Late last year, I posted about Richard Valk’s “ISP in a box” project, which offered instructions for setting up a mail, web and more server on a Mac mini (or any Mac) at home.

Richard has now released “ISP in a box” 2.0, a series of blog posts with instructions and links to binaries that allow you to be your own ISP:

If you follow these documented steps you’ll end up with a Mac which you can use to host your and your friends’ websites by using an Apache2-based webserver which uses PHP 5 and can talk to a MySQL 5 database. This means you can install most PHP/MySQL based applications like for instance blogs or forums like WordPress and phpbb. You are also able to provide mail services for them with unlimited mailboxes, domains and web-based email services using Roundcube.

The end result is a system running Apache 2.2.3, MySQL 5.0.24, PHP 5.1.4, Postfix 2.3.2, Courier-IMAP 4.1.1, Courier-Auth 0.58, Cyrus-Sasl 2.1.18, Postfix admin 2.1.0 and Roundcube webmail 0.1 beta2.

Sounds like your kind of thing? Check it out .email in general, web hosting, php, dot it yourself, DIY, mail server, MySQL, Postfix, roundcube

As Brady J. Frey points out in a comment on another post, RoundCube Webmail has recently gone beta, with a release that contains many more features than the version Hawk Wings reviewed late last year.

RoundCube is a feature-rich webmail client that beats the pants of SquirrelMail. It also has a clean and pleasing Mail.app-like look:

It actually uses more Thunderbird-like icons, but since the designers of the Thunderbird icons took their inspiration from Mail.app, the “Mail.app-like” claim works out in the end.

RoundCube is open source and available from the RoundCube web site .

Alex King gave RoundCube a glowing thumbs up on his site yesterday.roundcube, webmail, mail.app, apple mail, thunderbird, IMAP, email

• Paul Heinlein has updated his collection of tips on building and running pine under Mac OS X.
• Paul Stamatiou has written a guide to installing RoundCube on your server. RoundCube is a webmail client with a Mail.app look.
• Apple has published a technote that advises you to “avoid using spaces and the commercial at symbol (“@”) in passwords of iCal calendars that are published to an iDisk or a WebDAV server.” You need to use only letters and numbers.
• Steve Gio joins the select few who are turning their backs on Gmail. He is returning to Mail.app as his main client. Why? Gmail offers no useable way to access email when offline.
• Chris Marsden says some nice things about Hawk Wings (ta very much), where he discovered Peter Maurer and his software. Raves about Witch, Textpander, et al. follow.
• In the Apple Mail Discussions, Tenacious MC wonders why Mail.app “seems to write to com.apple.Safari.plist for some odd reason”. So do I.

pine, mail.app, apple mail, roundcube, gmail, witch, Textpander, safari, ical, passwords, quickies, productivity

Roundcube is “a browser-based multilingual IMAP client with an application-like user interface”.

Written in PHP and requiring a MySQL database, it is still in Alpa but already offers a rich set of features including multilingual capabilities, full support for MIME and HTML messages, attachments, multiple sender identities, an address book with “find-as-you-type” address book integration, built-in caching for fast mailbox access and external SMTP server support.

And it looks good. It is fully skinnable through XHTML and CSS 2, but there are no prizes for guessing which mail client is the inspiration behind its default skin:

One blogger is cheeky enough to suggest that,

The interface looks quite similar to Apple Mail, but the best part is that you don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t need to spend a fortune on a Mac to get that great interface and it goes where ever you go.

When the planned features are included, it will give SquirrelMail a run for its money as my webmail client of choice.

You can read more about it, check out some screenshots, download the latest build (it’s free) and find installation guides on the Roundcube web site.