Developer(s) The Roundcube Team | Development status Active | |
Initial release 2008; 9 years ago (2008) Stable release 1.2.4 / March 10, 2017; 12 days ago (2017-03-10) Repository github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail | ||
Roundcube is a web-based IMAP email client. Roundcube's most prominent feature is the pervasive use of Ajax technology. After about two years of development, the first stable release of Roundcube was announced in early 2008.
Contents
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 is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) with exceptions for skins and plugins.
On May 3, 2015, Roundcube announced that they plan a complete rewrite of Roundcube called Roundcube Next. A crowd funding was set up to finance the project. The goal of $80,000 was reached on June 24. The final stand was $103,541. Roundcube Next will also include additional features like calendar, chat and file management. This will be implemented using WebRTC and connectors from popular services like Dropbox and OwnCloud.
Current features
Notable installations
Roundcube is used by a number of universities to provide email services to students and staff such as Sanger Institute Tata Institute of Social Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, University of Florida, Harvard University, University of Utah, University of Oregon, Stevens Institute of Technology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the University of Sussex, the University of Cambridge, the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. In a 2009 interview, two of Roundcube's core developers noted that the largest deployment to that date that they were aware of was at the University of Michigan with 70,013 students. Roundcube is also used in the Kolab Now service which supports its further development.
CPanel includes Roundcube, as a result of which many hosting companies around the world such as HostGator, DreamHost, Media Temple, Gandi, OVH and others use RoundCube.
Roundcube Webmail IMAP client was incorporated into epesiBIM (epesi Business Information Manager), a web-based, open source CRM-like application.
Apple's operating system, Mac OS X 10.7, provides Roundcube as the default webmail client in Mail Server. In prior versions SquirrelMail was the default client.
In 2013, Iran's Ministry of ICT launched the national email service at mail.post.ir which is using Roundcube.
Synology Inc.'s DiskStation Manager (DSM) uses Roundcube for their Mail Station package.
Technology
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.
Plugins
With version 0.3 Roundcube introduced a plug-in API which allows non-standard features to be added without the need to modify the source code. A variety of plug-ins are available from the Plugin Repository.