communik8r 20050823 review

C8 attempts to bring a desktop mail client look and feel to webmail

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Dave Hall

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C8 attempts to bring a desktop mail client look and feel to webmail. Google’s gmail attempted to redefine webmail, it was a galant attempt, but they could have gone further.

Evolution is a great desktop mail client, but it is no good having it stuck in the office when you are on the road, sitting in some internet cafe. The solution is here - communik8r!

Communik8r (or C8 for short) is an AJAX based webmail client which is built on top of phpGroupWare.

C8 currently only supports IMAP mail, but our plans include adding support for POP3 (with folders), jabber and SMS. The plan is to have one application to take care of most of your communication needs - hence the “name communik8r”.

C8 currently requires Mozilla Firefox 0.8+ to run. IE 6+ support is a must before C8 is declared stable. Any other browser which support xmlhttprequest and client side XSLT will be supported, at the moment there isn’t any other browser that meet these requirements.

Falling back to server side XSLT is being considered. There are several issues to be considered before a decision is made about a fallback mode, namely server load, code complexity/bloat.

Here are some key features of "communik8r":
Everything you would expect in a normal webmail client, plus
Multiple email accounts
WYSIWYG composer with “smart text”
Smart Caching
PHP based IMAP sockets - no php-imap required