A few small improvements

I’ll describe a few new features that will be included in the next main Roundcube version that is currently under development (1.6). Read more for details and some screenshots.

Canned responses in HTML format

A new feature just landed in Roundcube 1.6-git. It is a support for HTML formatting in saved response snippets.

This includes links, images and any HTML feature we usually allow in our rich text editor. When such a response is inserted to a plain text message it will be converted to plain text (and vice versa), so you don’t have to create two versions of each response.

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Contact form – private vs. business

If you use a webmail application for work you will more often need functionality related to business instead of private life. One example is an addressbook, where your contacts can have various properties.

Collected Recipients and Trusted Senders

Roundcube has some features that make use of contacts users collected in their addressbook(s). However, the process of adding new contacts was mostly manual and slow. Here come new ways to automatically collect contacts while using the webmail.

Elastic: Dark mode

Nowadays, when every major web browser supports dark mode and most people use mobile devices, every application has to have a dark mode. Roundcube 1.5 will have it too.

Calendar and Tasks for non-Kolab users

The great Calendar and Tasklist plugins from Kolab always contained additional drivers, so they could be used out of a Kolab setup (using SQL database as a storage). That part was never a priority for Kolab developers, but with Roundcube 1.4 and Elastic skin these plugins will be again available from plugins.roundcube.net in an up-to-date versions.

TinyMCE 5

HTML editing functionality in Roundcube is provided by TinyMCE 4. Is the new TinyMCE 5 release ready for update? Is it better from Roundcube perspective? Is the built-in mobile mode good? When will Roundcube update to this version? I may not answer these (yet), but I can already provide some screenshots ;)

A new skin for Kolab WebAdmin

In the past week I’ve been working on refreshing the look of the Kolab Administration Panel. The user interface hasn’t been touched since it was created. Even though the webmail frontend has a few themes including the fresh Elastic skin. It was really needed.

Instant updates aka Push in Roundcube

Roundcube’s user interface refreshes every now and then in a configured time interval. This is what many imap clients do (or did historically) and what most users understand and accept. I’m not going into details how it’s implemented internally right now, but it’s based on existing IMAP standards (and their limitations). The question is: can we have instant updates instead?

Kolab Single Sign On plugin

This new plugin (kolab_sso) adds possibility to authenticate users via external authentication services. For example, if your organization has such a service, users can access webmail with a single click (if already authenticated in the service). OpenIDC/OAuth2/SAML2 are technologies widely described and used in the Internet. So, I’ll just shortly write about what we provide at the moment.