I have been given the privilege of reviewing a nice little program called Gossamer Mail. Gossamer Mail is a little something I like to call "Hotmail In A Can". I have had experiences with several other webmail clients in the past, and none of them compare to the scope of Gossamer Mail (henceforth referred to as GMail, since Gossamer is a kind of long word to type over and over
). Each little section of this review will get a percentage grade, then I'll average them all up for the final score. I'll do this in five sections: Installation, Administration, End-user, Customization, and Other Stuff.
InstallationInstallation of GMail was a breeze. The entire program came in one nice neat little package - well, actually two nice neat little packages. One installer program and one installer datafile. To install, simply upload both files and CHMOD the .cgi file to 755. Then run it from your browser. You are asked some basic questions about your server, much like the questions you are asked when you first set up your UBB. Then the program unpacks itself from the datafile, sets up your MySQL database tables, and is ready to run in a few seconds. Then it automatically deletes itself (that is, the two installer files) for security. Upgrading the product runs the exact same way - upload the newer versions of the two files and rerun the installer, specifying an Upgrade instead of New installation. Files are unpacked and everything is reconfigured for your new version. To put it simply, this couldn't have gone easier!
I do have a single thing that I've gotta rate down for, though. The filesize of the installer datafile is nearly 13MB. Be prepared to wait for quite awhile during the upload if you're on anything less than broadband. I think ideally, installation of this program may work best if you have either a very fast connection or you have physical access to the server. But still, considering the sheer coolness of this product, waiting for a couple hours during the upload is only a minor problem.
Installation Requirements for the program are a little high, but anyone who can afford the program should have no problems at all affording
real hosting that comes with all the stuff anyway. Requirements are:
- Perl 5.004 or higher
- Perl DBI modules
- MySQL or MS SQL server
- "Catch-all" email address capabilities
- Cron-tab access (recommended)
- mod_perl (optional)
Installation Score: 95%.Administration Those who are used to UBB's pretty little control panel, beware. Though it's not much of a hinderance and doesn't really matter that much (so why am I even mentioning it?), GMail's control panel really ain't that pretty. It's somewhat devoid of "flair", so don't go in there expecting a bunch of fun colors and stuff. But hey, what it does do is get the job done. Nicely.
The control panel contains a massive amount of options and settings and other various stuff for you to play with. The Users control panel in particular is a very useful tool, containing options for all kinds of demographics searches and user management. Infopop might want to look at the GMail Search Users control panel and take a few lessons...
The main Setup control panel is good, and contains all sorts of setup options. But it's also where I started running into some problems - with the impact of the options on the program, not with the control panel itself. The main one I ran into, was that unless the program was set to "Debug Level 1", users would be unable to login. Of course, G-Threads recommends turning debugging off (Level 0) unless you're actually needing it for debugging purposes, since it causes a big hit on system performance. This problem seemed to manifest itself for no apparent reason, because for the first little while the program worked perfectly fine. Then all of a sudden it stopped working (returning 500ISE's upon attempting to login) and I learned from their support forums that I'd have to turn debugging on in order to trick it into working. I never found any real fix.
Overall, the control panel is very well executed. However, due to a couple problems I ran into, I am rating it down a little bit.
Administration Score: 75%.Click to jump to:
Page 2: End-User & Customization. Page 3: Other Stuff & Summary. Page 4: Screenshots
