You people might laugh at this but I don’t want anything to do with google.
When they bought youtube, my login there got trashed and replaced with a google login. But the google login was forced to be the one we use at work for the google Adwords account, and didn’t access my youtube account which was now orphaned. Also my office manageress who uses gmail.com for her personal email found that google had forced the work adwords login onto her gmail account and sorting that out made the adwords account (where she looks after the search keywords etc) inaccessible. Obviously all this can be solved by having a completely freshly installed browser (say chrome) for just gmail and not use that browser for anything else that is connected with google, and use another freshly installed browser (say IE) for the adwords account and use another freshly installed browser for some other google login stuff (taking care to clean up any stored config before installing each browser, with say Ccleaner) but life is way too short for that. So I phoned google (we pay them £600/month for adwords so we have a phone number for them) and the man said Yes we have had loads of complaints about this and No there is no solution (other than the above one with multiple different browsers) and No there is no way to get your youtube account back. So she uses IE for her gmail account, and IE isn’t used for anything else, except the Royal Mail franking account which works only on IE 
And I use Vimeo.
I am sure there are solutions in the form of some browser plug-in which presents different subsets of the cookie database to different sites and that would allow the use of the same browser across multiple sites related to e.g. google. But managing this would be a hassle because most of the time it’s not obvious which sites dump which cookies in your browser (though, again, there are apps for that I bet).
I thought a webmail app would directly access the email server file system but Ilohamail didn’t because it had a Logout button; I am pretty sure it used POP. It was also a binary or PHP app since that server had no Java but had PHP.
I will look at Zimbra, AfterLogic and Squirrel. Many thanks all.
If it’s just you it may be ok, but I for one hate POP3 for a webmail client.
If it’s just reading mail, it may be fine, but you cannot do any mailbox management (e.g. folders) without having all your mail clients going terribly out of sync, because they all have their local copy.
IMAP is the way to go if you access your mailbox from multiple devices (i.e. a laptop, a phone, webmail via browser). Keeps all your local copies exactly identical, including folder structure.
If you’ve written off Google then fair enough, but the situation has changed quite a bit since the problems you experienced. You can now be logged in to more than one Google account at the same time, in the same browser and flick between the accounts by clicking an ever-present menu in the top corner of the page.
Also, for other situations where you find yourself needing multiple browsers, Chrome has a feature built-in (no plugins) which allows you to have complete user personas, each with their own set of cookies, history etc. Again you can flick between them very readily.
Google is to everyday internet/web use as stick and rudder is to flying Why bother fighting the tide?
Squirrel is a great option if you’d like to stick with old browsers or Lynx ;)
RoundCube is an excellent open source webmail application that has an updated GUI. Easy install and with good features.
And as mentioned, switch to IMAPS.
My mail clients don’t do IMAP.
What client are you using that can’t do IMAP (or better, IMAPS)? I don’t think I’ve seen a client that doesn’t do IMAP for at least a decade. Even Outlook can managet it (for certain values of managing IMAP)
I don’t think I’ve seen a client that doesn’t do IMAP for at least a decade
I am sure that is the situation today
But if you run a business in which you require access to emails going back say 20 years, you can’t dump one email client and switch to another. The databases won’t be compatible.
Coincidentally, within the last month, I have had two large long-term customers (or, more accurately, corporate climber types inside them) trying to bend me over a barrel and shaft me into doing something very expensive, which I was able to prove that I had no liability for, by pulling out emails from 10-15 years ago.
Business can be very different from private life where you can toss out old emails, and indeed many people treat emails like instant messages, reading only the first few lines and not keeping them more than a few days back. I don’t do that in my private life and I can’t do it in business. Funnily enough I am 99% sure the two customers had not kept old emails either… most companies are not that well organised.
The email program is Agent. It has been around since the early 1990s. It is very solid and probably totally immune from exploits, partly because nobody will bother writing one and partly because it doesn’t process HTML or other similar stuff. Clicking on an HTML-only email opens it in a browser. Fortunately, in business, HTML-only emails are not common and most attachments (purchase orders, etc) are just PDFs. It does POP3 with APOP or SSL/TLS, which is good enough. Its database is also easy to manage, backup, etc. Its only real drawback is that you have only one level of email folders (may have been changed in a later version).
We also use a 10 year old version of Sage accounts 
So you can probably guess what my office looks like
I would not touch the bloated virus magnet called Outlook with a 20ft bargepole. We still use Orifice 2003
I’ve got all my mail going back to 1990 as well; I don’t delete any. Sounds like your problem is Windows, not IMAP. Most non-Windows email storage is “one message, one file”. Certainly that’s how your SMTP server works. The beauty of that is you never need to worry about mail databases and compatibility. I’ve changed servers a few times over that period and each time it’s been straightforward because of the simplicity of that storage mechanism.
The whole point of IMAP is that messages live on the server, not on a less reliable, more vulnerable desktop/laptop/phone. The client is then irrelevant – I bet I’ve used dozens over that 25 year period.
I can see you’re not going to be convinced to switch, which is fair enough, but it does mean your webmail experience is going to be limited – you won’t for example be able to find an old email, or any replies you’ve sent, etc. etc.
As always, there are other angles here…
I am sure one could export the messages from Agent (it has an “export in unix format” option, which I use regularly) and using some custom written converter one could write out several tens of thousands of individual message files, which could be uploaded to an IMAP server. There is a risk in that; you would never know if a load of messages from say 2005 got corrupted.
POP also has certain advantages. One is privacy – the entire message database (apart from those you haven’t read yet) resides on your PC and not on some server which somebody can potentially hack. Backups are also secure; a batch process runs every night and zips up the whole database, and the hard drive is periodically swapped for another one living in a fire safe. Another one may be the size of data transferred, though I can imagine that cuts both ways, depending on the scenario.
I use webmail in a limited context and not seeing replies etc is not a problem.
Just as an update on this old thread:
NOCC Webmail is the only one which does the required job and it works great. Very slick in the way it displays both inline images and image attachments, as inline images. So if somebody sends you multiple image attachments, perhaps some inline and some as attachments, you don’t need to click on each one to open it.
And it works on mobiles.
