http://www.zimbra.com. Better in some ways, worse in others, but by far the most capable open source webmail available. I used it for a few years and loved it.
I always see Zimbra mentioned as a good open-source alternative to Gmail. But the demo always made me feel like it was a web-based Outlook UI-wise.
Like mbreese, I have wondered for some years if an open-source version of Gmail existed, and also what would be necessary to reproduce the Gmail experience (on the backend side for example, to get to the same speed in search). But I always hear Zimbra which doesn't seem to be the right answer to me.
> But the demo always made me feel like it was a web-based Outlook UI-wise.
My experience too, after using it for about a year. It's OK, but it's nowhere near as good as gmail.
I'm curious...what do you find Gmail does better than Zimbra?
Re:Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?
by nuclear_eclipse on Friday February 12, 2010 @09:24PM
(#1122410)
As an alternate opinion, I have RoundCube set up as a webmail option for my IMAP server, and have about 2GB of stuff in about 20 different folders, a few folders have 5000 or more messages in them, and RC seems perfectly performant, almost as quick as my native IMAP client.
My biggest complaint with it is that doesn't have a threaded view for mailing lists, but I haven't found a webmail yet with proper threaded view either. Other than that, I think it's a great substitute for a native client when I'm not at home and don't feel like using my phone, or don't have a good data connection.
Setting up your own mailserver is easy. But getting a gmail-like experience is pretty hard. For example, I tried Roundcube a while back with my full Gmail mail dump. It tried to keep up, but there was just no way it was going to handle 2gb of mail going back years.
I'd love to see something that either ran off of a standard imap server or that was a mail-delivery agent (MDA) that had a gmail-like web interface, complete with full text search.
I haven't found anything like that yet.