Roundcube

Last updated
Roundcube
Developer(s) The Roundcube Team [1]
Initial release2008;16 years ago (2008)
Stable release
1.6.9 [2]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 1 September 2024
Repository
Written in PHP
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Webmail
License GPL-3.0-or-later with exceptions for skins and plugins [3]
Website roundcube.net   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Roundcube is a web-based IMAP email client. It makes extensive use of Ajax technology. Roundcube is licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 or later, with exceptions for skins and plugins. [3]

Contents

History

After about two years of development the first stable release of Roundcube was announced in early 2008. [4]

On 3 May 2015, Roundcube announced, in partnership with Kolab Systems AG, that they planned to completely rewrite Roundcube and create Roundcube Next. A crowdfunding campaign was set up to finance the project. The goal of $80,000 was reached on June 24. [5] The final amount raised was US$103,541. [6] Roundcube Next was intended to include additional features like calendar, chat and file management. This was to be implemented using WebRTC and connectors from popular services like Dropbox and OwnCloud. However, Kolab Systems and Roundcube stopped development on the project in 2016, with no information or refunds provided to project backers, leading to a failed crowdfund. [7] A Roundcube developer later claimed Roundcube had no ownership over the Roundcube Next campaign, [8] despite its public engagement and ownership on the crowdfund page.

In 2023, a pro-Russia hacking group Winter Vivern [9] exploited a cross-site scripting vulnerability to attack European government entities and a think tank, as reported by researchers from ESET. [10] After opening a malicious email, the exploit could access folders and emails in that user's account and send those emails to the attackers' servers. [11]

In November 2023, the open-source file hosting software suite Nextcloud announced its partnership with Roundcube. [12] [13]

Technology

Roundcube is written in PHP and can be employed in conjunction with a LAMP stack, or any other operating systems that support PHP are supported as well. The web server needs access to the IMAP server hosting the email and to an SMTP server to be able to send messages.

Roundcube Webmail is designed to run on standard web servers such as Apache, LiteSpeed, Nginx, Lighttpd, Hiawatha or Cherokee in conjunction with a relational database engine. Supported databases are MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite. The user interface is rendered in XHTML and CSS and is fully customizable with skins.

Roundcube incorporates jQuery as part of its distribution, as well as other libraries such as GoogieSpell and TinyMCE.

Roundcube comes included with CPanel as of early 2008.

Features

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Email</span> Mail sent using electronic means

Email is a method of transmitting and receiving messages using electronic devices. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the digital version of, or counterpart to, mail. Email is a ubiquitous and very widely used communication medium; in current use, an email address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries.

In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by RFC 9051.

Within the Internet email system, a message transfer agent (MTA), mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. In some contexts, the alternative names mail server, mail exchanger, or MX host are used to describe an MTA.

In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. Today, POP version 3 (POP3) is the most commonly used version. Together with IMAP, it is one of the most common protocols for email retrieval.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Email client</span> Computer program used to access and manage a users email

An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maildir</span> E-mail format

The Maildir e-mail format is a common way of storing email messages on a file system, rather than in a database. Each message is assigned a file with a unique name, and each mail folder is a file system directory containing these files. Maildir was designed by Daniel J. Bernstein circa 1995, with a major goal of eliminating the need for program code to handle file locking and unlocking through use of the local filesystem. Maildir design reflects the fact that the only operations valid for an email message is that it be created, deleted or have its status changed in some way.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SquirrelMail</span> Software project

SquirrelMail is a project that aims to provide both a web-based email client and a proxy server for the IMAP protocol.

Kolab is a free and open source groupware suite. It consists of the Kolab server and a wide variety of Kolab clients, including KDE PIM-Suite Kontact, Roundcube web frontend, Mozilla Thunderbird and Mozilla Lightning with SyncKolab extension and Microsoft Outlook with proprietary Kolab-Connector PlugIns.

The Internet Messaging Program or IMP is a webmail client. It can be used to access e-mail stored on an IMAP server. IMP is written in PHP and a component of the collaborative software suite Horde.

The UW IMAP server was the reference server implementation of the Internet Message Access Protocol. It was developed at the University of Washington by Mark Crispin and others.

The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of notable webmail providers who offer a web interface in English.

The Courier Mail Server is a mail transfer agent (MTA) server that provides SMTP, IMAP, POP3, SMAP, webmail, and mailing list services with individual components. It is best known for its IMAP server component.

hMailServer Open-source e-mail server

hMailServer was a free email server for Windows created by Martin Knafve. It ran as a Windows service and includes administration tools for management and backup. It had support for IMAP, POP3, and SMTP email protocols. It could use external database engines such as MySQL, MS SQL or PostgreSQL, or an internal MS SQL Compact Edition engine to store configuration and index data. The actual email messages were stored on disk in a raw MIME format. As of January 15th, 2022, active support and development were officially halted, although version 5.6 will continue to receive updates for critical bugs.

A mailbox is the destination to which electronic mail messages are delivered. It is the equivalent of a letter box in the postal system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zarafa (software)</span> Discontinued free and open-source groupware

Zarafa was an open-source groupware application that originated in the city of Delft in the Netherlands. The company that developed Zarafa, previously known as Connectux, is also called Zarafa. The Zarafa groupware provided email storage on the server side and offered its own Ajax-based mail client called WebAccess and a HTML5-based, WebApp. Advanced features were available in commercially supported versions. Zarafa has been superseded by Kopano.

EmailTray is a lightweight email client for the Microsoft Windows operating system. EmailTray was developed by Internet Promotion Agency S.A., a software development d.

A mailbox provider, mail service provider or, somewhat improperly, email service provider is a provider of email hosting. It implements email servers to send, receive, accept, and store email for other organizations or end users, on their behalf.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kolab Now</span>

Kolab Now is a web-based email and groupware service, based completely on free and open-source software. It is owned and operated by Kolab Systems AG and was formerly known as MyKolab.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mailfence</span> Encrypted email service

Mailfence is secure encrypted email service that offers OpenPGP based end-to-end encryption and digital signatures. It was launched in November 2013 by Belgium-based company ContactOffice Group that has been operating an online collaboration suite since 1999.

References

  1. "Dev_Members - Roundcube Webmail - Trac". Trac.roundcube.net. Archived from the original on 2011-10-02. Retrieved 2011-09-19.
  2. "Release 1.6.9". 1 September 2024. Retrieved 26 September 2024.
  3. 1 2 "Changeset 5787 - Roundcube Webmail". Archived from the original on 2012-04-26.
  4. "RoundCube Webmail 0.1-stable released". roundcube.net. 2008-03-04. Retrieved 2024-03-08.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  5. "Tweet from @roundcubenext".
  6. "RoundCube-Next is Woefully Behind Schedule - Phoronix". Archived from the original on 2021-10-19. Retrieved 2021-10-19.
  7. "In 2018, RoundCube Next Remains Dead In The Water - Phoronix". www.phoronix.com. Archived from the original on 2021-10-19. Retrieved 2019-08-09.
  8. "What about Roundcube Next? · Issue #6030 · roundcube/roundcubemail". GitHub. Archived from the original on 2021-10-19. Retrieved 2019-08-09.
  9. "Winter Vivern | Uncovering a Wave of Global Espionage". 16 March 2023.
  10. "ESET Research: Winter Vivern attacks Roundcube webmail servers of governments in Europe through zero-day vulnerability". ESET . 2023-10-25. Archived from the original on 2023-10-28. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
  11. "Pro-Russia hackers target inboxes with 0-day in webmail app used by millions". 25 October 2023.
  12. Korotaev, Mikhail (2023-11-29). "Open source email pioneer Roundcube joins the Nextcloud family". Nextcloud Blog. Retrieved 2023-12-02.
  13. Rudra, Sourav (2023-12-01). "Open-Source Webmail Roundcube Joins Nextcloud". ItsFOSS.com. Retrieved 2023-12-02.