The straightforwardly named open source solution focuses on speed and performance.

by Jeff Goldman [December 15, 2004]

Sebastian Schaffert first created WebMail in 1998 as a simple bunch of Perl scripts—and he says the solution stayed that way until Version 0.3. "The main intention at that time was to create an e-mail solution that was easy to use and platform-independent," he says. "I gave Internet courses at that time, and didn't want to teach the users many different tools—only the Web browser."

Schaffert, a researcher at the University of Munich's Institute for Computer Sciences, says the system quickly became popular—aided, he says, by the fact that there weren't many alternatives available at the time. "It soon was relatively widespread, with translations to Italian, Swedish, and French," he says.

WebMail

Soon, Schaffert says, he realized that Perl scripts presented a significant drawback for a webmail solution. "When the Perl script finishes execution and the page is displayed, the connection to the IMAP server is closed, and has to be reopened the next time the user clicks on a page," he says. "This drawback is still an obstacle for most other webmail solutions based on PHP and Perl."

Java and XML
Since he was already fairly familiar with Java, Schaffert began rewriting WebMail in Java—first as a standalone application with its own Web server for versions 0.4 through 0.6, and later as a Java Servlet. "The main advantage of this solution is that connections to IMAP servers can be kept open, and thus the reaction time is very fast," he says.

Other functionality was added, Schaffert says, at about the same time. "I added caching functionality, allowing users to save IMAP requests at the expense of memory," he says. "Also, the project was switched to XML, both as a means to store configuration data and for the internal representations of user models and sessions. This allows users to develop themes and pages mostly in XSLT."

As interest in the project continued to grow, Schaffert says, he moved it to SourceForge. "I didn't want to serve it from our university's Web servers any longer," he says. "I feared that the amount of traffic would draw too much attention to me—as the university guidelines, strictly speaking, only allow Web space to be used for personal and university issues."

Development and support
At first, Schaffert was putting out new releases of the solution about every two months, but he says he hasn't put much work into development of the project recently, mostly due to the demands of work and family. He hopes to revive development in the future. Interest in the solution continues—Schaffert says SourceForge's stats indicate that it's seen about 40,000 installations so far.

WebMail works on any operating system that runs Apache Tomcat. The solution's key advantage over other approaches, Schaffert says, is speed. "Because WebMail is able to keep connections alive over page requests, it offers considerably better performance than most other solutions, especially for large mailboxes with over 1,000 messages," he says.

As an open source solution, support for WebMail is limited to the discussions on the solution's Web forums and discussion lists. Aside from those sources, Schaffert says, no companies or individuals are currently offering commercial support for the solution.

— End

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Online resource:
	Webmail Directory
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