Ask HN: Know of a Gmailish Interface for Self-Hosted Email?

5 points by gierach 15 years ago | 8 comments

I'm a long-time Gmail user and love the slick web interface. I love the searchability, threading of emails, intuitive reply mechanism, built-in chat, etc. However, I don't have full control over it. I would like to run my own mail server, with my own domain, and host a comparable web interface to it for my own purposes. Built-in chat would be great (maybe compatible with XMPP so I could still chat with my Gmail contacts).

Does anyone know of a package out there that fits the bill? I'm not looking for "Google Apps for your Domain". Does anyone else think this would be useful?

gexla 15 years ago |

I would advise against running your own web server unless you really know what you are doing. I'm sure you know how to setup a web server, but email deliverability (getting past spam filters of the big email providers) is a huge pain in the *. So much that I don't even attempt it these days, I just outsource my email.

gierach 15 years ago | |

Ok, let's change the context then. What if I run a web hosting company and want to offer an installable package that includes an MTA, MDA and a front end for viewing/sending mail? (I don't run a web hosting company, so I'm sure there are other things that need to go into that mix.) The customer would click a button and we would configure everything on their VPS or whatever. If that's not plausible enough, maybe I'm a web hosting company that just offers to host your email and now I've got enough scale to make it worth investing resources to ensure deliverability and spam filtering. At some point it's got to be worth running your own email infrastructure and for those scenarios, is there an installable front end that has the Gmail special sauce?

jaddison 15 years ago |

Given the fact that server failure is a 'when', not an 'if', I'd recommend using "Google Apps for your Domain". It takes the hassle out of it all (as you already likely already know!) and leaves you (and your team?) free to focus on making money.

bobf 15 years ago |

I don't know of anything that will give you anything even close to Gmail as far as an interface/search/chat. Also, running your own email server is basically saying "sign me up for an endless source of pain". At my current job, when we were hosting our own email, I was spending 4-5 hours a month on email issues on average. Google Apps is either free or $50/user/year - although it is a bit less flexible, it is well worth it to me.

joezydeco 15 years ago |

Clarify what "I don't have full control" means in this situation. Do you want to run procmail? Bulk sends? Mailing lists?

underdesign 15 years ago |

I was pointed here as an installable Gmail alternate: http://roundcube.net/

gierach 15 years ago | |

Thank you for the concrete suggestion! From the screenshots, Roundcube looks like a very good webmail client. It looks like they're going after Outlook though with their feature set and layout.

[Edit] But this is exactly what I'm looking for in terms of being an installable package that can be thrown on a web server and hooked up to an in-house or third party email infrastructure.

zkirill 15 years ago | |

Roundcube is good and has come a long way over the years.