Suggestion to the list maintainer

Tomas Kuliavas tokul at users.sourceforge.net
Sat Jan 19 08:34:05 CST 2008


Sorry to other list readers about offtopic rant, but I can't stand when
people attack software that I like.

>> >> PS : I do find Subject prefixes ugly too... Bu I hadn't found a more
>> >> handy solution.
>> >
>> > Don't use squirrelmail, or better yet - fix it. I suggest you replace
>> > squirrel with Zimbra, it's much better. I'm just a happy user.
>>
>> Zimbra is commercial groupware suite. SquirrelMail is free webmail
>> application. You are suggesting to replace whole user's email system
>> with some proprietary locked product.
>
> It works pretty well, is free as in beer, and the only "closed" parts are
> its
> Java core. A lot of other stuff, such as the JavaScript framework, and
> reused OSS project, are still open-source.

Main Zimbra's product is not Open Source Edition. Zimbra sells its
products on annual/monthly subscription per seat basis.

Outlook, iSync, Blackberry, mobile connectors. Clustering. Backups. These
are not open.

Do Zimbra admins know how their email setup works or just click on
provided buttons? Can they change setup from default values without
breaking it completely? Do admins have option to revert their changes, if
something breaks? What happens if you deviate from standard OpenSource
Edition setup and see cryptic Java errors in your logs or Zimbra web
pages.

> I have been using it for a year and I really beats everything else out the
> hands down. IMHO of course.

I've been using SquirrelMail for more than 6 years.

You are comparing apples to oranges. Zimbra is not email client. It has
email client as part of whole server package. Zimbra's webmail client uses
AJAX, has better integration with email system (it is designed for Zimbra)
and it can't be compared with SquirrelMail. SquirrelMail is email system
agnostic. It works with any email setup that has good IMAP4rev1 service.
SquirrelMail has bundled client side filtering support, but use of server
side filtering with SquirrelMail is recommended. Client side filtering is
slow, because SquirrelMail is webmail client written in PHP without any
direct access to existing email setup.

Zimbra can't replace SquirrelMail, because it also replaces IMAP, SMTP and
POP services and other parts of email setup. Zimbra adds features that are
not needed for standard email client.

Suggestion to tag subject of mailing list emails is a good one. Mailman
can do that. I think some email clients (Outlook Express) can't filter
emails by custom headers.

from other email
> Having run squirrel for a 5+ years, and some of the most annoying bugs
> remaining unfixed (say support for national characters that actually works
> in real life)

Prove your claims. When these issues are related to broken MIME produced
by other software? When they are related to the fact that translations are
locked on charsets specific to selected language/country? When they are
related to big CJK charset tables that are hard to implement in pure PHP?

SquirrelMail does not use utf-8 for historical reasons, but you can always
change it to utf-8 if you want. Charset support was improved since 1.4.4.
It was 3-4 years ago.

I am former SquirrelMail i18n developer and I suspect that you are
spreading FUD about SquirrelMail. SquirrelMail has issues, but you and
others are free to fix them. If Zimbra has issues, you will have to wait
until Yahoo fixes it.

-- 
Tomas




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