Webmail: Coming Soon to UNT!

By Dianna Mullet, UNIX System Administrator

Webmail has been a hot item on the Net for the past several years in the form of free Internet mail accounts. Sites like Hotmail™ and Yahoo have been used by literally millions of Internet users all over the world, but until recently, similar Webmail clients were not widely available for sites like UNT, who wanted to provide their own Webmail service. 1999 marked the first year that a variety of Webmail clients were either freely or commercially available.

If you’re not familiar with Webmail, it’s a site on the World Wide Web that’s used to access IMAP (and POP) mail that’s stored on a server. With Webmail, you can read the same mail from any computer, as long as the computer has a Web browser like Netscape or Internet Explorer –- no special software or plug-ins are required. Since Webmail preferences are also stored on the server, not your computer’s hard drive, you’ll get the same address books, personal preferences, and look-and-feel regardless of which computer you’re on when you run it.

Back in January, the ACS UNIX group began evaluating Webmail clients. We ruled out several clients: some clients relied on back-end databases that would have been difficult to manage or migrate to other Webmail systems in the future; others (mainly the freely available clients) were bizarrely complex to install and upgrade; and others were still in alpha release without evidence that maintenance would be continued. Eventually, we narrowed the options down to four clients and early in October, made demos of the four clients available to students.

Webmail Demos

The Webmail demos will be available to all students for evaluation until October 31 at 5 PM. The home page for all four demos is http://testmail.unt.edu/. Webmail will be supported in addition to, not in lieu of, the current supported E-mail programs (Pine and Simeon) that students use to read their IMAP mail.

There are four Webmail clients up for evaluation:

1. Execmail Web
2. Mailspinner
3. Infinite Technologies WebMail
4. SilkyMail

ACS is basing the selection of a Webmail client on feedback from students. On the day following the October 31 deadline, comments will be tallied up (results will be posted to the testmail.unt.edu Web site) and the most popular Webmail client will be purchased. Webmail will officially be made available to all students at the beginning of the spring semester.

As of October 18, 71 "votes" had been submitted. Mailspinner (25 votes) is in the lead. Users who like Mailspinner say that it’s easy to use and has features that they find useful, such as address book storage and the capability to do remote LDAP address book searches. Execmail Web (22 votes) is a very close second. Users liked its professional quality interface and simplicity ("everything on one screen"). Infinite Technologies WebMail (18 votes) came in third, and users who preferred WebMail say that it’s interface is its best feature. Unfortunately, SilkyMail (6 votes) is a beta version, and users were put off by its beta-version bugs.

Your Opinion Counts!

Please try the evaluations and let us know what you think! Student feedback is essential. The more specific the comments, the more it helps ACS understand what students expect in a Webmail application. Send your comments to operator@unt.edu.