This week hasn’t been very busy, so I finally did something I’ve been interested in doing for awhile - I setup a webmail client for Georgia Tech’s email. Tech’s webmail system is simply put - disgusting. Using folders to organize and archive email is a joke and simply isn’t practical. The interface is fairly ghetto as well. So how does this all work? Essentially, I’m using SVN builds (developer releases basically) of an awesome webmail project called Roundcube that I’ve configured to connect to Tech’s IMAP server (IMAP is a way of getting email while keeping it on the server). I’ve changed a few of the the defaults to settings I think people would prefer more (12 hour clock with relative dates (Today, yesterday, etc.) vs 24 hour clock with abbreviated days). I’ve setup LDAP lookups against Georgia Tech’s directory server, so if you go into the address book, you can lookup an email address based on someone’s name. Logging in is simple, just use your GT account and password, you don’t need to type in your email address to login. The only thing you really have to do is the first time you login, go to Personal Settings (top right) and go to Identities and set your email address to whatever your address is (either your GT alias or leave it as your mail.gatech.edu address) - I’ve set it up to guess your email address by using your GT login + @mail.gatech.edu. This should work for most people, except for freshmen who I believe get an alias style address as their default along with a non-gtg style account. You can create folders under Personal Settings using the Folder area (And there’s only three areas in the Personal Settings area, so it isn’t bloated with options) to help organize and archive your mail. And since this is all done using IMAP, the folders and mail you move there will be accessible anywhere (Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora (*cringes*), or even under Tech’s webmail if for some reason you don’t like this solution). I’ve been using Roundcube for almost a year on my personal domain and I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I have. Give it a try!
Update 9/9/06: I’ve deployed Lighttpd to improve performance. Lighttpd is a (great) webserver, which is what serves webpages to your browser. I’m using a stripped down version of PHP (a programming language for web applications that Roundcube uses) in combination with FastCGI in my lighttpd implementation. I’m running it on port 8080 (https://gtwebmail.net:8080, however simply typing gtwebmail.net will redirect you to the right place) since Apache (another very popular webserver) still has to serve my other websites on the normal web port (port 80, which browsers simple hide from you to keep things simple). My non-scientific tests have determined that is a bit faster than before. Another advantage is that lighttpd handles heavier loads (lots of people connected) much better than Apache does, so if this ever gets popular it should hold up fairly well in terms of speed.
Update 9/20/06: The latest SVN builds include an HTML email composer. It’s using TinyMCE, so it pukes (buttons don’t work, but keyboard shortcuts do if you want to go that route) on Safari - but it’s great in Firefox & Internet Explorer. You can enable it under Personal Settings. You can setup an HTML signature under your Identity (Personal Settings) if you want to (I stuck in my standard CSS/HTML sig). I’ve also installed XCache as a PHP extension. XCache is a PHP Opcode Accelerator (”Makes things go faster”), but it hasn’t made any big difference to me which made things go noticeably faster once it got its cache built up. I’m also going to try and make it so you can access different accounts (Like your CoC email, I think you get an engineering account if you’re an engineer, and so forth) via a server pop up menu at login. There’s two issues with enabling this that are problematic, so I might try my hand at playing with the PHP code to make it work.
Update 10/04/06: So I finally juggled around the lighttpd.conf and httpd.conf files (Lighttpd and Apache web server configuration files) and there’s no longer a need for serving up GTWebmail on port 8080 (although I’ll be leaving it on with a redirect for now while people update bookmarks, etc.). This means that https://gtwebmail.net is where you’ll wind up (none of that :8080 stuff) no matter what you type in for gtwebmail.net. That port 8080 stuff probably just confused people when they saw it anyways, good riddance. And now back to my previously scheduled CS2335 project.
As of this post, I’ve shut down the lighttpd instance running GTWebmail.net and deleted the database of user preferences (along with the user it was run under) - so everything for GTWebmail has been deleted. I hope you enjoyed it.
