roundcube webmail

Hot on the heals of my success with horde, I decided to check out another webmail package - roundcubemail.

I'd come across roundcube in my surfing once before, but it was a recent positive mention on one of the blogs that I follow that prompted me to check it out properly.

Roundcube can be found at www.roundcube.net and it comes in at a teeny 1.6MB tar.gz compared to horde's 26MB. OK yes, horde does a lot more than just webmail for that 26MB, but that was after all the only thing I actually wanted....

With a working apache and mysql instance already setup, adding another vhost, and database for roundcube was really simple. 10 minute job tops.

The initial configuration & "installation" is done entirely through the web interface by accessing the /installer directory.
This takes you through a nice systems requirement check screen, followed by an easy to use 3 step wizard which creates the rather complex config files for you.

You can either download them using the provided link, or just copy/paste the contents across from the text box onscreen, which I opted for. I was already sshed into my webserver anyway, pasting into vim was quickest.

You also have to create a log and temp directories that your webserver/roundcube instance has write access to.
It really was very painless to get through all that.

At the end of the wizard you can even test the configuration, both smtp, imap, and database access. This is one seriously polished product - top marks guys!

I did run into database issues again when trying to load the front page. The roundcube error log (/logs/errors) plained pointed to the cause though the database table didn't exist.
Just like last time I seem to have managed to start off with an empty database again. I still don't know what is causing this is, but the fix was the same as with horde:
mysql -u roundcubemail -ppasswordhere roundcubemail <>

With the database initialised, roundcube was ready for action.
And that's it!

I've been playing with it for 15 minutes so far and really love it :)

Do check it out :)