Switching…

Boy did I miss out on a important update. I forgot this email during the holidays and only noted the upgrade on Roundcube because there was a patch released this week which solves a bug with parsing HTML messages which got introduced in the last security update for 0.1-beta2.

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.

We had to wait a long time for this release but its finally there. The Roundcube developers finally released their second beta, there where some intermediate CVS releases if which I’ve tried some. The new version has some new functionality about which you can read the announcement:

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.

Just a quick word. I wanted to let you know that the OS X Security Update 2006-001
won’t be any problem and you can apply it to your server setup (if you followed my instructions). Although there is an update in it where the apache_mod_php is replaced, we are using another PHP module which is located in a different place. The server logistics package is still at 4.3.9 and is still a security issue. I’m looking into compiling a version myself and help you compile it yourself without to much problems.

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.

As a former user of squirrelmail on my Sun box I loved the use of a webmail client to access my mail all over the world on any computer connected to the internet equipped with a graphical browser. When confronted with the Roundcube webmail project I had to try it out and installing it on my mac mini server was the natural thing to do. I subscribed to the announcement mailinglist to keep track of updates as the official release version was and still is 0.1. (more…)

I’ve got the server running for some days now and I must say it’s handling the load quit well. The only thing I had trouble with migrating easily was the squirrel webmail program, it had some problems with the include path and I didn’t feel like re-installing it. I’ve received emails from people saying that I should use Roundcube for web based email, not getting squirrel to run was the perfect excuse I needed to try and install it. (more…)