topic Do I like Squirrel Mail? in Plusnet Feedback

Do I like Squirrel Mail?

sarev — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 17:55:01 GMT

Hmm. Before I get to that one, let's start with why I have to waste several minutes of my life registering with this forum when I'm already a customer and hence registered with the Member Centre?
Right, Squirrel Mail. This is without question the worst webmail app I can remember using, and I've used a few. Sorry, guys, if this is some in-house development but it's badly let down in a few key areas:
1. It's mind-bogglingly slow. It's clearly very simple from an implementation standpoint so maybe it's just running on an old P4 someone has under their desk?
2. It's a complete faff to use: how can I easily select a bunch (not all) messages without having to click on all their tick boxes individually?
3. It's ugly. Sure, clean and simple is one thing. Butt ugly is another. And while we're at it, why isn't "Spam" and "Not spam" in the "Transform email" group of buttons? And why are they lost over on the right of the screen?
4. It's buggy. Let me give you an example:
I'm on business in Delhi so I think I'll just log in to webmail (for the first time) and see what's happening. First of all, how on Earth do I guess my login name for a mailbox that isn't primary? Thanks for nothing with the complete lack of instructions on the front page, or in the email setup pages of the Member Centre for that matter. You have to start doing searches in the Support pages before you can figure it out as "<username>+<mailbox name>".
Anyway, finally logged in and it (eventually) shows me my inbox. I have loads of emails from my NAS telling me it has a faulty fan so I want to delete them all. So I have to select all of them by hand and then I click on "Delete". So SM sits there for ages before saying there was a timeout connecting to the IMAP server. Nice. Back to the inbox and select them all again, click delete and this time an error message appears saying my session has expired and I need to log in again. Literally just a minute aftrer the last operation failed. Doh!
This is repeatable if you guys fancy checking. I also saw similar errors immediately after logging in. There's some very broken timeout code in there somewhere.
I've only been using SM for about half an hour and already I'm hoping I never have to use it again. Maybe I should create a mail forwarding rule to copy all my PlusNet email to 1and1 - their webmail is a hideous Web 2.0 JS vomit fest, but it's still better to use than SM.

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

jelv — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 19:36:43 GMT

Quote from: sarev
Hmm. Before I get to that one, let's start with why I have to waste several minutes of my life registering with this forum when I'm already a customer and hence registered with the Member Centre?

Because registering allows you to chose a display name and chose which other information is to be displayed in your public profile. I for one wouldn't want my account name to be used - how long would it take spammers to figure out that the account name was the key to everyone's email address?

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

sarev — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 02:31:55 GMT

Sure - and I've not used my PlusNet user name. But that wouldn't stop the page after login page from simply saying "choose a display name" when you log in for the first time. By the way, this forum seems to be altogether more speedily hosted than the webmail platform... Odd.

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

jelv — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:14:24 GMT

I presume you are aware that these forums use standard free forum software from http://www.simplemachines.org/
The more they are customised, the more difficult it is to update when new releases come out. Plusnet made that mistake with the old portal forums which were a heavily customised version of phpBB.

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

mrmarkus1981 — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 14:41:59 GMT

FWIW i totally agree, webmail is woeful. Thankfully i use it very occasionally!
Logouts, SMTP failures, Unknown username & password errors (even though firefox has the correct login details saved)
Its pants !

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

rgsuk — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 18:34:40 GMT

I don't know about Squirrel Mail on here but I have it through cPanel on my servers and use it quite often. It has the kind of functional interface that I like and it isn't slow in my experience.
The problems you are having must be to do with the server it is working on?

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

adamwalker — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 09:23:14 GMT

sarev,
Thanks for your feedback. In the interest of being completely open and honest we are aware that our current webmail service suffers from a few short-comings and may not be ideal for its intended purpose.
We have been beta testing an alternative to to Squirrel mail for a while now, where as I cannot make any firm promises I will enquire about adding you to the trial.
Adam.

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

Nick_Russell — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 09:50:42 GMT

Quote from: _Adam_Walker_
We have been beta testing an alternative to to Squirrel mail for a while now....

I hope you do not mean Roundcube! I am on this trail. It is better than Squirrel mail ....but not by much!

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

adamwalker — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 09:53:58 GMT

Hi Nick,
Yes, that's what I'm referring to but the who reason we are trailing this is for feedback. With that in mind could you elaborate for us what you don't like about it please?

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

Nick_Russell — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:13:48 GMT

Hi Adam,
I have several email accounts. I use OE to collect all emails at home but use web mail a lot when travelling and hence see several different interfaces and all are better than Squirrel or Roundcube both of which look very amateur. Functionally is poor.
BT - They use Yahoo for their webmail. This looks and works very well.
Hotmail - very good but not a fair comparison as it is designed as a web based email system
GMail - Looks OK but it handles folders and labels in a strange way. I don't like it.
GMX - Works and looks good.
There was talk elsewhere on the forum of an Outlook style webmail interface - any news on this?

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

adamwalker — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:38:39 GMT

Thanks very much for your feedback.

Quote
Outlook style webmail interface

I've heard something similar, I'll go chase this up and see what I can find out.

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

Strat — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:44:20 GMT

A bit like Outlook Web Access something I've configured and used often.

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

adamwalker — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:48:33 GMT

Quote
Outlook Web Access

I've just spoken to the team in charge of improving webmail (amongst other things) As far as we're aware we've not eluded to OWA (I can vouch for it being good as I use it personally)
However we're planning to make changes and improvements over the coming months so I'll keep you lot posted
re Roundcube specifically, there are newer versions available to what we are trialling at the moment that we know are much better so I'm going to chase up the possibility of us updating this so we can at least improve the experience for our trialists.

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

adamwalker — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:52:57 GMT

PS....
I've been tasked with collating feedback about our current webmail offerings so please let me know if anyone else would like to contribute their opinions about this.

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

chandu — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:35:33 GMT

Attn Adam Walker,
Have you considered Horde (used by Ukonline) and/or Mailzone (used by Onetel)? Both are very powerful and straight forward to use for people on the move (from anywhere in the world. Just my tupence worth!!!

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

swanny2020 — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:46:48 GMT

i must admit i have used this squirrel mail twice now and i'm not that keen on it i have tried to sync it with Window Mail with no joy is there anyway i can do this ?

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

grahamt — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:01:13 GMT

I use Outlook Web Access for work-related webmail. It's a mixture of OK and frustrating.
Firstly, it doesn't really adhere to proper web standards. Using it with IE and Firefox are two very different experiences. It can be used with Firefox (and, I assume, other browsers) but it's much clunkier than with IE. I generally use it via the Firefox IE Tab Plus add-on, which embeds IE rendering within Firefox.
Sometimes it's just so damn 'friendly' that it simply refuses to tell you the actual e-mail address of someone you might want to compose a new message to, even when you try to get the properties of teh contact name. This forces you to reply to a previous message, which may be more or less of a pain, depending on how many other recipients there are (and which need deleting) and what was the subject line and content of the previous message.
It does have more features than Squirrelmail, but I would hope there's something better out there.
Graham

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:48:02 GMT

Quote
I've been tasked with collating feedback about our current webmail offerings so please let me know if anyone else would like to contribute their opinions about this.

Have had Roundcube since trial began but am not using it now as I don't like it for reasons outlined elsewhere in the forum. As has been said it is better than SM but only by a bit.
Horde is a better bet IMO. Like one of the other posters, I have it on CPanel and it doesn't open straight into the Inbox which is a bit annoying but hopefully this can be solved.
I quite liked the one that we had when the security breach occurred but can't remember the name. Can't this be looked at again? I understand from other posts that it is much improved. Only other comment is that BT users have Yahoo mail - is this not an option for us in view of the fact that PN are now tied up with that organization?

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 13:18:05 GMT

Have spent some time working with Horde from cPanel and I find that it is quite good. Now got it to go straight to Inbox but I am having to select the language English (British) to log on every time (bit annoying) - presumably this is just a peculiarity of my set up. So I have to add my vote for Horde but still prefer Yahoo.

Re: Do I like Squirrel Mail?

dratddestroyer — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 20:50:36 GMT

I prefer Squirrelmail.
It may not be pretty. No flash, Java or other bandwidth hogs. Just what you need when you are on a slow connection.
PS I am not a troll.