communik8r

The C8 webmail client aims at providing desktop mail client look and feel while using webmail. The predecessors to C8 such as Gmail and Evolution are great mail clients, but they are not ideal for remote use. Enter C8, an AJAX based webmail client built on top of phpGroupWare that currently only supports IMAP mail. However, the development team plans on adding support for POP3 (with folders), jabber and SMS. The goal of communik8r is to provide a comprehensive communication platform, hence the name.

Currently, C8 requires Mozilla Firefox 0.8+ to run, but the development team plans on adding IE 6+ support before declaring C8 as stable. Additionally, any other browser that supports xmlhttprequest and client-side XSLT will be supported. Unfortunately, no other browser meets these requirements at the moment. In the event of such an occurrence, C8 is considering fallback to server-side XSLT. However, there are concerns about server load and code complexity/bloat when using this fallback mode.

Some key features of "communik8r" include everything that would be expected in a typical webmail client, along with multiple email accounts, a WYSIWYG composer with "smart text," smart caching, and PHP-based IMAP sockets that don't require php-imap. Overall, C8 is a promising webmail client that aims to bridge the gap between desktop mail clients and webmail.