Roundcube Webmail Overview

Roundcube Webmail

Round cube is a web-based IMAP E-mail client. Its feature that stands out is the pervasive use of Ajax technology. Round cube is a free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU General Public License, with exceptions for skins and plugins. The software was created in 2008.

Roundcube is scripted in PHP and can be utilized in conjunction with a LAMP Stack or any other operating system that supports PHP. The web server requires access to the IMAP server that is hosting the email AT to an SMTP server for its ability to send messages. Roundcube webmail is established to run on standard web servers like  Lite speed, Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, Hiawatha or Cherokee in conjunction with a supported database engine. Supported databases are MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL lite. The UI is displayed in XHTML and CSS and is fully customizable with skins. Roundcube also uses jQuery as part of its distribution as well as other libraries like Google Spell and TinyMCE.

Roundcube is currently used by a number of companies in their tech stacks, including CenturyLink, Fraunhofer and Monogram. It is also used by universities to provide email services to students and staff. Some of these universities that use this service include sanger institute, Tata Institute of social sciences, University of Florida, Harvard University, University of Oregon, University of Utah, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Stevens Institute of Technology, Technical University of Dortmund, University of Cambridge, University of Victoria, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, institute of physics Bhubaneswar, Bilkent university and many other institutions.

 In an interview in 2009, two round cubes called the bloopers reported that the largest deployment to date that they knew about was with the University of Michigan with 70,013 students. The software is also used in the Kolab Now service which supports its further development.

CHANEL includes Roundcube, as a result of this many hosting companies around the world such as Media Temple, Gandi, OVH, Hostetter and others use Roundcube. Roundcube Webmail IMAP client was also imbibed into epesi BIM [epesi Business Information Manager], a web-based open-source CRM-like application.  Apples Mac OS X 10.7 Lion server operating system provided Roundcube as the default webmail client in the mail server. In earlier versions of Mac OS, Squirrel Mail has been the default client.

Iran’s ministry of ICT established the national email service @mail.post.ir using Roundcube. Synchrony Inc.’s DickStation Manager [DSM] also uses Roundcube for their mail station package.

Features of Roundcube

Roundcube currently has the following features

• Ajax technology spread throughout the UI, allowing drag and drop messages management and other features.
• Multilingual with more than 70 languages.
• Sophisticated privacy protection.
• Full support for MIME and HTML messages
• Connects to any IMAPv4 server
• Encrypted TLSv1.2 connection to IMAP Server using PHP5.6 SSL/TLS Libraries
• IDNA Support
• Full-featured address book based on vCard with growth support
• Thread message listing
• Find as you type address book integration
• Forward messages with attachments
• Spell checking
• OAuth support
• IMAP Folder Management
• Built-in caching for fast mailbox access
• Search messages and contacts
• Support for external SMTP Server
• Pretty Good Privacy and Mailvelope support
• Support for shared/global folder and IMAPACLs
• Template system for custom themes
• Canned Response templates.
• Three-column [widescreen] mailbox view.

On May 2015 Roundcube announced that they planned to completely rewrite Roundcube and create Roundcube next in partnership with Kolab Systems AG. A crowd-funding campaign was set up to finance the project the goal of 80000 dollars was reached on the 24^th of June. The final amount gotten from the funding was 103541 dollars.

Roundcube Next would include features like a calendar, chat and file management. This was supposed to be done using WebRTC and connectors from popular services. However, the development of the project was halted in 2016 with no valid explanation on why it was halted or how the project broke money to be refunded. A Roundcube developer later claimed that Roundcube had no ownership of Roundcube’s next campaign despite its public engagement and ownership on the crowd fund page.

Plugin services

The plugin repository for Roundcube is based on Composer to manage, install and update the plugins for users’ Roundcube installation.

The plugins are installed to the plugins/ directory and when running the install command users will be asked whether to activate the plugins right away. For any later activation or deactivation of a plugin, users can add/remove the plugin name to/from the $config[‘plugins’] option in their local Roundcube config file.

Advantages of using webmail services like a round cube.

• Webmail services like Roundcubes’s main advantage are “accessibility”. If you use webmail you can access your inbox on any computer or device with an internet connection. Just visit the webmail’s internet address and log in using your username and password.

Disadvantages

• If you are using Roundcube in your own small business or in a small or medium company chances are your storage space will pretty quickly get full.
• Upgrading webmail storage requires an additional fee. Full storage can have catastrophic consequences such as missing emails and users will be unable to send and receive emails.