# Comparison of Horde vs. Squirrelmail



## dpalme (Aug 14, 2012)

Has anyone made the choice of Horde over squirrelmail? How would you rate horde? I know it provides a lot more in the way of groupware, but how's the overhead? 

All thoughts and comments are appreciated.

Douglas


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## lme@ (Aug 15, 2012)

Horde is much harder to configure but it's much more comfortable than Squirrelmail.
What I'm using now is Roundcube which is also nice to use and not to hard to setup.


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## EasyTarget (Aug 16, 2012)

If -all- you want is email, I'd go for Squirrelmail, or possibly RoundCube.

Squirrelmail is nice and easy, works fine as a primary email interface. But lacks any groupware features at all. Which kinda sucks if you are used to having integrated calendars etc. and is enough to make me reject Ssquirrelmail out-of-hand as a solution for my needs.

Roundcube appears to be a better mail client, but has the same flaw that it only does email.

Horde Sucks. Royally. Hugely, and I would urge you to avoid it at all costs.
Wonderful functionality, many features, good UI (in parts) which is still being developed? what's not to like?
Actually, the list that makes it worthless goes like this:
1) It's massive instability, default updates to (apparently unrelated) ports break Horde. PHP5.4 is not a supported platform for FreeBSD/Horde, you have to roll your system down to 5.3 (5.4 is currently being shoved down our faces by the ports team despite only being released recently and full of major regressions and bugs due to it's mutant Ninja developers who prefer 'leet features' to 'bugfixing') 
2) It's massive size. (related to 1, above of course) over a hundred packages, plus another hundred as dependencies. All creaking and rubbing against each other.
3) It's lack of documentation. What little is available is confusingly formatted, frequently incomplete or worse, incorrect. There is no coverage to the general documentation, install guides contain stupidities such as telling you that the only way to configure the system is via the online configuration tool. Whilst ignoring the fact that configuration errors can prevent you using that tool to fix your configuration. And (apparently deliberately) refusing to document the configuration directives.
4) It is being funded and influenced by corporate interests and steered inexorqably towards being a huge, dedicated admin team required, corporate behemoth.

I'll stop typing and simply say that unless you have hundreds of hours of your personal time to waste on the horde. You will havbe a happier life if you avoid it. When running it is lovely, but are you prepared to make the huge initial investment, and commit to many evenings 'fixing' it in the future?

I have just lost 6 months of my life to this, it's latest screwup is incredible (On monday morning, about 11am, halfway through a normal usage session with no other activity on the server at all, no updates or modifications for weeks) it starts totally failing, http connections succeed, but absolutely no response is sent by the horde, not a single byte of data. Connections are just held open and never close until Apache times them out, not a single error in any log, anywhere. Not a single bit of help on the Horde documentation or website.

I made the decision last night to de install this bloated bit MS'esque rubbish and install Citadel.

And I'd like to propose that as a alternative. Check out Citadel.org. It's like the horde.. but less suckage.


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## dpalme (Aug 16, 2012)

Fair enough, thanks for the feedback...

Roundcube is probably what I'm going to use on an interim basis.


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## FIlIPy65 (Aug 17, 2012)

Just email? RoundCube for sure.

Relatively easy, functional and have an interface appreciable. =)

Cheers.


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## OH (Aug 17, 2012)

There is a calendar plugin for Roundcube which has options to share your calendar with other users. It's still very much in development though and I haven't yet had the time to properly test it.


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## EasyTarget (Aug 20, 2012)

@oh - thanks for that, good to know.

By the way; my latest Horde snafu was caused by the pecl/apache cache module; I seem to have had issues when cache entries expired some time after updating. This weekends update of that to v3.1.12 seems to have got things working again.

And once again, I am reminded how nice Horde is when it is working, really nice, and once all the components have the dynamic HTML treatment it will be even better. I just wish I had confidence that it will be on-line when I need it instead of when only working when the stars line up and conditions are just right.


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