You can now download free, ready to run native installers for Windows, OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Azure and Amazon EC2 images for Roundcube.
For those of you not familiar with this popular app, Roundcube is a modern webmail solution for managing your emails, similar to GMail, that you can host on your own servers. Some of its features include MIME support, address book, folder manipulation, message searching and spell checking.
You can also now launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below. This server was configured with GMail by default. You can log in with a GMail account to start using it.
Thomas Bruederli, the Lead Developer and Project Administrator of Roundcube, was kind enough to answer some questions about his project.
1. What is the goal of the Roundcube application?
Roundcube aims to be a state-of-the-art webmail application that can be put on top of every standard email server and which is free to use and can easily be extended.
2. What are some of the features of Roundcube?
As the name states, the core features are everyday email reading and writing. For the use in corporate or institutional environments, Roundcube also integrates LDAP address books. Thanks to the plugin architecture one can choose from a broad variety of plugins that add further features such as calendar, task management, message filters or synchronization.
3. Which projects or organizations are using Roundcube currently? What kind of projects do they use it for?
There are several American Universities using Roundcube for their campus or department email service, the largest deployment known is at University of Michigan serving 70K users. But also many internet service providers around the world meanwhile offer Roundcube by default for their paying hosting customers. Finally, Roundcube became the web client of the open source groupware solution Kolab which is a powerful competitor in the groupware market.
4. What do you expect will be the main benefits of having BitNami packages available for Roundcube?
Although the installation of Roundcube is rather simple, having it packaged and pre-configured will hopefully make it even easier for people to give it a try. Since the Roundcube software is still pretty young and under heavy development, we also expect to open a proper update channel with the BitNami packages.
Would you like your favorite app to be part of BitNami? Be sure to suggest and vote for it in our contest!