[Owncloud] Email handling in ownCloud

[Jon Spriggs]

If you're looking for a mail service, hosted by you, then implement
something like Citadel, or Horde, or any of the handful of webmail or
web based groupware suites. Most of these implement their own mail
backend, or use the server's own mail server, and are more likely to
be kept up to date for that suite of tools than something which is
bolted on "because it's cool".

If you're looking for something which is integrated with webdav and
caldav, Horde's groupware suite provides a caldav service for the
calendaring, can read another caldav service (so could poll OwnCloud),
and also has it's own service for interacting with WebDav (called
Gollem), so why not just use that?

I think there's a lot of features that OwnCloud are re-implementing,
that horde already has done, and I'm surprised the two projects aren't
looking to each other to see how they could complement each other -
especially as Horde already has contact syncing, calendaring and mail
(using SyncML or their own XMLRPC service), they provide file store
access (webdav, ftp, sftp, local file store, and database backed file
store), photo galleries, a wiki service, ticket tracking and lots,
no.... really, LOTS more.

It's licensed under the Apache license (http://www.horde.org/licenses/apache)

So far, for me, the main benefits to OwnCloud over horde is the music
service, and the relative lack of complexity, but if you start adding
all the rest of this stuff in, you'll need to be as complex as Horde
is.
--
Jon "The Nice Guy" Spriggs



On 7 November 2011 21:25, Mario Danic <mario.danic at gmail.com> wrote:
> To be honest - and I'm just a bystander that hasn't implemented anything yet: I like the idea of having everything hosted by ownCloud, including
> my email. While some people might not want that, just like everything else in OwnCloud it could be optional.
>
> If anybody wants to work on a webmail interface, I am more than willing to lead the development of an automated mail server installation script, and
> the documentation that might be needed (like how to set DNS, etc).
>
> I do not expect this webmail interface to be the best in the world - I'd rather have it nice, simple and elegant, so I can check and answer mails while
> on the go.
>
> Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated.
>
> Cheers,
> Mario