cpanel](https://www.shodan.io/search?query=cpanel)

~~~
etcet
If you're logged in,
[https://www.shodan.io/search?query=title%3A%22whm+login%22+p...](https://www.shodan.io/search?query=title%3A%22whm+login%22+port%3A2087)
is a better query which shows 1.5M cPanel installs.

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smn1234
I loved Horde, and then tried AfterLogic Webmail Pro. Surprising there's no
single robust mail offering

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wolco
Sad day.

