Nix Zimbra, RoundCube is more what i was thinking

So last week i posted something about how tech collectives needed much better open source web mail apps… it got the attention of the riseup.net and resist.ca collectives. Mostly they soundly rejected the notion that they were in competition with yahoo mail, hotmail, and gmail. I agree on some points, but also we need to be having apps which make activists more productive as well as encouraging more secure email and social ownership over the means of communication.

After looking at zimbra i have to agree with kellan, it’s the wrong solution. It’s a bulky server side java solution which tries to do everything. That and it’s dog slow.

So a couple days ago blaine came across another solution which looks interesting, the roundcube webmail project is a more lightweight php based webmail app. Instead of trying to emulate outlook like oddpost and zimbra do, it’s got a simplest thing which could work elegance. Usability and simplicity.

That ease of use goes beyond just the interface, m installed it on the resist servers for a test without much trouble.

The question which remains is this. Is it worth the tech collectives effort in extra support to add yet another webmail client. I hope they choose to do it, either roundcube or something else which works.

Last thursday at hacknight espe was talking about building something like roundcube but with a django backend instead of php. I tried to advocate for rails but i was out numbered by phython heads and they were right about the state of python libraries being much better than ruby libs.