AlphaMail 1.0.23 review

AlphaMail is a mod_perl webmail solution with a C++ middleware component that is intended to make the system highly scalable

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 1777K Developer: Tony Kay

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AlphaMail is a mod_perl webmail solution with a C++ middleware component that is intended to make the system highly scalable. It is written using C++, perl, and HTML::Mason, and accesses mail stores through IMAPS.

It is in active production use at the University of Oregon, and currently supports many *NIX variants with any RFC-compliant IMAP server including UW, Cyrus, and Dovecot.

Here are some key features of "AlphaMail":
Detailed Message Indexes
Message indexes include the subject and a snippet of the message body. Most character encodings are supported (see Perl::Encode for a list), and are transcoded to UTF-8 for display.

Index Filtering (search)
Message indexes can be filtered by keyword (header/body search), quoted phrase, from, and to. The filter field is also UTF-8 compliant, and such a filter will apply to messages that are encoded in other character sets. For example, searching for a japanese word (as in the second screen shot) matches messages that are encoded in shift-jis as well as UTF.

Feature-rich Message Reading
The message reading interface has many features, including the ability to show a message in an unformatted state (i.e. all space preserved, so you can view source code as it was typed), print view, full headers, and image previews (currently jpg, gif, tif, and png). Messages are also transcoded to UTF-8, so all modern browsers can display your international mail. AlphaMail also supports many popular attachment formats, so the attachment can be viewed before downloading. You can view full-size images, list files from zip and tar.gz archives, as well as preview word and excel files.

Message Composition
Compose supports all common features, including address field completion, spell checking, draft messages, attachments, and message size limits.

Configurable Options
There are many user-configurable options such as linkify, HTML image stripping, HTML sanitization, randomized signatures, and IMAP folder subscription (which changes the list of folders on the left edge).

Small Screen Support
You can also change the interface (at login) to support your handheld device! This mode minimizes the on-screen controls for optimal use on PDAs and phones.

What's New in This Release:
A Mozilla 1.7 Javascript problem has been fixed.
This release improves locking code on shared pointers in the Web cache.