Head Nut, Rick Castello
Age: 29
Occupation: Retail business owner, Internet consultant, Web developer
Education: Some college (Aeronautical Engineering, Philosophy) CalPoly San Luis Obispo, CA, took extended leave to start a business.
Location: Northeast US, just north of Boston, MA
Stable Series Lead, Jonathan Angliss
Age: 21
Occupation: Network Engineer, Programmer, Web developer
Education: Cisco certifications, some college (Information Technology, Physics, Mathematics)
Location: Dallas, Texas, USA
Stable Series Lead, Thijs Kinkhorst
Age: 23
Occupation: student & website hosting company owner
Education: Student Medical Computer Science, Utrecht University
Location: Utrecht, Netherlands
Development Series Team Lead, Erin Schnabel
Age: 26
Occupation: Software Engineer, Large IT Corporation
Education: B.S. Computer Engineering/M.S. Computer Science
Case Western Reserve University
Location: Poughkeepsie, NY, USA
Development Series Team Lead, Marc Groot Koerkamp
Age: 28
Occupation: Advisor European Tenders, System Administrator Education: Electrical enginering University Twente
Location: Enschede, Netherlands
Plugins Team Lead, Jimmy Conner
Age: 23
Occupation: Computer Technician (Universal Computer Systems)
Education: College
Location: College Station, Texas
Plugins Team Lead, Simon Dick
Age: 27
Occupation: System Developer/Administrator
Education: Computer Science BSc
Location: London, UK
Internationalization Team Lead, Chris Hilts
Age: 37
Occupation: Programmer, Network Engineer, Web developer. IT responsible in a big printing plant.
Education: Both french and spanish pre-university course completed. Some university (3 years at Agronomist SuperiorEngineering).
Location: Madrid, Spain
Project Admin in Training, Chris Hilts
Age: 27
Occupation: Employed in an unrelated industry (for now)
Education: AAS IT/Networking from ECPI Technical College
Location: Roanoke, VA, USA
Key developer(s):
Regular contributors are:
Jonathan Angliss
Rick Castello
Simon Dick
Gustav Foseid
Bron Gondwana
Chris Hilts
Dave Huang
Jeff Hinrichs
Sam Johnston
Thijs Kinkhorst
Marc Groot Koerkamp
Jason Munro
Philippe Mingo
Peter Palmer
Seth E. Randall
Konstantin Riabitsev
Dan Rue
Erin Schnabel
Stefan Sels
Rob Siemborski
Wouter Teepe
Paul Joseph Thompson
Pontus Ullgren
Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and other web-based email services have introduced to users how easy it is to read and reply to email on the road by using a simple web-browser. This works great if you use one of these services, but the majority of users use email accounts given to them by their school or place of work. Since these accounts often require a mail client such as Eudora, Netscape Mail, MS Outlook this can make viewing email from multiple locations, such as airport kiosks, very complicated. SF.net’s Jan 2003 project of the month, SquirrelMail, provides a system administrator the ability to easily offer web-based email to his or her users by installing it in conjunction with their IMAP mail server. The SF.net team has a particular fondness for SquirrelMail. Besides being a great application, the project was one of our first SF.net projects back in November 1999 and they continue to be one our most active. (Top 10 out of 50,000+).
Project Name: SquirrelMail
Founded / Started: November 18, 1999
Project Quote:
SquirrelMail – Webmail for Nuts
Trove info:
Environment :: Web Environment
Intended Audience :: End Users/Desktop, System Administrators
License :: OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Programming Language :: PHP
Topic :: Communications :: Email, Communications :: Email :: Email
Clients (MUA), Internet :: WWW/HTTP, Internet :: WWW/HTTP :: Dynamic Content
How did you get started?
Luke Ehresman and his brother Nathan founded this project in late 1999, early 2000. The rest of us joined at various points along the way.
What is the intended audience?
Anybody wanting web based access for their mail services. It’s ideal for ISPs/Companies to provide web based access to roaming staff/customers.
What exactly does it do…and what makes it unique?
SquirrelMail is a web based mail client using IMAP4rev1 for mailbox access, with plugins to support extended features such as POP3 retrieval, and a lot more. It has been designed with as few dependencies as possible to help ensure success on almost any platform.
How many people do you believe are using your software?
According to Luke Ehresman, founder who has since left the project, "The project grew further than my brother and I ever thought when we started it in 1999. Currently it has over 2 million users and is one of the most popular webmail clients out there".
What gave you an indication that your project was becoming successful?
Feedback. Feedback from small users running their own mail server for their families, and feedback from larger ISPs using SquirrelMail as an interface for thousands.
What has been your biggest surprise?
The rapid growth of SquirrelMail, it’s increasing popularity, the way plugin developers come out of the woodwork.
What has been your biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge continues to be offering robust support without incurring excessive bloat. SquirrelMail started as a small, fast, webmail client. Plugins allow a great deal of flexibility, and allow an administrator to decide how many bells and whistles to add. The core of SquirrelMail is still fairly quick, but there have been some trade-offs made in order to support the quirks of various IMAP servers, and to fully support requisite RFC’s etc. This is something we continue to work with, and with future versions we hope to optimize certain paths based on lessons learned.
Why do you think your project has been so well received?
It’s flexible, looks good, runs cross platform, has few dependencies (making installation simple), supports over 30 different languages,and is easy to use.
Where do you see your project going?
We’re looking at restructuring different pieces of the SquirrelMail architecture, to make it both more pluggable and more streamlined. We want to improve our performance (which isn’t bad as it stands, but there is room for improvement). We’re also looking at UI changes, the use of templates to make it easy to customize the look and feel of the UI to match any containing site.
Milestones:
SquirrelMail project begins on SourceForge – November 18, 1999
Version 0.1 — December 14, 1999
Version 1.0 — January 30, 2001
Version 1.2.0 — 25 December 2001
Move 1.2 tree to "security fixes only" status – Soon
Move 1.3 tree to 1.4, new stable – Soon
Templating and back-end enhancements on new (1.5) dev tree – Soon
Quote about SF.net:
SourceForge.net is the helping hand every OSS project needs. You come up with the idea and the code, they’ll provide the necessities to help it grow.
Why did you place the project on SF.net?
Only Luke can answer that, but we’re sure glad he did. See next question for more.
How has SF.net helped you?
SourceForge.net gives us excellent visibility, free hosting for website and mailing lists, a CVS repository, and a built-in base of active and interested OSS enthusiasts. We wouldn’t be more than a tiny hobby project without them.
The number one benefit of SF.net for your project is:
Support services.
Supported services allows us to concentrate on getting the important things like coding, debugging, and user support done, without having to worry about hosting issues.