Roundcube, a webmail program, is now featured in cPanel’s recent release. Roundcube, just like its name, is a little…well…different. After spending much time pondering the origin of the name, I came to the conclusion that it is not another square peg meant to fit in a rather round hole. Roundcube is the round peg, that still is a square (think webmail) at heart, but not in look and function.

Roundcube differs from the alternatives of Horde and Squirrelmail in that it functions much like a desktop email client such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. This bit of news will fall on welcome ears for those who thought the previous cPanel webmail offerings fell short of the mark.

First things first, cPanel implemented an autoload utility that allows you to load up your webmail tool of choice when visiting the /webmail URL on your domain. The new feature includes a  redirect tool that offers the ability to specify the number of seconds that the redirect will take, which leaves you ample room to feel quite dangerous and choose an alternate webmail client each day while waiting for the redirect to complete.

If Roundcube were to be assessed in a single word, I would choose the word “smooth.” It offers a rather bland, yet useful, interface that does have a slight learning curve. Included in the design are icons at the center top of the page which are not labeled with text. You can hover your mouse over them to find out their functions After using Roundcube for a while, you’ll know them automatically. These will fade out when they are unavailable – such as when no message is highlighted.

The message pane in Roundcube is one of those features that feels just like a traditional email application. To select a message, simply click on it There are no annoying checkboxes to click. (Finally, someone has listened!) Selecting a message in Roundcube highlights just as it would in Outlook. Notice that you can drag and drop an email to a folder as well. To highlight multiple individual messages, simply use your control key and click on the appropriate messages. To highlight a group of messages, such as every message on the page, hold your shift key and click. These features improve  the webmail experience in general, and make Roundcube much more user friendly than the alternatives.

On the top bar, you’ll notice a send/receive button and an address book. The “Personal Settings” button leads to the best and simplest feature set of any of the cPanel webmail choices. Here you can select basic features such as timezone, language, automatic draft saving, and whether or not you want to use HTML in your emails. The “Folders” tab allows you to create, edit, and remove folders as needed. Finally, the “Identities” tab allows for the management of your webmail identities. It means that you can set reply-to addresses, display names, organization names, bcc recipients, and your signature.

Composing a message is simple with Roundcube. Simply click on the icon to do so from the main screen. You’ll notice that everything is pretty much self explanatory via icons here. The great feature here is that attachments can be attached from the left side of your current screen. Simply click the “+” box and browse and upload your file.

Roundcube is simply simple. This welcomed addition to cPanel provides the next generation of webmail usability with desktop-like interface. The introduction of Roundcube might even bring a few people to the dark side (of webmail). This is a tremendous improvement upon the existing webmail offerings included with cPanel.

And, as always, Idologic will be available should you need any help. Don’t ever hesitate to ask us a question.

We’ve begun (and have been successful so far) upgrading our cPanel servers to the latest version of cPanel, version 11. The move to upgrade was one that we thought and planned out pretty carefully. We are fairly conservative when it comes to major software (cPanel, PHP, MySQL, etc.) upgrades at Idologic, so we wanted to wait a while and make sure cPanel 11 was going to run without problems. We announced our tentative schedule in late August and began upgrading from there.

What are some of the benefits of using cPanel 11? Here are some that we’ve noticed right away at Idologic:

• Prettier. cPanel 11 is quite a bit prettier than 10. It has a lot more AJAX and a lot of UI improvements such as sorting and more drag and drop features. The interface is also faster.
• Resellers have enhanced branding features as well as faster / easier theme switching.
• There have been a lot of changes in the areas of spam handling and protection for cPanel 11. Spam is one of the biggest causes of server trouble at any hosting company and any improvement to this area is welcomed. In particular, cPanel’s spam handling has been optimized to handle a much higher volume of spam without slowing the server down (which is a good thing given the increasing amount of spam).
• New file manager. If you (or your customers) use the cPanel file manager, you will notice it has undergone significant changes.
• It is now much easier to install modules for Perl and other programming languages.
• The help section of cPanel has been improved significantly. There is also a getting started tour within cPanel now.

If the server you are on hasn’t been upgraded, don’t worry, it’s coming soon. So far, cPanel 11 has been working great (and we expect it to continue to be that way), so you only have positive changes to look forward to in the near future. If you have a dedicated server with us, please contact us and let us know when you’d like to upgrade. You can upgrade at your convenience (and if you’d like, not at all), but it is an upgrade we’re suggesting.

As always, if you have any questions whatsoever, we are standing by and more than happy to assist you.

Note: this is reposted (and updated a bit even) from our previous website however everything below is still valid.

As we are all quite aware, spam is a large and increasing problem on the internet. According to recent studies, up to 80% of all email is actually spam. Unfortunately, this is not just an interesting piece of trivia — there is a real cost to spam whether it be your time (or your clients’) in weeding through it or the extra storage and utilization on the server in processing so much extra email.

Note: for the purposes of this article, spam includes UBE (unsolicited bulk email) and email that contains viruses.

At Idologic we have been carefully watching various anti-spam solutions for quite a while. Given the enormity of the problem, there are a multitude of solutions available both for purchase (proprietary) or for free (open-source). Interestingly enough, many of the best proprietary solutions are simply well-packaged sets of open-source tools. Given sufficient time and understanding, a knowledgeable server admin can construct an anti-spam solution that fairly accurate while requiring minimal maintenance. A well-built antispam solution can approach 80-90% accuracy rates with no false positives or manual maintenance (i.e. someone to flag spam manually on the server every day).

Simply put, that is what we have now done.

You may have noticed that there is an “Server-Wide Spam & Virus Protection” option in cPanel. This is simply the front-end to a comprehensive sysem consisting of….

• ClamAV — a superior open-source virus scanning solution. Additionally, virus signatures are updated daily from a central repository.
• Exiscan — an extension of the Exim MTA which provides the glue for Exim to call other programs.
• Exim Advanced Configurations — this allows us to block certain well-known virus file extensions. You can always send a file through regardless of its extension by first zipping it.
• DNS RBL’s — that is, DNS-based black-lists. We currently employ 3 very conservative DNS RBL’s. Please see further notes on them below.
• Vipul’s Razor — a distributed, collaborative, spam detection and filtering network that is constantly updated by screened user contributions.
• Server-based blacklist and whitelist overrides. This gives us the ability to override any of the methods above on a server by server basis whether to allow or disallow email. This would be normally be done in response to a request via ticket where a customer needs to receive certain emails but does not want to disable all filtering.

While we have put a large amount of time into crafting a very conservative but accurate spam-blocking configuration, we do realize that some clients may not wish to have any filtering. Because we recognize this need, this system is combined with cPanel Pro to provide user-controlled opt-in or opt-out on a cPanel account basis. Here is a sample screenshot from cPanel showing the configurability provided.

Please note that CPSkins has stopped updating their skins and so is not compatible with enabling/disabling this feature (spam filtering will still be working….you just can’t use CPSkins to enable/disable it). You will need to use RVSkins or x2 as your cPanel skin. We would recommend RVSkin as being very feature-rich and configurable.

Specific instructions.

• For RVSkin, go to RVAdmin Skin Manager / Package-Feature Manager. Choose the Feature List you for the user whose feature set you want to control, find the feature ‘Server-Wide Spam & Virus Protection’ and enable it.
• For the x2 skin, go to WHM > Feature Manager > Edit Feature Set. Check the box for “Server-Wide Spam & Virus Protection” at the bottom of the list and save.

We have enabled the configuration above on all reseller servers and will set up dedicated servers/VPS’s by request (no installation charge).

Explanation of DNS RBLs

Given that there are several irresponsible DNS RBL’s (SPEWS & SORBS for example), DNS RBL’s sometimes get a bad name. Fortunately, there are several highly accurate DNS RBL’s available. After careful research, we have chosen to use…

• list.dsbl.org — tests for open relay SMTP servers and will only list a server if confirmed open.
• zen.spamhaus.org – SpamHaus is a well-recognized anti-spam service provided for free to ISP’s and webhosts. It contains the IP addresses of verified spam sources as well as servers confirmed to be compromised by illegal 3rd party exploits.

These 2 lists have a very low to non-existent false positive rate. For example, in over a year of live implementation in a large environment (80,000 emails/day), the Spamhaus RBL’s have had zero false positives.