The security update for December is an important one if you haven’t upgraded or installed since then you are advised to do so. My apologies for bringing you this news a bit too late, I’ll try to be more alert in the future.

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After a long period of development and some major changes in the
project organisation, we finally released version 0.1-beta2. New
features like message search, spellchecking, saving messages as
draft and folder renaming are introduced with this release.

It is looking like a solid release which is perfectly usable in a production environment. I did a fresh install of the source and created a fresh database to make sure that I didn’t inherit any problems from previous versions. If you want to do the same you can use my instructions on installing it on Mac OS X.

Update: After playing with it for a day there are some notable improvements. Forwarding emails with attachements work properly and the From field is correctly filled. The biggest plus for me however, as english isn’t my native tongue, the spell checking capabilities.

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I’ve also upgraded my Blog to WordPress 2.0.1 last night, I was still using 1.5 and felt that I needed to upgrade. You might have noticed postings disappearing and appearing double in the RSS feed. Something went wrong during the upgrade but I made a backup !!! Which enabled me to try again successfully…
The Roundcube webmail project has made 2 patches available that solve two ugly bugs. One prevented from saving the language selection in the user preferences and the other completely omitted mail headers when having no smtp server configured.

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Despite being version 0.1 it looks pretty mature, it’s a full working webmail with all the basic features you need to read and send mail. I didn’t find or encountered any serious bugs while using it. Just sometimes I needed to click more than once to read a single email. When I received an email Thomas Bruederli on the announcement list that he released an updated CVS version I dared to use it as version 0.1 was a stable release. I’ve been using this CVS release roundcubemail-cvs-20060205 for a couple of days now and I must say some of the rough edges have been smoothed. The interface is much more responsive than the 0.1 version so I’m keeping this one as my current production webmail.

Please note that this is still alpha stage software.

To do the upgrade you need to do the following (copied from the upgrade guide)

- replace index.php

- replace all files in folder /program/

- replace all files in folder /skins/default/

- run all commands in SQL/*.update.sql or re-initalize database with *.initial.sql

- add these line to /config/main.inc.php
$rcmail_config['trash_mbox'] = 'Trash';
$rcmail_config['default_imap_folders'] = array('INBOX', 'Drafts', 'Sent', 'Junk', 'Trash');
$rcmail_config['prefer_html'] = TRUE;
$rcmail_config['prettydate'] = TRUE;
$rcmail_config['smtp_port'] = 25;
$rcmail_config['default_port'] = 143;
$rcmail_config['session_lifetime'] = 20;
$rcmail_config['skip_deleted'] = FALSE;
$rcmail_config['message_sort_col'] = 'date';
$rcmail_config['message_sort_order'] = 'DESC';
$rcmail_config['log_dir'] = 'logs/';
$rcmail_config['temp_dir'] = 'temp/';

- replace database properties (db_type, db_host, db_user, db_pass, $d_name)
in /config/db.inc.php with the following line:
$rcmail_config['db_dsnw'] = 'mysql://roundcube:pass@localhost/roundcubemail';

- add these lines to /config/db.inc.php
$rcmail_config['db_max_length'] = 512000;

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It didn’t look to complicated and it turned out to be one of the easier installs on the server. This is what I had to do to get it working:

First you need to download the code from the Roundcube site, I’ve used roundcube_webmail_0.1-20051021.tar.gz.

Extract the archive into the directory /Library/Apache2/htdocs (if you have the Apache installation from Server Logistics like I did and documented).

Step into the directory roundcubemail-0.1-20051021 and change the permissions on the temp and logs directory so that the webserver can write into these directories with the following commands:
chown -R www:www temp
chown -R www:www logs

Next we need to create a database for Roundcube to use. Start up MySQL on the command line and issue the following commands in MySQL:

CREATE DATABASE roundcubemail;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON roundcubemail.* TO roundcube@localhost
IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit

Note: Change the PASSWORD into any password you would like to use, remember it as you need to put it in the configuration file later.

Next we need to create the database structure (tables and such), luckily a script to create all this has been included in the archive. You need to execute the following command to import the script into the database:

mysql -p roundcubemail <sql/mysql.initial.sql

Next step is modifying the configuration of Roundcube to reflect your situation. Step into the directory config and we will first edit the database connection. Edit the file db.inc.php and change the password in the following line with the password you used earlier:

rcmail_config['db_dsnw'] = 'mysql://roundcube:PASSWORD@localhost/roundcubemail';

Next file to edit is the main.inc.php and change the following lines:

$rcmail_config['enable_caching'] = FALSE;

Define the host as localhost

$rcmail_config['default_host'] = 'localhost';

But if you use IMAP over SSL as I do you need to use:

$rcmail_config['default_host'] = 'ssl://localhost:993';

If you’ve changed these lines your done with the configuration of Roundcube.

I like to use a subdomains to divide up the specific tasks my webserver does. I use http://webmail.richard5.net to allow users to access their mail. (Mental note: still need to provide SSL support for this). How you can set this up as well is as follows:

Go into /Library/Apache2/conf and edit the httpd.conf file. Uncomment the following line:

NameVirtualHost *:80

and add the following beneath it:


ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.tld
DocumentRoot /Library/Apache2/htdocs/roundcubemail-0.1-20051021/
ServerName webmail.yourdomain.tld
ErrorLog logs/webmail-error_log
CustomLog logs/webmail-access_log combined



Then restart Apache by issuing the command:

/Library/Apache2/bin/apachectl restart

Point your browser to http://webmail.yourdomain.tld and you should see a login screen appear.

For errors you could check the logfiles to explain what went wrong. For Roundcube errors check the /Library/Apache2/htdocs/roundcubemail-0.1-20051021/logs/errors file and for general mail errors check the /var/log/mail.log file.

Hope you enjoy Roundcube as much as I do…

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