Open WebMail is a webmail system based on the Neomail version 1.14 from Ernie Miller. Open WebMail is designed to manage very large mail folder files in a memory efficient way. It also provides a range of features to help users migrate smoothly from Microsoft Outlook to Open WebMail.
Links Readme | Changes | Faq | Copyright | Screenshots | Icons | Download Master Site http://turtle.ee.ncku.edu.tw/openwebmail/
Mirror 1 http://openwebmail.org/openwebmail/ | ftp://openwebmail.org/ Mirror 2 http://www.geocities.com/openwebmail/ Mirror 3 http://ftp.ee.ncku.edu.tw/pub/openwebmail/ SourceForge Forums http://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=34552 Freshmeat http://freshmeat.net/projects/openwebmail/
Fast Folder Access
Folder access performance is greatly improved through the use of dbm (a simple database provided by perl). When a mail folder is selected in the folder view, Open WebMail will parse the mail folder file and cache the parsed result to a dbm. This dbm is reused whenever the user wants to access the folder. The dbm cache eliminates the scan of an entire folder for every access, a significant benefit when dealing with a large folders. The dbm is automatically synchronized with any changes to the folder itself; the dbm update is incremental if the folder modification is done by the Open WebMail application itself. The dbm will however be recreated when a folder is found to have been changed by an external program.
Efficient Message Movement
The size of a message will be slightly increased after it is read at the first time because of status change. A large movement of messages may be introduced due to the size change. Also, the user may want to move a group of messages between two folders. The routines for message update and movement have been totally rewritten so that minimal movement occurs, with correspondingly minimal memory utilization.
Smaller Memory Footprint
Much effort has been put into optimizing Open WebMail's memory utilization. The memory footprint of Open WebMail is much smaller than its predecessors when dealing with messages with large attachments (e.g. a 20MB document), as a result of which the application now runs smoothly on a medium sized machine, (e.g. a Celeron 300 with 128MB RAM).
Convenient Folder/Message Operation
Open WebMail supports 'create', 'rename', 'delete', and 'download' operations on folders, and 'move', 'copy', 'delete' and 'download' operations on messages.
Graceful File Lock
Since a mail folder may be used by multiple programs simultaneously, it is necessary to lock the file before accessing the folder. Open WebMail uses a blocking lock with a timeout limit of 30 seconds. It gives the lock a better chance of success than a nonblocking lock, which returns an error if the lock can not be aquired immediately. Open WebMail also supports locking by dotlock file to ensure that the file locking operates correctly on platforms operating with an incomplete implementation of NFS lockd.
Virtual Hosting and Login Alias
Open Webmail can use the sendmail virtusertable to map a virtualuser to the real userid in a system. A virtualuser can be either in the form of a pure 'virtualusername' or 'virtualusername@somedomain'. When a user logins, the loginname will be checked in the following order:
1. Is this loginname a virtualuser defined in virtusertable?
2. Is this loginname a real userid in system?
3. Does this loginname match the username part of a specific virtualuser?PAM support
Openwebmail can use a number of sources for authentication through the PAM (pluggable authentication module). Ex: NIS+, NIS, LDAP.... Solaris 2.6, Linux and FreeBSD 3.1 are known to support PAM. For more information about PAM, please see http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/
Full Content Search
Full content search with regular expression support is provided. When a user enters a keyword in the search box, the scope of the mail folder is limited to the keyword related messages. This means the user can use the sort or static functions on the search result. The scope limit is released when the user selects another folder or refreshes the current folder.
Strong MIME Message Capability
Most webmail packages present MIME messages poorly compared to traditional POP clients. Open Webmail presents MIME messages in an attractive format comparable to that presnted by Microsoft Outlook. It does this through supporting unlimited levels of attachments and cid object cross-reference inside attachments. Open WebMail also supports uuencoded block inside messages, and displays those uuencoded blocks as if they were normal attachments.
Draft Folder Support
This feature enables the user to write a message in a number of stages, even over several days. The user can save an unfinished message into the draft folder and continue editing at any time.
Spelling Check Support
The spelling check in Open WebMail is very user-friendly and powerful: It makes suggestions for mis-spelled words, and the user can correct the errors very easily by selecting one of the suggestions from a drop-down menu.
POP3 Support
Multiple POP3 accounts can be defined, allowing a single user to fetch mails from a number of mail servers. All messages fetched will be stored in the INBOX folder. Should the fetch operation exceed 10 seconds (due to a slow link or large message for example), the operation will be put into background to avoid an http timeout.
Mail Filter Support
Multiple filter rules can be set to move or copy incoming mails to different folders automatically or even delete them directly. The user can categorize mails from a specific person or spammer, and identify mails containing viruses very easily by defining rules of sender, receiver, SMTP relay, subject, body or filename of attachments.
Since mail filtering is activated only in Open WebMail, messages will stay in the INBOX until the user reads their mail with Open WebMail. 'finger' or other mail status check utilities may report new mail incorrectly, since they are not aware of filters: A command tool 'checkmail.pl' is provided for use as finger replacement, which performs mail filtering before reporting mail status.
Message Count Preview
When the user pulls down the folderlist menu to select a folder, the counts of new messages and total messages of each mail folder are displayed after the folder name to assist the user in finding unread mesages.
Confirm Reading Support
The user can request a 'confirm-reading receipt' for each message sent. When the message is read by the recipient, a receipt will be sent back to this user.
There are too many other small enhancements to mention. You may choose to find them by yourself...
Open Webmail is available for the following languages:
Language Abbreviation Translation Contributor Catalan ca Jordi Vidal Czech cs Michal Drapak Chinese (Simplified) zh_CN.GB2312 Wang Jun Chinese (Traditional) zh_TW openwebmail Danish da incomplete Dutch nl Michiel van Slobbe, Christian Boer English en openwebmail Finnish fi incomplete French fr incomplete German de Andreas Roedl Hungarian hu Nagy Endre Italian it Benedet Marvi Korean kr Moonsang Kwon Lithuanian lt Alvydas Sinkunas Norwegian Nynorsk no_NY incomplete Polish pl Pawel Jablonski Portuguese pt Jos Ferradeira Portuguese Brazil pt_BR Edison Figueira Junior Romanian ro incomplete Russian ru incomplete Slovak sk Lubos Klokner Spanish es Felix Martos Swedish sv Goran Jartin
Thanks to Ernie Miller. His great work Neomail provided the solid foundation upon which Open WebMail was built. Without Neomail, there would be no Open WebMail.
Thanks to Joshua Cantara, the web based spelling check is based on his code in WBOSS 1.5a.
Thanks to Nikolay Pelov, the PAM support in openwebmail is mostly from the example code in his perl Authen::PAM module.
Thanks to Emir Litric for his great works of art. He made all the great 3D icons and the many fancy styles in Open WebMail, and maintained the doc/RedHat-README.txt. He is now one of the authors of Open Webmail.
Thanks to Russ Reese, the login alias/mapping is based on his patch code and idea.
Thanks to Nimrod Zimerman and Nimrod S. Carmi, who contributed the useraddbyweb package in contrib/. This allows users to be added to a Linux system dynamically through web signup.
Thanks to Dugal James P., who submitted the patches for PAM support, automated DST adjustment, internal msg detection on solaris dtmail, disallowed_pop3servers option, fix for passwdfile in NIS+, fix for user homedir in sun automounter and fix to the content-type header error in attachment downloading.
Thanks to Raul Monferrer, who submitted the patch for multiple dictionaries support in spellcheck.
Thanks to Jordi Vidal, who translated the language, template files and Cool3D icon into Catalan.
Thanks to Thomas Chung, who registered the domain openwebmail.org for the Open Webmail project, setup openwebmail.org site and maintained a tarball packed with an install script special for RedHat 7.x platform. He also helped other users to solve problems on installing Open Webmail. Thank you, Thomas!
Thanks to lubos klokner, who translated the language, template files and Cool3D icon into Slovak.
Thanks to James Dean Palmer, who contributed the support for new mail headers: In-Reply-To, References and X-Status. He also wrote a new sort method "by thread" for folderview, added the 'A' flag display of answered messages and made the from column more concise by cutting it off at @ symbol if it is a pure address.
If you encountered any problem with Open Webmail, please check changes.txt to see if the problem is fixed in the latest current version. If not, try the readme.txt and faq.txt. If you want to seek help, please post your problem in the openwebmail-users discussion forum.
If you want to mirror this site, please use this script.
If you still want to contact us, please email to openwebmail@turtle.ee.ncku.edu.tw
The Open WebMail is brought to you by
Nai-Jung Kuo ³¢¤Dºa
Chao-Chiu Wang ¤ý¶@¥C
Chung-Kie Tung ¸³¥ò·_
Emir Litric
Distributed System Laboratory
Department of Electrical Engineering
National Chung-Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, R.O.C.
12/15/2001
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