Teromail summarizing webmail

Teromail is a free summarizing webmail with smart search. It is not actively being developed nor tested enough for production use, but is usefull as

• A prototype of a better user interface for webmail
• An example how to program with php-imap library.

Why Teromail - Download - Standards - Links

Why Teromail?

Beginners

• Easy to use
• No user configuration needed
• Toolbar (new message, search, logout) and mailboxes always visible
• User interface is tested with actual non-geek humans during development

Advanced users

• Initial summary page is often enough for reading mail
  • Summary shows the real content by skipping quotes and newlines
• Search works like web search engines
  • Case insensitive "and" search
  • Automatically searches both headers and body
• Usable in both graphical browsers (Mozilla, Phoenix) and text mode browsers (lynx, elinks).
• Mobile devices support
  • xhtml basic is an html standard specially made for pda's
  • Only three page requests are needed to view latest messages (login, summary, logout)
• Light interface without visual clutter
  • No graphics (in the interface, can of course display attached pics)
  • Only new message -page uses tables
• Secure, always uses ssl (https) connection
• Tabs support: any link can be opened in a new window or tab.

Administrators

• Easy installation
  • Just copy teromail directory into a directory displayed on the web, such as ~/public_html/ or /var/www/html/
• Secure, teromail is just another client to imap server

Business people

• Free, runs on a completely free platform

Developers

• Small codebase: only 700 lines of php code (to compare, a well known webmail Squirrelmail is more than 25 000 lines of php)
• Toobox principle - small separate tools. Teromail uses external programs and libraries when possible.
  • imap server: basic mail handling, sending, searching
  • php-imap (a standard part of php 4): connection to the imap server
  • optional components
    • spamassassin and procmail can filter spam
• Free software, GNU General Public Licence

Download and install

Download teromail-0.3.53.tar.bz2 (18 KB). Includes major bugfixes and minor feature enhancements. Bugfixes: sends quoted-printable, reply works everywhere, abstracts skips long quotes, XHTML validated, only cookies used for sessions, save hidden. Features: compose look&feel improved, got rid of all html-tables. Beta code. To get rid of funny warning messages, set DEBUG=0 in config.php. Teromail 0.3.53 was released on April 6 2003.

Requires: Apache web server, an imap server, php 4 and php_imap. If you are using apt with redhat, you can install these with
apt-get install httpd php php-imap; /etc/init.d/httpd restart; chkconfig imap on; chkconfig imaps on;

To install, simply download teromail to a directory displayed on web, such as /var/www/html or $HOME/public_html. Then uncompress the package tar -jxvf teromail*.tar.bz2. That's it, now you can use it by pointing your web browser to http://localhost/teromail-version/

Old and obsolete 0.3.38-alpha (16 KB) is still available in download/. This alpha version was buggy, but suitable for usability testing and user interface preview. Teromail 0.3.38-alpha was released Mar 15 2003.

Standars and technologies used in Teromail

PHP

php manual - sessions - regexp - perlre - strings

HTML

XHTML basic 1.0 - XHTML 1.0 - Modularization of XHTML (tag definitions) - HTML Compatibility Guidelines

CSS Level 2

Email

Transfer

imap (rfc2060) - php-imap

Message format

Internet Message Format rfc2822

Common Internet Message Headers rfc2076

Mime

Format of Internet Message Bodies (headers) rfc2045

Media Types rfc2046

Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text rfc2047 - utf8_decode(str) uft-8 to iso-8859-1 - imap_8bit(str) iso-8859-1 to quoted-printable

Conformance Criteria and Examples (and bibliography) rfc2049

Links

Other free webmail clients

Squirrelmail is php based webmail. It is easy to install, and has many plugins. However, user interface uses frames. Codebase is more than 25 000 lines ('cd /usr/share/squirrelmail', 'find src/ functions/ config/ -iname \*.php |xargs wc -l' "27457 total").

Imp is a popular php based webmail. It seems to be the choice of many universities. On the negative side, installation is a pain. Imp-latest seems to be 1.3 MB without horde.

As there are many great free webmails, why write another one? User interface is my main concern here. I feel that existing programs just use html to implement a user interface that was designed for text mode (like pine or mutt) or for locally executed gui program (like kMail or Evolution). There is no reason why a webmail could not outperform a standalone program.

Teromail elsewhere

Teromail freshmeat entry

<< Up - (c) 2003 Tero Karvinen. Validate XHTML Basic 1.0 - CSS