Because I'm working away from home at client site much of the time, and un-snooped access to my home email is A Good Thing™ to have, setting up secure webmail was a priority for me when I moved to hosting my own email setup.

I've been using SquirrelMail for pretty much all that time - having a system that I can keep up to date using Debian's apt-get management tools is a strong incentive.

But I never really liked it - the interface is extremely clunky, and uses frames, which is a particular hate of mine. Recently though, improved Open Source webmail interfaces have been coming along like buses, no doubt inspired by the success of Gmail.

Three of the top contenders are:

Hula

This is an Open Source development of parts of Novell's NetMail product, providing a full service mail and calendaring solution, with hooks into ClamAV and SpamAssassin. It includes an MTA, but can work with external mailservers. Looks promising, but doesn't seem to be getting any closer to 1.0.

Zimbra

Currently being touted by the inestimable Mr King, this is another full service groupware suite, which has some rather nice integration capabilities. Trouble is, it looks like a bit of a resource hog, and requires Tomcat. Obviously targeted at the high end, it sounds like a I want my own server to run on please. Plus, while there are apparently Debian packages for it, it's only supported on RHEL/Fedora and SUSE.

RoundCube

Now this is more like it - it's just PHP webmail with a smart AJAX UI. So it'll piggy back on my anti-spam and anti-virus arsenal, without imposing a significant performance penalty. And easy to install? Well, see for yourself:

Setting up RoundCube

RoundCube Setup Howto

Not quite as easy as apt-get install roundcube, but still fairly simple

It's just hit beta stage, so I thought I'd give it a try. Using the above instructions, it took me less than 10 minutes to install a test rig. And I liked it so much, I repointed my webmail subdomain at it 5 minutes later.

So now I have a shiny new webmail system. If you're one of my webmail users (hi Dad!), this is why it all looks a bit different...