[BlueOnyx:18920] Re: Openweb mail

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Ernie,
> There is a wrapper hack available to make it work, I had to use it on a
> FreeBSD box. Basically replaced the need for suid Perl which is no longer
> standard. Do a google on Openwebmail SUID perl, it's in the first couple of
> hits from memory.

I know, Ernie. The thing is: The whole SUID-wrapper stuff for
OpenWebmail actually pre-dates SUID-Perl. So it was only a nasty work
around to begin with. In the meantime Perl got SUID-Perl and that was
around for 10-15 years or so, until it got dumped again. There simply is
little valid need to run Perl as root for this kind of stuff.

CPAN.org has quite a bunch of useful Perl modules that deal with easy
access from Perl to POP3 and IMAP mailboxes. So it's actually really
easy to poll mailboxes via IMAP from within Perl. That totally
eliminates the need for any Perl based webmail client to require "root"
privileges. It also eliminates lots of the intricate stuff in
OpenWebmail which deals with reading the whole mbox file, parsing it and
making sense of where one message starts and another ends. The whole
MIME stuff and handling of encodings in OpenWebmail? There's been Perl
MIME modules which do that since the end of the 90's. And they do it better.

But of course: OpenWebmail is so old, it predates all of the newer
commodities. And it has neither evolved, nor learned new tricks. Worse:
The newer the underlying Perl gets, the more OpenWebmail shows it's ugly
face and doesn't play it nice anymore. It's *that* old by now.

I'm really uncomfortable to keep such old code around. Especially when
it runs with the SUID-bit when it simply could do without if the code
was better or more modern. OpenWebmail? Let it die. It served its
purpose. Good riddance.

> Better to use Roundcube unless you really need Openwebmail.

Absolutely! :-)

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber