Roundcube is a web-based IMAP email client written in the PHP programming language. Roundcube's most prominent feature is the pervasive use of Ajax technology to present a more fluid and responsive user interface than that of traditional webmail clients. After about two years of development, the first stable release of Roundcube was announced in early 2008.
Released under the GNU General Public License,[2] Roundcube is free software.
Notable Applications
Roundcube is used by a number of universities to provide email services to students and staff such as Harvard University,[3] UC Berkeley,[4] University of Utah,[5]University of Oregon,[6] Stevens Institute of Technology,[7] Tilburg University,[8] and the University of Sussex.[9] In an interview[10] in 2009 two of Roundcube's core developers noted that the largest deployment to that date that they were aware of was in the University of Michigan with 70,013 students.
Many hosting companies around the world such as HostGator,[11] DreamHost, Media Temple and Gandi use RoundCube.
Roundcube Webmail IMAP client was incorporated into epesiBIM (epesi Business Information Manager), a web-based, open source CRM like application.
Apple's operating system, Mac OS X 10.7, provides Roundcube as the default webmail client in Mail Server.[12] In prior versions SquirrelMail is provided by default.
Technology
Roundcube Webmail is designed to run on standard web servers such as Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, Hiawatha or Cherokee in conjunction with a relational database engine. Supported databases are MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite. The user interface is rendered in XHTML and CSS and is fully customizable with skins.
Roundcube incorporates jQuery as part of its distribution, as well as other libraries such as GoogieSpell and TinyMCE.
Current Features
- Connects to any IMAPv4 server
- Available in over 60 languages
- Full support for MIME and HTML messages
- Compose Richtext/HTML messages with attachments
- Multiple sender identities
- Threaded message listing
- IDNA support
- Full-featured address book based on vCard with group support
- LDAP directory integration for address books
- Find-as-you-type address book integration
- Forwarding messages with attachments
- Built-in caching for fast mailbox access
- Searching messages and contacts
- Spell checking
- Support for external SMTP server
- Support for shared/global folders and IMAP ACLs
- IMAP folder management
- Template system for custom themes
Plugins
With version 0.3 Roundcube introduced a plug-in API which allows non-standard features to be added without the need to modify the source code. A variety of plug-ins are available from the Plugin Repository.
Future Development
Currently version 0.9 is in development.[13]
See also
References
External links
