an open source browser-based email product

[Jay Cuthrell]

Brian Wilson wrote:
> NCSU is switching all web-based email to this squirrelmail.
> 
> http://www.squirrelmail.org/

The only caveat in using SM (or almost any other IMAP connected 
web-based email product) is that there can be sluggish response  if you 
have extremely large personal mailboxes and a large base of users ~100k 
users or so....  By large, I mean personal mailboxes with 500MB or more 
and with the usual collection of people that just never POP things off 
the server etc... quotas are one way to avoid this.  This is also a 
function of how people like to sort their inboxes, filtering, as well as 
the functions you allow in the SQ interface.  Hey, at least you get options.

Also, as your load of concurrent users increases, at some point you will 
want to look at offload of SSL, load balance options, and/or IMAP 
proxy[1].  These aren't strict requirements by any means but they can 
get you over the first concurrent hurdles of SSL, connnection limits, 
and IMAP overhead for open/close.   You'll also want to decide if 
SSL/TLS is right for your organization or project goal.

http://www.squirrelmail.org/wiki/en_US/NewIMAPConnections
http://freshmeat.net/projects/imapproxy/
ftp://ftp.pitt.edu/users/d/g/dgm/

(imapproxy.org appears to be down right now but pitt's ftp is up)

Again, these are for high load conditions.  If you want speed, keep the 
number of connections load and don't put any more network hardware 
(latency) in than you have to for SLA/risk considerations.  i.e. a 
personal box should just -scream-

Bottom line, I'd put apples to apples hardware: LAMP/SQ against an 
IIS/Outlook Web Access/Exchange5.5 environment any day in terms of 
response and extended features.  Oh, and the plugins for SQ are just 
plain fun and easy to write.

Now... who wants to offer up opinions on the right IMAP package to use?

-Jay

[1] http://www.kuleuven.net/projects/imapproxy/ (an older Horde project)

-- 
Jay Cuthrell, CTO
NeoNova Network Services
http://www.neonova.net/
jay@neonova.net 919.460.3330