
Ask HN: Open-source alternatives of Gmail? - diamondhead
I've been planning to switch to an open-source alternative of Gmail. Any suggestions/experiences/thoughts?
======
dochtman
AFAICT the best alternative, interface-wise, is Roundcube, and it doesn't seem
particularly exciting (it's also written in PHP... which doesn't necessarily
have to count against it, but makes me a little wary).

I've foolishly started to build my own, which at some point may become good
enough to open source (I certainly don't want to commercialize it).

~~~
pstadler
Roundcube is by far the most clean, intuitive and beautiful opensource webmail
client out there.

> it's also written in PHP... which doesn't necessarily have to count against
> it, but makes me a little wary

why that?

~~~
mahcuz
Because it's PHP. Duh.

</sarcasm>

------
wccrawford
I went looking for something suitable a while back, but I didn't find
anything. The search is nice, but I'm really more interested in the mail
interface. The features I use:

Sending and receiving (duh)

delayed mail (in case I make a mistake... And I will!)

filtering (and tags/folders)

keyboard shortcuts

simple search, with folder/tag support

browser-based, so I can access it anywhere

~~~
unicornporn
Google were smart when they implemented tags. I've used them immensely
(several tags per e-mail). Most (?) IMAP servers doesn't support tags, that
makes migrating from Gmail a hard decision for me right now.

~~~
pja
Dovecot supports tags.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Dovecot supports it, but are there any good, stable IMAP clients that work
with it?

~~~
pja
Thunderbird good enough?

(Although I usually kill the default tags that Thunderbird still includes as a
hangover from the original Thunderbird release because that way I get useful
tag names in the Maildir should I ever need to hack on them directly.)

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
I didn't realize Thunderbird supported Dovecot's tagging abilities. Is that
something I need to enable? How do I use it? I've been using TB for years
because it's the only IMAP client that does things the way I want (other than
Mutt), but I didn't realize I could have arbitrary tagging with it.

~~~
pja
Just right-click on an email and go to "Tag...". You might want to delete the
default tags (which originate with TB 1.0) and create your own new ones from
scratch.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Oh, I've been using those default labels/tags for a long time already to mark
emails for follow up and so forth. If I'm looking to use those tags to
organize my email instead of folders, is there a way for Thunderbird to
display a tag hierarchy instead of or along side all my existing folders?

~~~
pja
The only real interface is to create search folders that search by Tag on the
server. Dovecot indexes everything behind the scenes, so it's reasonably fast.

Sadly, a full on "here's a hierarchy of tags, just display mail by tag" mail
reader doesn't exist to my knowledge outside of GMail itself :(

------
codehotter
Alternative to what? Hosted email? Or the web interface? If the latter:
<http://roundcube.net/> It access email through imap - so you still need a
good mailbox server.

------
pbreit
The best list I've seen: <http://www.noupe.com/ajax/10-ajax-webmail-
clients.html>

But none really compare too favorably with Gmail. Zimbra was looking good
before it went to yahoo and then VMware.

~~~
nodata
> Zimbra was looking good before it went to yahoo and then VMware.

Can you elaborate?

~~~
markokocic
I can.

The problem with Zimbra is that it tries to mimick Outolook on the web, not to
be actual webmail.

If you like Outlook, you'll feel at home, but compared with Gmail it just
feels to old school.

And it is slow, even inside a LAN.

------
seqastian
AtMail Open seems nice?

problem with most webmail apps seems that they want to be desktop apps for
some reason and completely miss the point imho

~~~
dochtman
It looks fairly bland and aged (and especially bad when compared to
screenshots of the commercial AtMail webmail client).

------
jholman
I actually see two problems with switching off gmail (which I'm starting to
think about doing, as google keeps getting evil-er).

One is how nice it is to have ubiquitous web-mail, integration with my
Android, etc. Some of these problems I think I can solve with my own brain-
sweat, and obviously this thread might help.

But the other is spam. Before gmail, I hated spam. After switching to gmail (I
guess about 5 years ago), I gradually lost my memory of spam ; I get less than
one piece of spam per month. Is spam gone these days? Are there good open-
source low-maintenance solutions?

~~~
wazoox
My spamassassin lets very little spam through. Zero maintenance, but I took
some time to tweak it.

------
astro1138
SUP is supposedly modeled after Gmail, if you enjoy the benefits of text
tools. I myself am using mutt.

~~~
jedbrown
<http://notmuchmail.org/> is a good alternative to Sup, but neither of these
are webmail.

------
mstevens
I really like <http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/prayer/> (prayer
webmail).

It's very much hitting the basic, fast spot though, rather than the gmail
style.

------
teyc
SquirrelMail (is open source) and has some nice paid themes
<http://nutsmail.com/>

~~~
davidcollantes
Nutsmail have done a pretty impressive modification of the original
Squirrelmail to include clean, good looking themes and plugins, all nicely
packaged. Thanks for the link!

------
112percent
We really like Group Office, whilst it doesn't have the class of Gmail, or the
search prowess it works really well for small teams.

If you are taking about using something like Sup then I think there is too
much faff should you ever decide to migrate away from it. Whilst it looks and
works great it is useless for interoperability with your phone etc..

------
aphexairlines
Hula had shown a lot of promise, but it withered away:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_(software)>

It was forked though as Bongo: <http://bongo-project.org/Main_Page>

~~~
LanceHaig
Hula was killed off by Novell when it sold Netmail to Messaging Architects.

We did fork the code and have moved on quite a bit we are in dire need of
front end developers to help make a great frontend for a fantastic backend
system. if anyone is interested in helping out please come by the IRC channel
or the mail list

EDIT:

For those that are interested the IRC channel is #bongo on irc.oftc.net

We have some bindings to allow for webui development we have a complete PHP
one which we used to plug roundcube's interface onto our backend. The others
are in different stages of completion, there is the start of a mono binding
and a ruby one so any help with these parts would be greatly appreciated.

------
hoopti
I find the problem with most of the open source UI's out there is the lack of
good search capabilities. It is just so easy to open up gmail and search for a
document. Everything else that uses imap seems slow and old.

------
Hoodoo
I have recently switched from Roundcube to Squirrelmail - the former worked
annoyingly slow for me. I only had to tweak the source code a bit to get rid
of these _ugly_ iframe borders.

I don't use web interface too much though.

~~~
nodata
I seriously cannot believe that something that looks like it was designed for
Netscape Navigator still exists. There must be a need for it over everything
else, I'd love to know where it's still used.

~~~
goodside
Or there's very little need for it, which is why nobody has made anything
better since.

~~~
diamondhead
according to @teyc's comment, nutsmail sells templates for it.

------
titel
Have you checked RoundCube out? It's a modern and open source self hosted
email client - <http://roundcube.net/>

------
ck2
Thunderbird is getting pretty darn good lately.

Now that Firefox mobile is getting good too, maybe Thunderbird mobile will
start to happen in 2012?

------
suivix
If something that is hosted by a 3rd party 'in the cloud' is open source, does
it really help? Since someone else is still managing your data.

~~~
wccrawford
You don't think he's planning to host it himself in the cloud? Quite a few
platforms make this easy enough, if not very cheap.

------
diamondhead
<http://inbox2.com>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3083935>

~~~
yeahsure
I don't understand. Wasn't this an iPad/Windows email client that went open
source?

The OP is looking for a webmail, open source solution similar to Gmail.

------
cq
Any AGPL webmail clients like gmail? I prefer Free Software to Open Source

