6 ms·

Ask HN: Open-source alternatives of Gmail?

75 points by diamondhead 15y ago

I've been planning to switch to an open-source alternative of Gmail. Any suggestions/experiences/thoughts?

suivix 15y ago
If something that is hosted by a 3rd party 'in the cloud' is open source, does it really help? Since someone else is still managing your data.
- wccrawford 15y ago
  You don't think he's planning to host it himself in the cloud? Quite a few platforms make this easy enough, if not very cheap.
- rmc 15y ago
  If it's open source, you can (presumably) download it yourself and host it yourself. (I know technically with most FLOSS licences you don't need to share the code unless you distribute it, but it would completely miss the point to call it open source and not distribute the code)
112percent 15y ago
We really like Group Office, whilst it doesn't have the class of Gmail, or the search prowess it works really well for small teams. If you are taking about using something like Sup then I think there is too much faff should you ever decide to migrate away from it. Whilst it looks and works great it is useless for interoperability with your phone etc..
seqastian 15y ago
AtMail Open seems nice? problem with most webmail apps seems that they want to be desktop apps for some reason and completely miss the point imho
- dochtman 15y ago
  It looks fairly bland and aged (and especially bad when compared to screenshots of the commercial AtMail webmail client).
dochtman 15y ago
AFAICT the best alternative, interface-wise, is Roundcube, and it doesn't seem particularly exciting (it's also written in PHP... which doesn't necessarily have to count against it, but makes me a little wary). I've foolishly started to build my own, which at some point may become good enough to open source (I certainly don't want to commercialize it).
- unicornporn 15y ago
  Roundcube it is. If one is looking for threading and the more advanced options available in Gmail there's not much of an alternative as it stands right now.
- pstadler 15y ago
  Roundcube is by far the most clean, intuitive and beautiful opensource webmail client out there. > it's also written in PHP... which doesn't necessarily have to count against it, but makes me a little wary why that?
  - mahcuz 15y ago
    Because it's PHP. Duh. </sarcasm>
  - getsat 15y ago
    The quality of the code in your average PHP project is... less than stellar. Low quality code typically results in exploitable bugs (XSS, CSRF, SQL injection, remote code execution, local filesystem access, etc.).
- nprincigalli 15y ago
  Interestingly, I remember in 2006 Roundcube was already being touted as a gmail lookalike. Back when being able to move your emails from one folder to another using drag-n-drop in the browser made you feel /slick/ :)
- whichdan 15y ago
  http://trac.roundcube.net/browser/trunk/roundcubemail http://trac.roundcube.net/browser/trunk/roundcubemail Looks like pretty straightforward PHP4. I wouldn't really hold that against it unless you plan to do development with it.
wccrawford 15y ago
I went looking for something suitable a while back, but I didn't find anything. The search is nice, but I'm really more interested in the mail interface. The features I use: Sending and receiving (duh) delayed mail (in case I make a mistake... And I will!) filtering (and tags/folders) keyboard shortcuts simple search, with folder/tag support browser-based, so I can access it anywhere
- unicornporn 15y ago
  Google were smart when they implemented tags. I've used them immensely (several tags per e-mail). Most (?) IMAP servers doesn't support tags, that makes migrating from Gmail a hard decision for me right now.
  - pja 15y ago
    Dovecot supports tags.
    - nuclear_eclipse 15y ago
      Dovecot supports it, but are there any good, stable IMAP clients that work with it?
      - caseyf2 15y ago
        Pine (or Alpine) ;) I love nearly everything about Pine, but I wish that Dovecot's IMAP searching was faster.
      - pja 15y ago
        Thunderbird good enough? (Although I usually kill the default tags that Thunderbird still includes as a hangover from the original Thunderbird release because that way I get useful tag names in the Maildir should I ever need to hack on them directly.)
        sixtofour 15y ago
astro1138 15y ago
SUP is supposedly modeled after Gmail, if you enjoy the benefits of text tools. I myself am using mutt.
- jedbrown 15y ago
  http://notmuchmail.org/ http://notmuchmail.org/ is a good alternative to Sup, but neither of these are webmail.
codehotter 15y ago
Alternative to what? Hosted email? Or the web interface? If the latter: http://roundcube.net/ http://roundcube.net/ It access email through imap - so you still need a good mailbox server.
pbreit 15y ago
The best list I've seen: http://www.noupe.com/ajax/10-ajax-webmail-clients.html http://www.noupe.com/ajax/10-ajax-webmail-clients.html But none really compare too favorably with Gmail. Zimbra was looking good before it went to yahoo and then VMware.
- nodata 15y ago
  > Zimbra was looking good before it went to yahoo and then VMware. Can you elaborate?
  - markokocic 15y ago
    I can. The problem with Zimbra is that it tries to mimick Outolook on the web, not to be actual webmail. If you like Outlook, you'll feel at home, but compared with Gmail it just feels to old school. And it is slow, even inside a LAN.
teyc 15y ago
SquirrelMail (is open source) and has some nice paid themes http://nutsmail.com/ http://nutsmail.com/
- davidcollantes 15y ago
  Nutsmail have done a pretty impressive modification of the original Squirrelmail to include clean, good looking themes and plugins, all nicely packaged. Thanks for the link!
Hoodoo 15y ago
I have recently switched from Roundcube to Squirrelmail - the former worked annoyingly slow for me. I only had to tweak the source code a bit to get rid of these _ugly_ iframe borders. I don't use web interface too much though.
- nodata 15y ago
  I seriously cannot believe that something that looks like it was designed for Netscape Navigator still exists. There must be a need for it over everything else, I'd love to know where it's still used.
  - aninteger 15y ago
    Some of us favor the old web 1.0 interface. It's clean and simple and it renders fast.
  - goodside 15y ago
    Or there's very little need for it, which is why nobody has made anything better since.
    - diamondhead 15y ago
      according to @teyc's comment, nutsmail sells templates for it.
  - Hoodoo 15y ago
    It's my own hobby vps, so I could use telnet there if I felt like it. I think if I've made a screenshot of it it might make people's eyes bleed, since I've modified the minimal theme which came with it a little to fit my taste. :) I don't see the web interface too often anyway.
  - chalst 15y ago
    Is this a styling objecting? I don't think these issues are trivial exactly, but if the deployers cared, it would not be too difficult to beautify. Universities often use Squirrelmail. The most recent instance I saw was for Potsdam.
aphexairlines 15y ago
Hula had shown a lot of promise, but it withered away: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_(software) It was forked though as Bongo: http://bongo-project.org/Main_Page http://bongo-project.org/Main_Page
- LanceHaig 15y ago
  Hula was killed off by Novell when it sold Netmail to Messaging Architects. We did fork the code and have moved on quite a bit we are in dire need of front end developers to help make a great frontend for a fantastic backend system. if anyone is interested in helping out please come by the IRC channel or the mail list EDIT: For those that are interested the IRC channel is #bongo on irc.oftc.net We have some bindings to allow for webui development we have a complete PHP one which we used to plug roundcube's interface onto our backend. The others are in different stages of completion, there is the start of a mono binding and a ruby one so any help with these parts would be greatly appreciated.
cq 15y ago
Any AGPL webmail clients like gmail? I prefer Free Software to Open Source
mstevens 15y ago
I really like http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/prayer/ http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/prayer/ (prayer webmail). It's very much hitting the basic, fast spot though, rather than the gmail style.
- thepointyhat 15y ago
  Thanks for that - looks top notch. Will try that out tonight.
titel 15y ago
Have you checked RoundCube out? It's a modern and open source self hosted email client - http://roundcube.net/ http://roundcube.net/
hoopti 15y ago
I find the problem with most of the open source UI's out there is the lack of good search capabilities. It is just so easy to open up gmail and search for a document. Everything else that uses imap seems slow and old.
diamondhead 15y ago
http://inbox2.com http://inbox2.com http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3083935 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3083935
- yeahsure 15y ago
  I don't understand. Wasn't this an iPad/Windows email client that went open source? The OP is looking for a webmail, open source solution similar to Gmail.
ck2 15y ago
Thunderbird is getting pretty darn good lately. Now that Firefox mobile is getting good too, maybe Thunderbird mobile will start to happen in 2012?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
jholman 15y ago
I actually see two problems with switching off gmail (which I'm starting to think about doing, as google keeps getting evil-er). One is how nice it is to have ubiquitous web-mail, integration with my Android, etc. Some of these problems I think I can solve with my own brain-sweat, and obviously this thread might help. But the other is spam. Before gmail, I hated spam. After switching to gmail (I guess about 5 years ago), I gradually lost my memory of spam ; I get less than one piece of spam per month. Is spam gone these days? Are there good open-source low-maintenance solutions?
- wazoox 15y ago
  My spamassassin lets very little spam through. Zero maintenance, but I took some time to tweak it.

75 points by diamondhead 15y ago

I've been planning to switch to an open-source alternative of Gmail. Any suggestions/experiences/thoughts?

If something that is hosted by a 3rd party 'in the cloud' is open source, does it really help? Since someone else is still managing your data.

wccrawford 15y ago
You don't think he's planning to host it himself in the cloud? Quite a few platforms make this easy enough, if not very cheap.
rmc 15y ago
If it's open source, you can (presumably) download it yourself and host it yourself. (I know technically with most FLOSS licences you don't need to share the code unless you distribute it, but it would completely miss the point to call it open source and not distribute the code)

112percent 15y ago

We really like Group Office, whilst it doesn't have the class of Gmail, or the search prowess it works really well for small teams. If you are taking about using something like Sup then I think there is too much faff should you ever decide to migrate away from it. Whilst it looks and works great it is useless for interoperability with your phone etc..

seqastian 15y ago

AtMail Open seems nice? problem with most webmail apps seems that they want to be desktop apps for some reason and completely miss the point imho

dochtman 15y ago
It looks fairly bland and aged (and especially bad when compared to screenshots of the commercial AtMail webmail client).

dochtman 15y ago

AFAICT the best alternative, interface-wise, is Roundcube, and it doesn't seem particularly exciting (it's also written in PHP... which doesn't necessarily have to count against it, but makes me a little wary). I've foolishly started to build my own, which at some point may become good enough to open source (I certainly don't want to commercialize it).

unicornporn 15y ago
Roundcube it is. If one is looking for threading and the more advanced options available in Gmail there's not much of an alternative as it stands right now.
pstadler 15y ago
Roundcube is by far the most clean, intuitive and beautiful opensource webmail client out there. > it's also written in PHP... which doesn't necessarily have to count against it, but makes me a little wary why that?
- mahcuz 15y ago
  Because it's PHP. Duh. </sarcasm>
- getsat 15y ago
  The quality of the code in your average PHP project is... less than stellar. Low quality code typically results in exploitable bugs (XSS, CSRF, SQL injection, remote code execution, local filesystem access, etc.).
nprincigalli 15y ago
Interestingly, I remember in 2006 Roundcube was already being touted as a gmail lookalike. Back when being able to move your emails from one folder to another using drag-n-drop in the browser made you feel /slick/ :)
whichdan 15y ago
http://trac.roundcube.net/browser/trunk/roundcubemail http://trac.roundcube.net/browser/trunk/roundcubemail Looks like pretty straightforward PHP4. I wouldn't really hold that against it unless you plan to do development with it.

wccrawford 15y ago

I went looking for something suitable a while back, but I didn't find anything. The search is nice, but I'm really more interested in the mail interface. The features I use: Sending and receiving (duh) delayed mail (in case I make a mistake... And I will!) filtering (and tags/folders) keyboard shortcuts simple search, with folder/tag support browser-based, so I can access it anywhere

unicornporn 15y ago
Google were smart when they implemented tags. I've used them immensely (several tags per e-mail). Most (?) IMAP servers doesn't support tags, that makes migrating from Gmail a hard decision for me right now.
- pja 15y ago
  Dovecot supports tags.
  - nuclear_eclipse 15y ago
    Dovecot supports it, but are there any good, stable IMAP clients that work with it?
    - caseyf2 15y ago
      Pine (or Alpine) ;) I love nearly everything about Pine, but I wish that Dovecot's IMAP searching was faster.
    - pja 15y ago
      Thunderbird good enough? (Although I usually kill the default tags that Thunderbird still includes as a hangover from the original Thunderbird release because that way I get useful tag names in the Maildir should I ever need to hack on them directly.)
      - sixtofour 15y ago

astro1138 15y ago

SUP is supposedly modeled after Gmail, if you enjoy the benefits of text tools. I myself am using mutt.

jedbrown 15y ago
http://notmuchmail.org/ http://notmuchmail.org/ is a good alternative to Sup, but neither of these are webmail.

codehotter 15y ago

Alternative to what? Hosted email? Or the web interface? If the latter: http://roundcube.net/ http://roundcube.net/ It access email through imap - so you still need a good mailbox server.

pbreit 15y ago

The best list I've seen: http://www.noupe.com/ajax/10-ajax-webmail-clients.html http://www.noupe.com/ajax/10-ajax-webmail-clients.html But none really compare too favorably with Gmail. Zimbra was looking good before it went to yahoo and then VMware.

nodata 15y ago
> Zimbra was looking good before it went to yahoo and then VMware. Can you elaborate?
- markokocic 15y ago
  I can. The problem with Zimbra is that it tries to mimick Outolook on the web, not to be actual webmail. If you like Outlook, you'll feel at home, but compared with Gmail it just feels to old school. And it is slow, even inside a LAN.

teyc 15y ago

SquirrelMail (is open source) and has some nice paid themes http://nutsmail.com/ http://nutsmail.com/

davidcollantes 15y ago
Nutsmail have done a pretty impressive modification of the original Squirrelmail to include clean, good looking themes and plugins, all nicely packaged. Thanks for the link!

Hoodoo 15y ago

I have recently switched from Roundcube to Squirrelmail - the former worked annoyingly slow for me. I only had to tweak the source code a bit to get rid of these _ugly_ iframe borders. I don't use web interface too much though.

nodata 15y ago
I seriously cannot believe that something that looks like it was designed for Netscape Navigator still exists. There must be a need for it over everything else, I'd love to know where it's still used.
- aninteger 15y ago
  Some of us favor the old web 1.0 interface. It's clean and simple and it renders fast.
- goodside 15y ago
  Or there's very little need for it, which is why nobody has made anything better since.
  - diamondhead 15y ago
    according to @teyc's comment, nutsmail sells templates for it.
- Hoodoo 15y ago
  It's my own hobby vps, so I could use telnet there if I felt like it. I think if I've made a screenshot of it it might make people's eyes bleed, since I've modified the minimal theme which came with it a little to fit my taste. :) I don't see the web interface too often anyway.
- chalst 15y ago
  Is this a styling objecting? I don't think these issues are trivial exactly, but if the deployers cared, it would not be too difficult to beautify. Universities often use Squirrelmail. The most recent instance I saw was for Potsdam.

aphexairlines 15y ago

Hula had shown a lot of promise, but it withered away: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_(software) It was forked though as Bongo: http://bongo-project.org/Main_Page http://bongo-project.org/Main_Page

LanceHaig 15y ago
Hula was killed off by Novell when it sold Netmail to Messaging Architects. We did fork the code and have moved on quite a bit we are in dire need of front end developers to help make a great frontend for a fantastic backend system. if anyone is interested in helping out please come by the IRC channel or the mail list EDIT: For those that are interested the IRC channel is #bongo on irc.oftc.net We have some bindings to allow for webui development we have a complete PHP one which we used to plug roundcube's interface onto our backend. The others are in different stages of completion, there is the start of a mono binding and a ruby one so any help with these parts would be greatly appreciated.

cq 15y ago

Any AGPL webmail clients like gmail? I prefer Free Software to Open Source

mstevens 15y ago

I really like http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/prayer/ http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/prayer/ (prayer webmail). It's very much hitting the basic, fast spot though, rather than the gmail style.

thepointyhat 15y ago
Thanks for that - looks top notch. Will try that out tonight.

titel 15y ago

Have you checked RoundCube out? It's a modern and open source self hosted email client - http://roundcube.net/ http://roundcube.net/

hoopti 15y ago

I find the problem with most of the open source UI's out there is the lack of good search capabilities. It is just so easy to open up gmail and search for a document. Everything else that uses imap seems slow and old.

diamondhead 15y ago

http://inbox2.com http://inbox2.com http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3083935 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3083935

yeahsure 15y ago
I don't understand. Wasn't this an iPad/Windows email client that went open source? The OP is looking for a webmail, open source solution similar to Gmail.

ck2 15y ago

Thunderbird is getting pretty darn good lately. Now that Firefox mobile is getting good too, maybe Thunderbird mobile will start to happen in 2012?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

jholman 15y ago

I actually see two problems with switching off gmail (which I'm starting to think about doing, as google keeps getting evil-er). One is how nice it is to have ubiquitous web-mail, integration with my Android, etc. Some of these problems I think I can solve with my own brain-sweat, and obviously this thread might help. But the other is spam. Before gmail, I hated spam. After switching to gmail (I guess about 5 years ago), I gradually lost my memory of spam ; I get less than one piece of spam per month. Is spam gone these days? Are there good open-source low-maintenance solutions?

wazoox 15y ago
My spamassassin lets very little spam through. Zero maintenance, but I took some time to tweak it.