roundcube beta1

The folks over at the Roundcube webmail project have released (8 weeks ago) the first beta of their web client, and it’s installed for all the friends and family to give a whirl. Unfortunately, a preview window didn’t make it into the beta release, although I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing from a performance/network utilisation perspective.

So far the only real bug I’ve seen has been the proper display of multibyte characters with both IE and Firefox. I’m not sure if that’s a config issue on the server or client, and I’ll look at it a little later. In the interim, stick to using English, as French looks blecchy. If you’re a deadsquid user, and don’t have the URL, drop me a line and I’ll send it to you. When logging in, you must use your full email address as the username.

It’s prettier than SquirrelMail, the default webmail client we use, but it doesn’t have as many extra features (like changing your password) yet. A good start, and it’ll be interesting to see if/how they implement plugins.

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Update: I know what the character encoding issue is. Yet more fun and games with webservers and UTF-8 encoding not being properly reported to the browser. It’s amazing how UTF-8 implementations can fuck things up – it caused me untold grief with the language police when I worked at that little telco. People using older versions of Outlook (Express) would always see mucked up French, and we’d get reported. But that’s another story. I’ll try and fix it later today, but make no guarantees/promises. 🙂