Instant Web Mail
Version 0.61



About

Instant Web Mail is a free, web-based POP mail client. It is incredibly easy to install - however, the easy installation comes at a price: There are no Sent mail and Trash folders, and there is no address book.
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Author/copyright

© 2001, 2002 Jonas Koch Bentzen and the contributors.
Instant Web Mail is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.



Contributors

In alphabetical order:

Sven-Erik Andersen [m] The Norwegian translation.
Oliver Ardo [m] The Slovak translation.
Birkir Björnsson [m] The Icelandic translation.
The Chatvillage Crew [m] The "Chatvillage" theme.
Eddy Dibbink [m] The Dutch translation.
Nicklas af Ekenstam [m] Patches to the Swedish translation.
Marc Eley [m] The "Grand Issue" theme.
Emre Erim [m] Patches to the Turkish translation.
Grazziano Picanço Guarany [m] The Brazilian Portuguese translation.
Ulf Harnhammar [m] Suggestions for security fixes.
Nenad Hranic [m] The Croatian translation.
S. Craig Jones [m] The "Dark City", "Ochre", and "Silver Sage" themes.
Eric Joseph-Alexandre [m] The French translation.
Kjell Awall [m] The Swedish translation.
Petr Kveton [m] The Czech translation.
Morten Leerhøy [m] The logo image and the "Cysol" theme.
Pierluigi Montinaro [m] Patches to the Italian language file.
Piero Orsoni [m] The Italian translation and the "Blue" theme.
José Antonio Pérez [m] The Spanish translation.
Rui Ribeiro [m] The Portuguese translation.
Frank Roth [m] The German translation.
Sergey Shibeko [m] The Russian translation.
Leszek Stefaniak [m] The Polish translation.
Juris Valdovskis [m] The Latvian translation and the "Yellow" theme.
Necdet Yücel [m] The Turkish translation.

Besides those listed here, a number of people have contributed with suggestions, bug reports, etc. Thanks to all of you.



Features



Requirements



Download

Download Instant Web Mail.



Install
  1. Upload the entire instantwebmail directory to your server. That's it! Instant Web Mail works right out of the box (hence the name), so if you want to try it out right away, point your browser to http://example.com/instantwebmail/index.php and log in. However, if you want to change the language or other configuration options, you should follow the next steps:
  2. If you've installed the program on a Unix server (e.g. Linux, FreeBSD, or Sun Solaris), you need to chmod (change the permissions of) the file settingssaved.php to 666. This can usually be done from within your FTP client. Right-click on settingssaved.php, select "Chmod", and check the boxes as shown on this picture:
    Chmod
  3. Point your browser to http://example.com/instantwebmail/settings.php. Log in with the username "username" and the password "password". Now you can configure Instant Web Mail to suit your needs. Don't forget to change the administrator username and password right away.




Questions and answers

If your question is not answered here, please visit the forums.

Why do I get an "Internal Server Error" message when I load the pages?
Delete the file named ".htaccess" - that should get rid of the error message. However, be aware that if you delete the .htaccess file and your web host has enabled magic_quotes_*, you might experience problems with backslashes being added to the emails you write (i.e., all quotation marks will have a backslash in front of them). In that case there's nothing you can do but ask your web host to disable magic_quotes_*.

I get warnings or error messages when I try to send messages with attachments.
When you attach a file, you're actually uploading a file to the server. This file needs to be written to the hard disk of the server, and if PHP cannot copy the file to the disk, it issues an error message. The situations in which PHP is unable to write to the disk are usually caused by an erroneous PHP setup or wrong permissions on the upload directory. This means that you need to contact your web host and make them fix the problem. Make sure you include the entire error message and other relevant information.

Why do I get an error message saying that the function wordwrap()/is_uploaded_file()/session_unset() is undefined?
Probably because you didn't read this readme file thoroughly. It is very clearly stated in the Requirements section which version of PHP is needed to run Instant Web Mail. You need that version (or a newer one), otherwise the whole thing won't work. That should go without saying - nevertheless, I get a lot of emails asking me the above question. If you don't know which version of PHP is installed on your server, ask your web host, or try running this script:

<?php
echo "You are using PHP version ".PHP_VERSION;
?>

Why does it take more than 10 seconds for each page to load even though I have a fast Internet connection?
The problem is probably caused by the POP server. Some POP servers perform so-called reverse DNS lookups on the clients that connect to them. These reverse DNS lookups take time - often more than 10 seconds. If the POP server is located within your internal network (LAN), you can probably eliminate the problem by using the IP address of the server instead of the host name when you log in. Another solution is of course to ask your system administrator to disable reverse DNS lookups in the POP server.

The program can't connect to the POP server even though I'm entering the correct host name, username, and password.
This might be a firewall issue. Some web hosts that offer their services for free shut off all network traffic from/to certain ports. There's nothing you can do but install Instant Web Mail on another server.

How can I be informed about new releases of Instant Web Mail?
Go to freshmeat, create a new user account if you don't have one already, find the project page for Instant Web Mail, and click on "Subscribe to new releases".



To do



Change log