Being odd, I run my own mail server. This is a legacy of me having poor service from online mail providers, being a bit paranoid and wanting to reuse old hardware. I run the excellent Mecury mail server and use Vista’s Windows Mail client to read using PoP3.
All this talk about clouds however has got me thinking. I really should consider beefing up the server and switching to IMAP4. That way I can read my mail anywhere, on any device with a suitable client. Ideally, to even the experience out, I need a webmail client to wrap around IMAP4 and make it truly universal.
After not much poking around, I’ve come across RoundCube. It is a simple, elegant but more than adequate mail client and only took about an hour to get working. As I run Apache, MySQL and PHP already it was a breeze. Mercury is very standards-compliant so it never grumbles when other software talks to it properly.
For anyone wanting to do a similar thing, I recommend getting XAMPP and following the simple steps here on getting it working. If there is enough (any) interest, I may put a page together showing how easy it all is.
