Brett
I am trying to decide whether to use Roundcube in my new venture. It is so very close to being just what we need. However, after webmastering the mail system of a venture, I am convinced that a few more features are essential. Without them, the guys would throw it back at me. Here is what I think it needs to get over this bump.
1. In business, often people write the email before deciding all the people to send it to. In RoundCube, there is no convenient way to pop new email addresses into the address field of a new email after writing it. We need this.
2. Most business people I know find a row of smily face icons just above the message field to be too "nursury school". And frankly, we never use them anyway and the animations are distracting. We'd like to turn that off in "preferences."
3. The signatures required in every email at a business tend to be rather wordy. We need an auto signature to save time.
4. Not a deal breaker, but it would be nice if we could import address books in CSV from other apps. I can do it at the server, but it's a headache over time.
5. Also not a deal breaker, but it would be nice if the user, instead of me, could add fields to the address book.
6. Not a deal breaker, but would be nice if attachments did not have to appear in the email, just listed hotlinked for download.
That's it, friend. Do this, and RoundCube could compete with everything. Calendars don't work in a business setting unless they have complex project management features. For personal calendars, I would just give everyone an instance of TotalCalendar, an excellent product. All the extraneous features on Atmail really have no use for me, it's just money for nothing. I will just tie RoundCube into CPanel, so i can manage the accounts, and I'll be golden. But, without features #1 and #3 on my above list, I can't use RoundCube yet.
I very much want this package on my server. Is there anything I can do to convince you to add these two features quickly. I know that your programming is worth a lot more than I can pay. If you do this, I will make a point to be an active proponent of RC. I think it should be made standard with CPanel. You are on the right track visually and functionally. The above 6 features will make it an industry standard.
If anyone out there has already written solutions for this, I'm smart enough to insert the code with fair instructions, but I am not a programmer. Just a veteran (51 year old) web designer with a few extra skills.
Thanks for listening.