Roundcube Webmail 1.0.0 released

> ...and I hope that the project has gotten much better over the years.

It has! They have made some significant improvements. There recently was a huge effort to separate the RC core code -- all of the stuff that talks to imap -- from the rest of the interface, so now people can easily build RC clones.

Also, relatively recently, they reworked their skinning system and got a new design professionally made ("Larry", now the default). You can get Roundcube skins for people who like Outlook, or want better mobile support, etc.

And if you've got managesieve installed, you can make your email do tricks that Gmail can't.

Usually, people use dedicated apps to access mails from mobile, connecting directly to the IMAP server. Which is much more mobile-convenient.

> It's slow to fetch my email...

Yeah, there can be a couple causes for this. Sometimes it's the skin being used. Some Roundcube skins are quite a bit faster than the default; you might check with your ISP to see if they support additional Roundcube skins. (They are very easy to install, and users can select an RC skin from their settings panel.)

> ...and searching for specific emails doesn't work very well.

There should be a tiny dropdown arrow next to the magnifying glass icon in the search box. (This is not great UI.) Click that, and you should get a menu like the following:

Subject, From, To, Cc, Bcc, Body, Entire Message.

Make sure Entire Message is selected. It's not by default. RC will remember your setting for each folder. This will make your searches slow on folders with lots of messages, but it improves the search results quite a lot.

Yeah, Gmail has probably the best spam filtering of any mail service in the world.

But! You can do pretty well at it, too, if you feel like putting in the effort. I host email for some clients, and most of my sysadmin time these days is spent dealing with spam in some fashion or another.

1. Greylisting. Greylisting is fantastic, and the package you're looking for here is sqlgrey. It's easy to use and admin and it has sensible defaults. You can pretty much just drop it in and immediately get an 80% reduction in spam.

2. Use the right MTA stack: currently I think that's Postfix and Dovecot. Postfix and Dovecot go together like ice cream and apple pie. Postfix is far easier to admin and configure than Sendmail, and Dovecot has good support for managesieve, which'll be important in a moment.

3. Install SpamAssassin and AMaViS. Getting it working correctly with Postfix in a multi-domain environment, so that each user can have their own SA settings, is a little bit tricky, but totally worth it. AMaViS by default wants to manage SA's settings. Don't let it.

4. Install the managesieve, password, and sauserprefs plugins. Now you can change your email password, your filters, and your SpamAssassin preferences right from the webmail interface.

5. Configure SpamAssassin to label messages "[SPAM]" (it also sets the X-Spam-Flag header) on junk messages, and then set up a default filter in managesieve to redirect those things to Junk folder. Bam, no missing emails, no cluttered inbox. Use imap on your favorite devices.

6. A couple of extras, like Fail2Ban, will help too. You can modify Fail2Ban to watch your mail.log for frequent attempts at nonexistent user accounts and then iptables those spammers.

As with most things, you can spend as much additional time as you'd like fine tuning this, writing some custom software, and so on. But, the above will get you about 98% of the way to Gmail's level of spam filtering in about a day's worth of work.

Here's a somewhat aggressive solution: Allow incoming emails only from previously approved senders.

Direct strangers to reach to you via Twitter.

I have always self-hosted my mail. When spam started to become an issue I began looking around for a solution. I happened upon the newly minted spamassassin project, made it work to my liking, sent in a few patches and never looked back. Now, many years later, I still run SA in combination with Exim and Dovecot, filing unrecognised spam into a 'SPAM-it' folder from where it is picked up every night to train the bayes filter. Everything which is 'definitely' spam is refused at the gate, everything which is most certainly spam is filed in a spam folder which is out of sight and mostly out of mind, everything which is probably spam is automatically dumped in the aforementioned 'SPAM-it' folder (with autolearning disabled to avoid erroneous positive feedback). There is a 'HAM-it' folder to tell the filter about mail I care about as well as a 'FORGET-it' folder to untrain the filter on given messages. I use sieve to file messages in their designated folders.

No other filtering is applied, no greylisting, no country blocks (I need to be able to communicate with people all over the world), no fail2ban, no nothin'. By keeping the filtering concentrated in one spot I avoid the trap of turning the mail system into a Rube Goldberg machine loaded with unintended consequences.

On average, one or two spammy messages make it through the portcullis per day. I simply dump them in the 'SPAM-it' folder and forget about them. False positives are exceedingly rare, fortunately. On the whole I consider my mail setup to be functional and above all manageable.

Everything needed to implement this is available in Debian. There is a handy Sieve editor available as a plugin to the Roundcube web mail client for those who like to click pretty boxes instead of writing filter scripts.

I do the following:

* don't accept mail for non-existing recipient adresses

* don't accept mail where the sender domain is one of my domains, except when whitelisted manually

* don't accept mail from hosts on the NiXSpam list[1] (unlike some others, NixSpam has pretty reasonable policies with automatic delisting after 12 hours)

These three rules together work pretty well, I get only a handful false negatives every day, and virtually no false positives, even though I publish my real mail address on many places in the web, and even used it in usenet, back in the days.

Next step would be using SpamAssassin, but [2].

[1] http://www.heise.de/ix/NiX-Spam-DNSBL-and-blacklist-for-down...

[2] http://xkcd.com/1205/

I'm very happy with dspam (http://dspam.nuclearelephant.com/), and the Dovecot integration plugin (http://johannes.sipsolutions.net/Projects/dovecot-antispam)

I half-assed this once and just made postfix check spamhaus and spamcop. Very little spam gets through.

I'm thinking about turning on greylisting as well, but right now its not needed.

I believe any host that runs cPanel should have it. Or at least that's my experience.

Gandi.net does.

Bytemark do.

Gandi does, and you do not need to buy webspace from them. Just registering a domain there will get you 5 free mailboxes and 1000 forwarding addresses.

https://www.gandi.net/domain

Namecheap

HostGator

There's a plugin, but I haven't used it yet. https://github.com/qnrq/rc_openpgpjs

The biggest feature at launch was the idea of "unlimited" storage (I think at the time it was 1GB) This was a huge departure from the existing Yahoo!/Hotmail models which had much more restrictive limits on storage.

That and the idea of one inbox and no folders. The concept of letting your mail flow into one box and not "filing" it was also a big change from the existing mindset.