Instant Web Mail

Version 0.55

About

Instant Web Mail is a free, web-based POP mail client. It is encredibly easy to install - however, the easy installation comes at a price: There are no Sent mail and Trash folders, and there is no address book.

Author/copyright

© 2001 Jonas Koch Bentzen and the contributors.
Instant Web Mail is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Contributors

In alphabetical order:

Sven-Erik Andersen [m]	The Norwegian translation.
Oliver Ardo [m]	The Slovak translation.
Birkir Björnsson [m]	The Icelandic translation.
Eddy Dibbink [m]	The Dutch translation.
Nicklas af Ekenstam [m]	Patches to the Swedish translation.
Emre Erim [m]	Patches to the Turkish translation.
Grazziano Picanço Guarany [m]	The Brazilian Portuguese translation.
S. Craig Jones [m]	The "Dark City", "Ochre", and "Silver Sage" themes.
Eric Joseph-Alexandre [m]	The French translation.
Kjell Awall [m]	The Swedish translation.
Petr Kveton [m]	The Czech translation.
Morten Leerhøy [m]	The logo image and the "Cysol" theme.
Piero Orsoni [m]	The Italian translation and the "Blue" theme.
José Antonio Pérez [m]	The Spanish translation.
Rui Ribeiro [m]	The Portuguese translation.
Frank Roth [m]	The German translation.
Sergey Shibeko [m]	The Russian translation.
Leszek Stefaniak [m]	The Polish translation.
Juris Valdovskis [m]	The Latvian translation and the "Yellow" theme.
Necdet Yücel [m]	The Turkish translation.

Besides those listed here, a number of people have contributed with suggestions, bug reports, etc. Thanks to all of you.

Features

Easy to install. Does not require PHP to be compiled with IMAP support.
Reads and sends attachments.
Displays text/HTML attachments in-line (while still giving you the option of saving them to your hard drive).
All the basic functions: Send, receive, reply, reply to all, forward, delete.
View all headers or the full source of the email.
Works even if the user has disabled cookies.
Converts 7-bit headers like "=?iso-8859-1?b?xiDY?= =?iso-8859-1?b?xQ==?=" into the correct 8-bit version ("Æ Ø Å").
URLs and email addresses are made into links.
Optional formatting of plain text messages: *Bold* is converted to Bold, /italic/ is converted to italic, and _underlined_ is converted to underlined.
Localized date field.
Translated into several languages.
Can be set up to check for new messages automatically.
Several themes available.
Customizable: Using the web-based administration page, you can easily add a footer to be shown on all pages. The front page (the log-in page) can be customized even further. All color and font values are gathered in one single style sheet, making them easy to alter.

Requirements

A web host account or server with PHP 4.0.3 or a later version. You do not need IMAP support in PHP - a standard installation of PHP will work.
A contemporary browser with extensive support for JavaScript and CSS. Netscape 4.x and earlier versions will not work. Instant Web Mail has been known to work in Konqueror, Mozilla, Opera, Netscape 6, and Internet Explorer.

Download

bzip2
.ZIP

Install

Upload the entire instantWebMail directory to your server. That's it! Instant Web Mail works right out of the box (hence the name), so if you want to try it out right away, point your browser to http://example.com/instantWebMail and log in. However, if you want to change the language or other configuration options, you should follow the next steps:
If you've installed the program on a Unix server (e.g. Linux, FreeBSD, or Sun Solaris), you need to chmod (change the permissions of) the file settingsSaved.php to 666. This can usually be done from within your FTP client. Right-click on settingsSaved.php, select "Chmod", and check the boxes as shown on this picture:
Point your browser to http://example.com/instantWebMail/settings.php. Log in with the username "username" and the password "password". Now you can configure Instant Web Mail to suit your needs. Don't forget to change the administrator username and password right away.

Questions and answers

Why does it take more than 10 seconds for each page to load even though I have a fast Internet connection?
The problem is probably caused by the POP server. Some POP servers perform so-called reverse DNS lookups on the clients that connect to them. These reverse DNS lookups take time - often more than 10 seconds. If the POP server is located within your internal network (LAN), you can probably eliminate the problem by using the IP address of the server instead of the host name when you log in. Another solution is of course to ask your system administrator to disable reverse DNS lookups in the POP server.

The program can't connect to the POP server even though I'm entering the correct host name, username, and password.
This might be a firewall issue. Some web hosts that offer their services for free shut off all network traffic from/to certain ports. There's nothing you can do but install Instant Web Mail on another server.

Why do I get an error message saying that the function wordwrap()/is_uploaded_file()/session_unset() is undefined?
Probably because you didn't read this readme file thoroughly. It is very clearly stated in the Requirements section which version of PHP is needed to run Instant Web Mail. You need that version (or a newer one), otherwise the whole thing won't work. That should go without saying - nevertheless, I get a lot of emails asking me the above question. If you don't know which version of PHP is installed on your server, ask your web host, or try running this script:

<?php
echo "You are using PHP version ".PHP_VERSION;
?>

There's a bug in your program. Could you fix it?
I might - if I have the time. However, before you send me a bug report, please make sure the bug is not listed in the To do section of this page. If you're sure you've discovered a new bug, send a detailed description of it to me. If your description is something along the lines of "The program doesn't display the message text", there's no way I can figure out what the problem is. I need to know which version of Instant Web Mail and PHP you're using as well as which operating system and web server program. Please include screen shots of all relevant windows, the full message source, JavaScript error messages, etc.

Do you plan to implement folders and address books?
No. As its name suggests, Instant Web Mail was made with the goal of offering a web mail program that can be installed within minutes. If the program were to save information such as sent mail and addresses on the server, it would cause the setup time to be much longer. Instant Web Mail was designed to read the mail directly from the POP server, and it would require a complete rewrite of the program to implement folders and address books. Also, I might add that implementing folders is a lot of work - but it's not particularly challenging (the difficult part when making mail clients is parsing the messages and displaying them properly, not communicating with an SQL database). When I write open source software, I tend to like small, but challenging tasks that might help me improve my programming skills - and making a complete web mail program with folders just doesn't fall under that category. Sure enough, if you or your company decide to pay me for making a complete web-based mail client, I'd be more than happy to - otherwise, forget it : )

How can I be informed about new releases of Instant Web Mail?
Visit Understrøm frequently - or go to freshmeat, create a new user account if you don't have one already, find the project page for Instant Web Mail, and click on "Subscribe to new releases".

To do

Better handling of multipart/related messages.
Bug: The decoding of 7-bit headers cuts away spaces in rare cases. E.g. the subject line "Tester =?iso-8859-1?b?xiwg2CBvZw==?= =?iso-8859-1?b?xQ==?=" will incorrectly be displayed as "Tester Æ, Ø ogÅ". The space between "og" and "Å" has been cut away for some reason.
Bug: Incorrect parsing of headers that extend to more than one lines. Say the subject looks like this in the message source:

Subject: All your base
are belong to us.

Instant Web Mail will display that subject line as just "All your base".

It's important to note that Instant Web Mail does not have any problems parsing those multi-line headers that provide information about the content type, character set, etc. of a certain message part. That is, Instant Web Mail will parse headers like the following correctly:

Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="----asdf1234"

Change log

Version 0.55 (November 13, 2001)
- The German translation was updated.
- The Spanish translation was updated.
Version 0.54 (October 26, 2001)
- New Icelandic translation.
- The Italian translation was updated.
- The Turkish translation was updated.
Version 0.53 (October 9, 2001)
- A new Slovak translation that replaces the old one.
- New Czech translation.
- Most other translations were updated.
Version 0.52 (September 30, 2001)
- Removed the crypt() function from settings.php because it caused problems with people not being able to log in.
- Added the .lowCheckBox class to the style sheets in order to insure that the check boxes in the header list don't take up so much space that they enlarge the subject table rows.
- New Slovak translation.
- Updated the Norwegian translation.
Version 0.51 (September 23, 2001)
- Some people were unable to log in using the default username and password. I think I solved the problem. If some if you still can't log in, contact me, and I'll take another look at the problem.
- In order to make it clearer to the user which links are attachments, a tiny image is now displayed next to all attachment links.
- Added a logo image.
- New German translation.
- The "Cysol" theme: New font color in text areas.
Version 0.50 (September 15, 2001)
- URLs are made into links now.
- You can now delete multiple messages directly in the header list.
- Fixed a line break bug in write.php which on some Unix systems caused the Content-Type header to appear in the body of the message.
- New themes: "Dark City", "Ochre", and "Silver Sage".
- Spanish translation.
- Improved README.html.
Version 0.41 (September 6, 2001)
- New theme: "Cysol".
- New theme: "Yellow".
- French translation.
- Updated the Latvian translation.
- Updated the Turkish translation.
Version 0.40 (August 29, 2001)
- It is now possible to have more than one preset POP server, port, and username. In settings.php, you can enter a list of POP servers, ports, and usernames to use, and then Instant Web Mail will display those lists in select boxes on the log-in page.
- Added another field to the log-in screen: "Your email address". The reason is that a lot of people have complained that Instant Web Mail doesn't show the correct "From" address in the compose window. Unfortunally, it's almost impossible for the program to guess the user's email address since there are tons of different ways of writing POP usernames - so what better way to solve the problem than let the user specify his/her email address?...
- settings.php now has help texts for some of the configuration options.
- The bug that caused certain message bodies to disappear should be completely fixed now.
- Updated the Norwegian and the Turkish translation.
- Swedish translation.
- Polish translation.
Version 0.30 (August 24, 2001)
- The bug that caused some message bodies to mysteriously disappear has been fixed.
- The ability to set the priority of outgoing mail has been added.
- New theme: "Blue".
- Brazilian Portuguese translation.
- Italian translation.
- Norwegian translation.
Version 0.22 (August 19, 2001)
- Added the possibility to request return receipts.
- Better attempts to guess the user's email address in the compose window.
- Dutch translation.
- German translation.
- Portuguese translation.
- Turkish translation.
Version 0.21 (August 17, 2001)
- In version 0.20, the default language had been set to Danish by accident. Version 0.21 changes the default language to English.
Version 0.20 (August 16, 2001)
- Added theme support.
- Optional formatting of plain text messages: *Bold* is converted to Bold, /italic/ is converted to italic, and _underlined_ is converted to underlined.
- Internet Explorer and Opera users might have had problems replying and forwarding due to JavaScript issues. These issues have been resolved.
- Fixed a bug which in some cases would cause the sender address in the compose window to be something like "someone@example.com@example.com".
- Russian translation.
- Latvian translation.
- Improved about.php.
- Improved README.html.
Version 0.12 (August 12, 2001)
- Fixed a JavaScript error that would occur whenever the user clicked on "New letter".
- Improved README.html.
Version 0.11 (August 12, 2001)
- Added automatic checking of new mail.
- Fixed a minor bug that caused the recipient and sender address to be the same in the "Forwarded letter" portion of the compose window.
- Improved README.html.
- Improved about.php.
Version 0.10 (August 5, 2001)
- First version.