How Nextcloud came to the aid of a popular open source project, in part by getting three other open source projects involved.
Since its release in 2008, Roundcube has never been able to offer support. Now, thanks to Nextcloud, it’s supported to the nines.
Roundcube is an open-source webmail client that can be used as a method for accessing email online. I used it as my goto for several years a while back, and still keep it around as an alternative for those times when the client on my desktop gets the hiccups. It’s popular because it’s often included as a freebie in shared hosting packages.
Enterprises like it too but haven’t adopted it as much as they might, partly due the its lack of technical support and partly because it often doesn’t completely fill their needs. Like any email client, it only offers a front end for users and must connect to an email server to send or receive emails. Enterprises looking for a webmail solution are likely to be looking for a solution that includes an email server and client wrapped up in one neat package.
Well, both of those issues have now been fixed with the help of Nextcloud, an open-source company that Roundcube has been working with, which has plenty of experience with satisfying enterprise customers.
“Since Roundcube joined us, Nextcloud began to receive requests from large hosting companies for support,” Jos Poortvliet, a Nextcloud cofounder and its director of communications wrote in a blog posted on Thursday. “While Roundcube is lightweight and relatively easy to run, businesses prefer that their business critical applications are backed by a serious SLA [service-level agreement]. There has never been an official enterprise support offering for Roundcube, but Nextcloud has extensive experience servicing large organizations.”
Germany-based Nextcloud is a project that started life as a file sharing platform but which now offers enough components that it can be used to host the sort of web portal that corporations maintain for their employees. It’s popular, especially in the EU, where even a growing number of branches of the German government are using it. Roundcube was brought into the picture because Nextcloud needed a good email client to integrate into its offering and the Roundcube project offered a good fit.
Nextcloud is also a good open source citizen, so when it became obvious that Roundcube was being held back by a lack of support, it used its expertise and connections to put together a support package that can be purchased through Nextcloud.
“It is tailored specifically for mail providers running large instances with thousands to millions of end users,” Poortvliet said. He noted that support is also available to help businesses, universities, and the public sector, “but our offering makes the most sense for larger installations.”
“Our goal is to help organisations that want to deploy Roundcube – lowering the barrier to entry and helping Roundcube grow,” he added. “And, of course, the improvements, bug fixes and funds that come out of this, will go back into Roundcube, making it a better product for everybody!”
In an email conversation, Poortvliet told me that the pricing is primarily based on the number of users or mailboxes. He also said that you don’t have to be running Nextcloud to get Roundcube support.
Bringing in Outside Help
If all Nextcloud did was set up and manage some kind of support that offered security and bug fixes, along with some tech support for folks trying to fix issues, that would have been enough. However, the company got others involved to do more.
“We’ve assembled a top-team of industry veterans and up-and-coming talent, working with mail server solutions Dovecot Pro and Stalwart, as well as the privacy experts at Mailvelope,” Poortvliet said. “Together, we’ve created a complete offering of enterprise support for Roundcube for companies looking to host an amazing email solution.”
Dovecot Pro is an IMAP server platform, the core of which is open source; Stalwart, develops an open-source email server; and Mailvelope, produces a eponymous browser add-on for encrypting emails with PGP. Working together with Nextcloud and Roundcube, these open-source companies have created a complete email solution that includes open-source technology for serving emails, as well as an open-source client to act as an online front-end.
This looks to me like a win-win for everybody, including Nextcloud’s enterprise users which might have little need for a standalone webmail client but which might want to take full control of their email needs with a fully supported email platform.
“Our partnership with Nextcloud brings together two major players in open-source based software to deliver an enterprise-grade email backend support option to the wider Roundcube community,” Frank Hoberg, the founder of Open-Xchange — the company behind Dovecot Pro — said in a statement. “Based on Dovecot Pro, this delivers an email backend with a range of advanced features, including its exclusive high availability architecture, extended search, and document previews, along with the highest level of support for mission-critical email they demand.”
It’s stories like this that keep me supporting open source in spite of it all.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
