Is anyone using Squirrel Mail? (it may be going away)


tgonhawk1

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I happened across a cPanel blog post, https://blog.cpanel.com/the-death-of-squirrelmail/  which describes
the plans by cPanel to deprecate and eventually remove Squirrel Mail as a choice for webmail.

Since I use Squirrel mail in preference to the other two for a number of reasons, I am dismayed at this prospect.

Squirrel mail seems to offer more ways to format your mail folders, display email addresses, adjust columns,
and has a very handy "Purge" button for emptying the Trash with a single click, to name a few things.
Also, the others don't seem to offer any choice of fonts, and the ones they use are small and difficult to read.

In the cPanel post, it says:
" You can continue to use SquirrelMail after version 78 because cPanel & WHM supports
custom webmail applications. Follow our documentation on Integrating Custom Webmail Applications, "

I wasn't sure what section of this Forum to put this, but here is a question/suggestion:

I suggest that Hawkhost look into and consider continuing to offer Squirrel Mail as a choice.

While I have no idea of how many of your clients use it, or how many look at the forum,
maybe if there are  a few concurring opinions, you will consider it. I hope so.

 

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We'll likely wait until it's deprecated and see how many users request it. It's possible we'll support it ourselves using the custom webmail option however on the outset it seems unlikely -- most users usually use Roundcube at this point in time.

It's worth noting you can always install SquirrelMail yourself and it'll work perfectly -- it should be in Softaculous as well :).

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4 hours ago, Cody R. said:

1) We'll likely wait until it's deprecated and see how many users request it. It's possible we'll support it ourselves using the custom webmail option however on the outset it seems unlikely -- most users usually use Roundcube at this point in time.

2) It's worth noting you can always install SquirrelMail yourself and it'll work perfectly -- it should be in Softaculous as well :).

1) "see how many users request it" -

That number will be much smaller than the number who use it and might prefer that it be maintained.
The old concept of the "silent majority" is definitely prevalent in online communities.

It's a tradeoff between how much work is involved and the amount of use.  I would say that if some minimal subset of users are using it,
and I presume you can measure that somehow, since you say "most use Roundcube" - and it's not a huge effort, it would be
worth doing.

Let me say that a little more simply: If it's not too much work, it would be worth it to keep even a relatively small user base happy.

2) "you can install it yourself"
Well that's good news, if it does disappear as a standard option, I would definitely look into doing that.
Thanks for the reply.

 

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On 7/1/2018 at 9:18 PM, tgonhawk1 said:

1) "see how many users request it" -

That number will be much smaller than the number who use it and might prefer that it be maintained.
The old concept of the "silent majority" is definitely prevalent in online communities.

It's a tradeoff between how much work is involved and the amount of use.  I would say that if some minimal subset of users are using it,
and I presume you can measure that somehow, since you say "most use Roundcube" - and it's not a huge effort, it would be
worth doing.

Let me say that a little more simply: If it's not too much work, it would be worth it to keep even a relatively small user base happy.

 

The tricky part about this is the software itself is not being maintained by anyone. The last update to it was May 30th, 2013 which is now 5 years ago. In cPanel v70 there was three updates alone to make SquirrelMail remain functioning. These includes security fixes and interface fixes a few of which we reported to cPanel and I have no doubt we weren't alone in reporting the issues. I can only imagine this will get worse as end of this year PHP 5.6 hits EOL and the supported PHP version is going to be 7.1. That would mean SquirrelMail should be compatible with PHP 7.1. This would have a significant cost associated with it I suspect as it would require significant changes to the code to maintain compatibility. If cPanel is reaching a point of being unable to justify support for it then it's really unlikely we could as I'd suspect it would require significant development time to maintain.

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Once again, thanks for an informative reply.

5 hours ago, Tony said:

 If cPanel is reaching a point of being unable to justify support for it then it's really unlikely we could as I'd suspect it would require significant development time to maintain.

That's too bad - I just like the interface much better than the others (ability to have larger more readable fonts, more control over display view, and just the overall simplicity of it).
But if it's not going to work, it's not going to work, and I guess I'll just have to adapt.

 

 

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  • 10 months later...

The hammer eventually did drop, and, having switched to Roundcube,
let me just say,  overall, RC is better.

There are a few things I preferred about Squirrelmail, but there are more
ways in which RC outperforms, making those pluses outweigh any minuses.

I do use it zoomed-in one notch - the default font settings are just too small for
these tired old eyes, and that overcomes my biggest problem with it.

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