I have a mail server (maintained by a colleague who knows “unix”) which has just been moved from a FreeBSD server (running on ADSL!) to a fast Centos server.
I used to have a webmail app – Ilohamail. This was really basic and failed to correctly display all but the simplest plain text emails. One had to do View Source to read them… Obviously HTML-only emails (a rapidly spreading plague) you could just forget…
We are now looking for a new and modern webmail client for the Centos server. The normal way of fetching emails from the server is POP3 with SSL/TLS but sometimes webmail is handy, especially for deleting large amounts of unwanted emails (not spam as such – I pay £420/year to Messagelabs for spam filtering) or if travelling with a laptop on a poor mobile connection and you get some massive emails in your inbox.
I have done the usual googling and have some other recommendations, but there is one thing which most webmail apps seem to do badly: attachment handling. Is there a webmail app which displays multiple graphics image (jpeg etc) attachments as thumbnails, of a reasonable size, so if somebody emails you say 10 attached jpegs you can see them at a glance? The email app on a Windows 8 phone does exactly that and it’s really nice (there is not a lot else that’s functional on WP8).
Otherwise, it should be a nice clear program which doesn’t download a meg just to display the UI, and which supports all the modern email formats including inline images.
I would be grateful for any suggestions.
There is no PHP running on the server which rules out some webmail apps.
Google Apps for Business. The best email service you can get at a reasonable price and with your domain name. I would never go back to running my own mail server, it’s such a hassle. The Gmail web interface is better than anything else I’ve seen. I stopped using mail clients years ago.
The normal way of fetching emails from the server is POP3
POP3… you’re kidding?
horde/imp or squirrelmail. I’m not sure they do pop3, seems to be the wrong protocol for this.
I don’t actually know if a webmail app grabs the emails via POP3. It may use some internal connection.
We don’t have IMAP on there and the email clients I use at home, work and on the laptop don’t do IMAP.
Google use some aggressive spam filtering which I have seen drop a lot of bona fide emails. In my business that would be no good because at work we need to receive emails from say S America and China, which are full of spammers. Messagelabs spam filtering does a good job with these places.
We don’t have IMAP
Is there any mail server software left that doesn’t do IMAP? Wow…
It may use some internal connection.
Well yes all webmail server software speaks IMAP on this internal connection 
My mail clients don’t do IMAP.
How the webmail client connects doesn’t bother me 
Webmail and POP3 will not play nice together unless you have all your POP3 clients set to ‘leave a copy of the message on the server’ – which is very messy, and without IMAP there’s no way of setting read / unread flags, or synchronising sent items.
The whole thing sounds a bit messy to be honest!
Any reason why you can’t use IMAP? I’m struggling to think what the mail client is that you may be using that don’t support it!
Yes; all email clients but one leave a copy on the server. I have been doing this for 20 years. It works great
You can install something on the server (which would need some kind of server software, such as Perl, PHP, Java, or something else) which then accesses the mail via IMAP or directly reading the file system. Or you can use something external to access your mail server using POP or IMAP. GMail supports POP retrieval from a third-party server. It’s a firm favourite for many, including Achim evidently, and me, because of various features it has that most clients don’t have, though some of them will only be beneficial if you’re using a google-hosted account. The nice thing about using something like this is that you don’t have to install anything, so you can just try it and see if you like it.
If you want to install something you could try Zimbra or AfterLogic. But personally I’d try gmail first.
Using POP with appropriate “leave on server” settings is fine, but it means you don’t get read/unread/replied status, sent message, etc. on all devices. Plus doesn’t POP not support any kind of push/idle mechanism, so you have to poll the server?
