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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.

Installation
Installation 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

End-User
This is where the product really does outstanding. Like I said earlier, it's basically Hotmail In A Can. This has every option you could possibly want. You can set up new folders in your alloted space and sort your messages in any way you choose. You can set up multiple signatures for use in your outgoing mail. Set up your own address book. Check mail from other remote POP3 servers. GMail even has it's own set of user-configurable spam filters you can set up, so you stop getting all that porn.

Composing mail is easy, and can be done in one of two styles - text and HTML. Text is pretty straightforward - type your message and be done with it. HTML Mode is even better though, because you are given a wonderful little word processor style toolbar with all sorts of formatting options. The composer also has a spell-checker included.

One little thing about signatures that I found somewhat odd, was that you couldn't technically edit a signature without creating a new one. Once you created one, you could go back in and edit it later. But in order to save your changes, you were forced to give it a new name, so if you were going through a little "testing" phase you may end up with several different copies of the signature just sitting there being useless. This is minor, though, and its insignificance is far outweighed by the coolness of the rest of the program.

End-User Score: 95%.

Customization
*drools* Mmmmm, customization! You want customization options? You got it! Included in the GMail cpanel is a built-in template editor. All output pages are run by HTML files. So the template editor just allows you to easily customize those files to your little heart's content, without needing any other programs. True, you could accomplish the same thing with Notepad. But hey, I don't see UBB having a built-in editor for it's template files! So there!

Built-in are two separate template styles the users can pick from when they log in. The default one has some images and looks a good deal better than the basic one. It's page layout and colors are much more appealing to me, personally (even though green & orange isn't exactly the most pretty color combo I would have picked...). The basic one is just some old-skool tables in plain boring colors.

Also, GMail has a really well thought-out plugin system for adding new features to your installation very simply. There are already plugins available for using the member accounts from your existing forums software in conjunction with the webmail installation. Unfortunately, these only exist currently for VBulletin and WWWThreads (I'd assume it's still compatible with UBBThreads as well). But I was unable to find one for UBB. Or if there is one, it's not shown on the site yet. Sorry guys. But besides the forums addons, there is a plugin to make GMail a complete POP server in and of itself, one that allows GMail to authenticate off other POP3 servers, and one that makes GMail WAP-enabled so you can check your email from your cell phone.

So yeah, customizing your copy is just really freaking cool!

Customization Score: 100%.

Click to jump to:
Page 1: Intro, Installation, & Administration.
Page 3: Other Stuff & Summary.
Page 4: Screenshots

Other Stuff
GMail comes bundled with two nice little helper programs: FileMan & MySQLMan. MasterMind has reviewed FileMan elsewhere in this issue of the UZine, so go read his review for more information about that. MySQLMan is just a nice little MySQL database administration program so you can have low-level access to the backend of your GMail installation directly through the program itself.

As far as price goes, GMail seems a tad expensive. But when you compare what you get with GMail to what you get with other webmail programs, it's more than reasonable.

And I'd originally had more material for this section in mind when I started the intro, but now I can't think of it. Extra programs are good, initial investment is kinda pricey, so I'll just give this program a nice high score...

Other Stuff Score: 90%.

Summary
One word: Wow! If you are looking to offer your site visitors a free email account, but don't want to be burdened with the myriad of adverts imposed by services like Everyone.net, YOU WANT THIS PROGRAM! I will assume the debugger problem was pretty specific to something I did, since only one other person on the support forum was experiencing it. And though the price seems a little high, you get such an awesome program that it's worth every penny. Customization options are excellent, as is the user interface. CPanel could go for a facelift but the functionality of it is great. And installation is just freaking cool!

Go to http://www.gossamer-threads.com now and get this product if you're interested in harnessing the power of a Hotmail-type app on your own server! (Note, just for clarification, Gossamer Mail has no affiliation at all with Hotmail, but Hotmail is the only thing I can think of to compare it to.)

TOTAL SCORE: 91%

Click to jump to:
Page 1: Intro, Installation, & Administration.
Page 2: End-User & Customization.
Page 4: Screenshots

Screenshots
Screenshots of Gossamer Mail, as well as a working demonstration of both the main program and control panel, can be found by clicking the link below:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/scripts/webmail/screenshots.htm

That's all, folks!
Thanks to Alex Krohn for hooking us up with a copy of his great script. And thanks to Allen and the rest of the administration here for letting me do the review. And of course, thanks to the Academy, without them I don't know what I'd do. And that's all I've got to say about that.

---Skorpion