Webmail Program Comparisons

Round abouts Dec of 2001, i started looking for a good Open Source webmail program for use with Apache 1.3.24 (with mod_ssl) on UltraSPARC machine running Solaris 8.

Almost a year later, after having moved to NetBSD on alpha, i have finally found it, but i think it was only made available fairly recently. The package i like is Prayer. Even though some of it's rather extended functionality isn't there yet, and took some work to get it compiled under NetBSD, so far, i'm very happy with it.

My general requirements were:

1. I really do not like the idea of setuid:root anything. This shouldn't be necessary, and putting anything setuid:root in my cgi-bin seems like a Really Bad Idea.
2. I'd rather not use PHP for several reasons:
   • I have not yet had any other need for PHP, so it'd be a one off.
   • PHP is huge -- bigger than apache. Fertile grounds for buffer overflows. There seems to be at least one new security advisory on Bugtraq about PHP every 2 months.
3. Run-time scripting languages (PHP, Perl, Python) are flexible, but substantially slower than a code written in a pre-compiled langauge like C, making it necessary to throw an unnecessary amount of CPU power and RAM at what should be a fairly simple application.

Here are the data i've compiled:

Program	Version	POP3	IMAP	Folders	Address book	Attachments	Installation Ease (1-10)	Source
acmemail	2.2.3	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	7	Perl 5
BoboMail	0.6pre1	Yes	partial	Yes	Yes	Yes	?	Python
eCorrei	1.2.5	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	?	PHP with IMAP module
IMP	3.0	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	?	PHP with IMAP module
Null webmail	0.6.2	Yes	Unstable	No	No	Yes	2	C
Nwebmail	0.1.80	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	3	C
Open WebMail	1.65?	Yes*	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	4	Perl, Javascript
popper	1.41	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	?	PHP4, MySQL, CSS
Postman	1.12	?	?	?	?	?	?	C++
Prayer	1.0.4	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	4	C
SquirrelMail	1.2.5	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	7	PHP
Sqwebmail	3.3.4	Yes	partial	Yes	Yes	Yes	3	C/C++
TWIG	2.7.5	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	?	PHP4, MySQL, CSS
Webþing Mailer	2.7.5	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	5+	C/C++

For "Installation Ease," "1" is the easiest (./configure; ./make install) and "10" is the most difficult.

Notes

acmemail

BoboMail

eCorrei

IMP

• requires Horde and its "Turba" contacts manager.

Null webmail

Nwebmail

Good things:

• Written in C
• The main CGI program is setgid:mail, and uses a small setuid:root program for authentication. (So it is probably more secure than most other programs that do not use PHP)
• The setuid-root program for authentication would be easy to replace with a non-setuid program doing Kerberos-5 or PAM.
• Small and fast.

Suboptimal things:

• Still feels pretty "young."
• Had to twiddle a few things (in the C source) for Solaris. (Looks like it was written under Linux.)
• Had to install the GNU gettext library because Solaris lacks getline() and getdelim().
• No mail folders!

Open Webmail

• based on Neomail. (Neomail is sort of in limbo, because the "owner" can no longer maintain it.
• Lots of setuid-root Perl scripts.
• Supports POP3, but doesn't need to use it, if the mail spool for the users is on the local host.

Popper

Postman

Prayer

SquirrelMail

Sqwebmail

Compiles and installs relatively easily, though one does need to supply a lot of options to configure:

./configure --enable-https \
--enable-hardtimeout=3600 \
--enable-softtimeout=360 \
--enable-autopurge=30 \
--enable-maxpurge=90 \
--enable-cgibindir=/tew/vweb/www.ewranglers.com/cgi-bin \
--enable-imagedir=/tew/vweb/www.ewranglers.com/htdocs/webmail/images \
--enable-imageurl=/webmail/images \
--with-maxargsize=1048576 \
--with-maxformargsize=10485760 \
--with-ispell=/usr/local/bin/ispell \
--with-fcgi \
--enable-mimetypes=/var/httpd/conf/mime.types \
--with-module=authpam \
--without-authpwd \
--without-authshadow \
--without-authuserdb \
--without-authvchkpw \
--without-authldap \
--without-authdaemon

• One large setuid-root executable.
• authldap would not compile under Solaris 8 with gcc.
• It's HTML makes Netscape 4.79 on Solaris unhappy. This may be because Netscape doesn't support CSS very well.
• configuration seems trivial after installation.
• Cannot set "From: " line.

TWIG

• Usenet News reader
• Todo list
• Scheduling
• Contact Manager

Webþing Mailer

I ran into trouble getting this to build:

ragno:/tew/src/www/mail/webthing $ make
c++ -I/usr/local/include/mini-libg++ -O2 -Wall -c ShowFolder.cc
In file included from ShowFolder.cc:16:
Folder.h:41: invalid type `int' for default argument to `const gnuString &'
ShowFolder.cc: In function `void MAIN_folder()':
ShowFolder.cc:41: using typedef-name `DIR' after `struct'
make: *** [ShowFolder.o] Error 1

The "INSTALL" file says:

6. Now try "make".  Depending on your compiler configuration, you
   may have to change the "cc" command in the Makefile.
   NOTE: recent libg++ versions have dropped the String and Regexp
   functions used by this software.  It is possible to use them,
   but it will build most simply with GCC 2.6.x or 2.7.x.

...So i'm guess the compiler error i'm seeing might be related to the fact that i am using gcc 2.9.3. I looked at the C++ source, but it's beyond my meager abilities to fix in a reasonable amount of time.

$Id: webmailcomp.html,v 1.8 2007/04/27 23:14:05 johan Exp $