Forum OpenACS Q&A: Web Mail

1: Web Mail

Posted by Alan Pater on 05/16/00 08:04 AM

I saw a reference to web mail on another forum. Is it possible with
postgress & does it do IMAP?

2: Response to Web Mail (response to 1)

Posted by Connie Hentosh on 05/21/00 04:03 PM

I don't know why you would be asking this question in this forum. That is probably why you didn't get much of a response. But if you are looking for an imap solution. Then you might want to look at Cyrus at http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/.

If you are running anything sizable. It is know by people who have done large instalations of email that storing the email in a database is usually bad for performance. (on the scale of Hotmail, AOL, etc...)

Take a look at the postfix archives. (Found somewhere in www.postfix.org) There is a lot of good info on this buried there.

3: Response to Web Mail (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 05/21/00 04:41 PM

aD is now providing a web mail solution in the latest ACS, and it is in the process of being ported over to openACS. Postgres isn't the problem, it's the fact that aD wrote it in Oracle's embedded Java (SQLJ). Dan Wickerstrom, who's doing the port, has come up with a general solution that should allow folks to write Java code and stuff it into AOLserver ala Tcl, etc. Much better than the SQLJ kludge for the greater AOLserver community, if you believe Java to be the Right Tool for You at least.

I don't think our Postgres users are thinking on the AOL/Hotmail scale of service, yet at least. There are potential scalability issues other than the db - after all, the JVM for x86 Linux is interpreted rather than compiled and that's an order-of-magnitude pig to begin with compared to a solution built on (say) C routines embedded in AOLserver, or native-compiled Java.

4: Response to Web Mail (response to 1)

Posted by Connie Hentosh on 05/21/00 05:04 PM

Webmail of that scale will always be disk IO bound... not CPU bound. The JVM is fine for what is needed. Unless you are holding the messages in a database. Databases are created to solve different problems than storing large amounts of email.

But I agree that most users, Postgresql will be fine.

5: Response to Web Mail (response to 1)

Posted by Michael Feldstein on 06/29/00 01:52 AM

What's the latest on the web mail module? I see that there's been a lot of work done on it lately, but will it be release-ready with OpenACS 3.2.2?

6: Response to Web Mail (response to 1)

Posted by Dan Wickstrom on 06/29/00 09:12 AM

I've ported it twice now. Once to use jdbc and now it's using nsjava (see http://nsjava.sourceforge.net) to provide the java support. I also just upgraded it with the changes from acs classic 3.3. I'm middle of testing now, so if Ben releases tonight as planned, I won't have it completely tested. In that case, you might have to wait a few days and grab the latest webmail version out of cvs.

7: Response to Web Mail (response to 1)

Posted by Li-fan Chen on 06/29/00 10:56 AM

If you are in a rush to put something up why not try Horde.org's IMP project?

From what I understand it can be made to use Qmail (an ACSer favorite) and PostgreSQL (a OpenACSer favorite).

It will not store email in the DB though. But all accounting info seems to be redirected to the RDBMS. You could try to modify the PHP to Tcl and save some design work front-end building wise.

8: Response to Web Mail (response to 1)

Posted by Dan Wickstrom on 06/29/00 12:01 PM

There's no rush and I don't see how porting something new would be any quicker than using something that we have that is already ported. Besides we're trying to stay as close to acs classic as possible for the time being.

9: Response to Web Mail (response to 1)

Posted by Michael Feldstein on 06/29/00 04:59 PM

I'm not in a rush at all; I was just curious. We'd like to play with webmail but we've got so much on our plates that we've decided wait (short-term) for final releases of most OpenACS code unless we have a real pressing reason to do otherwise.

10: Response to Web Mail (response to 1)

Posted by Alan Pater on 10/05/00 04:43 PM

Where can I see the acs webmail module in action? Or should we just be using IMP with php for now? I'm not concerned with storing mail in the database, just having a webmail module as part of the community system.

Being able to access your email messages from anywhere in the world without having to install special software on every computer in every Internet cafe seems like an important part of any community system these days.