LincolnBlogs

Some times you run into some software that does just what you wanted and no more. ilohamail does just that.

For a long time now I have been running my own mail server of sorts. The short explanation is I use fetchmail to aggregate my email from various sources to my own local home server, which runs imap so that I can get my mail off of it there. It’s a great system with only a couple drawbacks. The first is that I have to use my ISP’s smtp server (they block port 25 to anyone but them). The second is you always have to have access to a mail client, well, until now that is.

Having access to a configurable mail client is not normally a problem, however, there are some times you just want to check your mail somewhere and all you have is a web browser. Tough to do with my setup unless you run some sort of webmail on your home server. Now in the past, that hasn’t been too difficult either, except since I have to push mail through my ISP’s smtp server and don’t run my own, I can’t send mail.

Last night I was browsing around the web and ran into ilohamail (no, it’s not Hawaiian, it’s actually Japanese). Anyway, one of the things that caught my attention about it was you could specify an external smtp server. The other thing was it seemed easy enough to get going, requiring only a webserver and php4 or better.

I actually installed the Ubuntu package, but I can’t imagine installing the source would be any different since it’s all php. Simply enough, you just make the packages ‘source’ directory web enabled. I did that by creating a symlink from my webserver/webmail to that source directory. You can adjust some settings if you wish in the include/local.php file. Other than that, it’s up and running and working! Yay!

Seriously though, I had been looking for something like this for a long time and I have installed several webmail systems to test them out. Nothing has installed as fast and easy as this program. This was literally a 5 minute install and works great!