Open Webmail Help Tutorials >> Abilities and Advantages of Open Webmail
Open Webmail is a full-featured webmail, addressbook, calendar and webdisk system that is designed to manage very large mail folder files in a quick and memory efficient way. It has been in development since 2001 and has accumulated a large number of other very useful features. It also provides many features to help you to switch from Microsoft Outlook smoothly. In-depth descriptions of the various features are available in the sections below. Complete Addressbook The addressbook is completely compliant with the vCard contact technology standard. This brings Open Webmail up to date with current contact exchange technology and allows the sharing of addressbook information with users of many other popular information systems such as Evolution, Outlook and others. Calendar with Reminder/Notification Support You can keep track of appointments, meetings, birthdays, whatever, with the build-in calendar in Open Webmail. This calendar provides several views, including year view, month view, week view and day view, so you can browse scheduled events very easily. There is also reminder support for scheduled events. You can specify the days that the reminder should look ahead. For convenience, the first 5 upcoming events are displayed at the top of mail folder view during normal webmail use. If you want the event reminder to be available outside the webmail system, you can also specify a notification email address such as a mobile phone or other mobile device. Webdisk Support The webdisk module provides a web interface for access your home directory as a virtual disk on the web. It is also designed to easily store mail attachments, allowing you to freely copy attachments between mail messages and the webdisk. The top directory of the virtual disk is mapped to your home directory and any item displayed in the virtual disk is actually located under your home directory. The webdisk supports basic common file operations, eg: mkdir, rmdir, copy, move, rm, chmod, file upload and download. To facilitate the easy download of multiple files or directories, the webdisk compresses the files into a zip stream on-the-fly during transmission. It also handles many types of archives, including zip, arj, rar, tar.gz, tar.bz, tar.bz2, tgz, tbz, gz, Z and arc. You can compress, decompress or list the contents of archives on the server without downloading them to your local computer. Mail Filter Support Multiple filter rules can be set to move or copy incoming mails to different folders automatically or even delete them directly. You can categorize mails from a specific person or spammer and identify mails containing viruses very easily by defining rules of sender, receiver, SMTP relay, subject, body or filename of attachments. In addition to the static filter rules, Open Webmail has build-in five smart filters: repeatness filter, bad format from filter, faked smtp filter, faked from filter and faked exe content type filter. Repeatness filter, bad format from filter and faked SMTP filter are useful in filtering messages from spammers that frequently exhibit these detectable characteristics. The faked from filter and faked exe content type filter are useful in filtering messages that may contain viruses. Since mail filtering is activated only in Open Webmail, messages will stay in the INBOX until you read your mail with Open Webmail. Note: Other utilities to check mail status may report new mail incorrectly, since they are not aware of the OpenWebMail filters. AntiSpam Support through SpamAssassin Open Webmail can use the popular anti-spam SpamAssassin software to scan messages fetched from pop3 servers or optionally all incoming messages. The SpamAssassin software will determine a spamlevel for each scanned message based on its content and assign the message a spamlevel number. You can define a spamlevel threshold for all your messages in Open Webmail. Any message with a spamlevel more than this threshold will be moved from the INBOX to the SPAM folder automatically. Open Webmail also supports Spam/NotSpam bayesian learning technology through the sa-learn program in SpamAssassin. In case the spamlevel determined by SpamAssassin is not appropriate, the user can train the system by telling it to learn the messages as Spam or NotSpam. AntiVirus Support through ClamAV Open Webmail can use the popular anti-virus ClamAV software as the external viruscheck module to scan messages fetched from pop3 servers or optionally all incoming messages. If a message or its attachments are found to have a virus, Open Webmail will move the message from the INBOX to the VIRUS folder automatically. Spelling Check Support The spelling check in Open Webmail is very user-friendly and powerful: It makes suggestions for misspelled words and you can correct the errors very easily by selecting one of the suggestions from a drop-down menu. POP3 Support Multiple POP3 accounts can be defined, allowing you to fetch mails from a number of mail servers. All messages fetched will be stored in the INBOX folder. Should the fetch operation exceed 10 seconds (due to a slow link or large message for example), the operation will be put into background to avoid an http timeout. Auto Login You can determine if you want to enable the auto login feature in Open Webmail. When enabled, you don't have to type your username and password every time to login to Open Webmail. Open Webmail will do this automatically for you. However, for security reasons, the auto login feature will be actived only if you don't log out in the previous session and the previous session has not timed out. Further more, the system administrator can limit the range of IPs that are allowed to use the auto login feature. Multiple Languages/Multiple Charsets Open Webmail is currently available for more than 30 languages and it is quite easy to add new languages to Open Webmail if yours is still not supported. For languages with more than one charset, Open Webmail will choose one as the default charset for the language. If a message is written with a charset other than the default, it will be converted to the default charset automatically. Strong MIME Message Capability Open Webmail has very strong support for MIME messages. While most webmail packages present MIME messages poorly compared to traditional POP clients, Open Webmail presents MIME messages in an attractive format comparable to that presented by Microsoft Outlook. Either inline or uuencoded attachments are supported. In addition to the presention, Open Webmail also allow users to compose complex HTML messages with inline attachments or external attachments. The friendly WYSIWYG editor Xinha has been built into Open Webmail so that you can write HTML messages conformtably and easily without any knowledge of HTML tags. Full Content Search Full content search with regular expression support is provided. When you enter a keyword in the search box, the scope of the mail folder is limited to the keyword related messages. This means you can use the sort or static functions on the search result. The scope limit is released when you select another folder or refreshes the current folder. Draft Folder Support This feature enables you to write a message in a number of stages, even over several days. You can save an unfinished message into the draft folder and continue editing at any time. Confirm Reading Support You can request a 'confirm-reading receipt' for each message sent. When the message is read by the recipient, a receipt will be sent back to you. HTTP Compression Open Webmail supports compression of HTML content over HTTP. With compression turned on, the average page size is reduced by over 80%. This feature effectively reduces the use of network bandwidth between the client computer and the webmail server and is very useful for users with a slow connection to the webmail server, such as dialup or mobile device users. Use of offline e-mail clients Open Webmail has several abilities and advantages that allow for excellent flexibility and synchronization with your offline e-mail client(s). E-mail that has been viewed in your Open Webmail inbox... Will be downloaded onto your offline e-mail client and marked as read. Can still be marked as unread if changed so within Open Webmail E-mail that has been downloaded onto your offline e-mail client... Will be taken off of the server for viewing on your computer when using the POP3 protocol on the offline client and will not be available for viewing in your Open Webmail inbox. Will not be taken off of the server for viewing on your computer when using the IMAP protocol and thus will be available for viewing in your Open Webmail inbox. Easy navigating Open Webmail also boasts an easy-to-use, compact and relatively quick navigational system. You can navigate through all the folders by opening the top left-hand drop menu and selecting the folder you wish to navigate to. It also doubles as displaying the current folder.
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