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Comment by adlpz | Hacker News Reader

Is there anything out there comparable to Gmail but open source? To be honest what I look for in an email client is not how snappy it is. It's how much it helps me deal with email. Gmail does it quite well. Search is good, tags are good enough, the interface is not bad, editing is pretty decent, features are plentiful. But I'd love an open source self-hosted alternative.

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My webmail server runs on SoGo (https://www.sogo.nu/) which is more of an enterprisey mail client than many other webmail systems. Kind of a pain to set up independently in my opinion, but combined with Mailcow it runs flawlessly.

Search on it depends on your IMAP server's search system (I know Mailcow uses solr but that takes a while on my server, probably because of underspec hardware). Tags are easy to work with, the interface is quite good in my opinion, and integration with calendar/contact sync is also quite nice. The front end for basic Sieve rules works well for my requirements. Gravatar support and desktop notification support are also nice bonuses.

There aren't too many themes for it, though, so you'll have to make your own if you don't like the look. There's a SoGo demo on their website if you're interested.

> tags

It's so interesting: when Gmail first came out, tags were so innovative. So much better than folders. I spent the first couple years tagging all my mail, and setting up filters.

Now I never think of it. If I want an email, I search. Having hundreds of thousands of old emails means tags would have long-since been overwhelmed.

Is this other people's experience? Or am I bad for not doing inbox-zero and carefully curated tags?

Same for me. I have a bunch of tags I created early on, but I don't think I've created any since the 2000s. I just search.

I use tags as supplementary keywords.

If you know what thread you're looking for, search is good enough. If you communicate with distinct groups of people about different projects, search is good enough. If emails from the same few people can concern different projects, and there are no terms that always appear in those message to differentiate (or your colleagues are bad at using the subject line), tagging your messages with the proper project/issue/topic goes a long way.

This means that any tag applied by a filter is usually pretty useless, you can just repeat the filter's query when needed.

There's Open-Xchange. [0][1] My domain registrar offers it for managed email, it works well on both desktop and mobile browsers.

Looks like they're not really aiming at the DIY crowd though, I wonder if it's tricky to set up.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Xchange

[1] https://www.open-xchange.com/products/ox-app-suite/

I've been following Cypht [0] for a while. It's a web based, lightweight, modular e-mail and RSS client.

The features mention:

> Save the parameters of a search so that you can quickly access them later from the menu without having to enter them again. This is particularly useful for parameters of searches that are used frequently. Saved search parameters can also be deleted later.

[0] https://cypht.org/

Roundcube is nice

I'm not OP but this is cool to know. What do you like about it?

A feature request for tags in Roundcube is open since 2009.

What is your point? Does the amount of dangling feature requests mean that it is not good? Does your snark negate my joy for using it?

It means that Roundcube is missing one of the two Gmail's killer features, tags. (The other is search.)

It means that they don't see it as out-of-scope or undesirable, but still didn't implement it after all this time. It indicates something in terms of product management and/or code extensibility.

Not that an open source project owes you anything, of course.

I used roundcube a long time ago but found it was too slow and a bit bloaty. So I switched to Rainloop which was faster and simpler to deploy. Snappymail is lightspeed compared to those two and there is even a debian package so even easier to setup.

Is roundcube better now?

i used roundcube a long time ago too, switched to rainloop, then switched back to roundcube about a year ago. they had just released a new theme (elastic) which also worked on mobile, and seems lighter too. i'm happy with it so far!

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