[WEB4LIB] Web based email programs

[Prentiss Riddle]

> From web4lib at webjunction.org  Tue Jun 22 19:43:02 1999
> Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 17:38:40 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Brian Williams <brianw at nethost.multnomah.lib.or.us>
> Subject: [WEB4LIB] Web based email programs
> 
> I'm interested in providing access to our staff to email via something
> besides good old pine, namely something web based - and not their
> browsers.
> 
> I don't want them to go to a third party. I don't mind running something
> on our server to provide this.

I've seen this question come up a couple of times before on Web4Lib.
Maybe a summary should be added to the list of resources on the Web4Lib
web page.

A few free web-based mail readers that have been mentioned include:

	http://netbula.com/anyemail/
	http://www.atdot.org/
	http://web.horde.org/imp/

Here at Rice, we chose one called "WING" for "Web IMAP/NNTP Gateway".
It's written in perl and uses IMAP (not POP).  It should be available
at a CPAN site near you.  The sysadmins who evaluated several packages
chose WING because they felt it would be scaleable to a large number of
users.  We like having such a tool on hand chiefly for security reasons --
we needed a way to support e-mail access from off-campus (especially
when our students scatter for the summer) without passwords being
subject to snooping, and WING lets us hide the passwords with SSL.

I haven't found a WING website, but here's the README:

	http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/modules/by-module/O/MICB/wing-0.6.readme

My co-worker who headed up the WING installation at Rice is Dean Lane
(dlane at rice.edu) and I imagine he'd be happy to answer questions.  He's
also put up a list of bugs and "to dos" (including an ambitious set of
extensions he wants to add for local use):

	http://wing.is.rice.edu/WingIssues.html

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle at rice.edu
-- Webmaster, Rice University / http://is.rice.edu/~riddle