Roundcube Goes Live!
It’s funny … when I joined hosting365 I had just setup Roundcube as my webmail client (I was a customer before I became an employee!) and it took about 30 mins (and I’m not a techie!), so naturally I thought it could be deployed within the same time for all customers.
Clearly I was wrong … there’s so much more to consider when innovating for a 30% of the Irish market than when playing with webmail for 1 person 
However, after much work and testing (remember Roundcube is still beta) we’ve launched it for ALL OUR CUSTOMERS!
Just go to webmail.hosting365.com, and enter your email address and password - it’s that simple! No need to enter domains, no need to go through control panels.
In case you’re interested, the reason it couldn’t be launched in 30 minutes, is that we process 40 million emails a month, so you can image the impact of a IMAP based webmail client on our infrastructure!
Innovation is hard .. much harder in a big company .. but it’s worth it, and as you can see (ref: FREE BLOG PLAN !!!!) we’re really trying.
Expect to see more innovations over the coming months! In fact, why not use this blog for what’s it’s really mean’t - and post in the comments the kind of innovations YOU’D like to see from a hosting company. PLEASE!!!
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Nice. Been using it for about a week and it seems very solid. Nice interface too - much cleaner than Squirell etc
Thanks for the feedback Peter! We’re working on a deployable version, so you can 1-click-install your own branded instance from your control panel…
To be honest, the new mail is nice and everything, but I think it’s too hard to get around. It does weird things, like show me unread mail which I’ve deleted, even though I know I’ve deleted *and* purged them in Horde, and I can’t find an option to create filters..
Hi Helena, thanks for the feedback!
Roubcube is BETA so hopefully they’ll fix issues like this soon … that’s why we have left the options use Squirrel and Horde still there.
The reason it shows you the deleted mails is because it’s an IMAP client, rather than POP, so you’d have to delete them in there again unfortunately. That doesn’t make it easy to switch between webmail clients, but if you do it once, and then continue to use Roundcube you should have no problem. Although if you want filters I’m afraid you’ll (and I!) will have to wait for that functionality to be added.
hi Ed,
like the blog. is there any chance your mail servers will support secure POP or some form of non-plain-text login? my wireless network is encrypted so i’m mostly safe from outside attack, but when i’m on a regular LAN it means anyone on the network segment can catch packets and read my login username and password, not exactly ideal for the year 2006 would you agree? identity theft etc etc.
this would be the icing on the cake for the h365 mail services, which are excellent.
cheers
tim
Hey Tim,
I’ve asked Paul Kelly, our Lead Unix Engineer, and the man responsible for the mail servers (he says thanks for the compliment!). The answer he gave me is below. You’ll see it is doable, soon, but not entirely straight forward.
The servers already support APOP which is a secure authentication mechanism - the password is sent as a hash of a combination of the plaintext password and the timestamp the server uses in its greeting. Whilst that does protect the security of the password, the emails
themselves are transmitted in plaintext.
That option is disguised as “Use secure authentication” in the Server Settings options of Thunderbird. I’m sure it’s similar in Outlook and other clients.
We can do SSL too for end-to-end encryption with a bit of effort, but there are two complicating factors. One is the load, which will be much less of a concern when we build out the next cluster of mail server machines.
However, just like a web site, we have to have one and only one SSL certificate on the server (and can’t run multiple IPs/certificates). That means customers using SSL will have to use only ‘mail.hosting365.ie’ as their server name.
hi Ed,
thanks for the reply and very informative answer.
re: server load, i understand the extra bandwidth and processing involved with setting up a secure connection. my guess is this would be minimised by the small amount of people who would actually use SSL. i’m sure you know yourself 95% of people just want to get their emails working with minimal config, and wouldn’t be worried about hackers sniffing packets etc.
similarly on the second point, if someone is techie enough to want SSL email, i’m sure they won’t mind using the H365 mail server name. i’ll speak for myself anyway, i really wouldn’t mind.
i’ll have a go with APOP in the meantime.
cheers
tim
hi Ed, just a p.s. to my last post…
outlook doesn’t support APOP. it does have an option for “my server requires authentication” but this isn’t anything to do with APOP and the passwords still go out in plain text.
will there be a notification on when SSL pop is enabled? i’ll check back here every now and then anyway.
Hey Tim,
Subscribe to http://www.hosting365status.com for an update.
hi, just following up on my question of 2 months ago regarding SSL pop3 support. has there been any progress on this? if H365 provided this then you guys really would be the ultimate hosters in my book
T
Hi Tim,
Sorry for the late reply on this to you. We’re actually building an entire new mail infrastrucutre that will blow you away when we launch it! Will most likely be start 2007, but we hope to run a beta trial before then, I can get you on that if you like?
hi Ed. i just noticed your comment now, 8 months later!
Is there an update on the new mail services? If it’s still in beta, please count me in. cheers. tim