AFAICT the best alternative, interface-wise, is Roundcube, and it doesn't seem particularly exciting (it's also written in PHP... which doesn't necessarily have to count against it, but makes me a little wary).

I've foolishly started to build my own, which at some point may become good enough to open source (I certainly don't want to commercialize it).

I went looking for something suitable a while back, but I didn't find anything. The search is nice, but I'm really more interested in the mail interface. The features I use:

Sending and receiving (duh)

delayed mail (in case I make a mistake... And I will!)

filtering (and tags/folders)

keyboard shortcuts

simple search, with folder/tag support

browser-based, so I can access it anywhere

Alternative to what? Hosted email? Or the web interface? If the latter: http://roundcube.net/ It access email through imap - so you still need a good mailbox server.

The best list I've seen: http://www.noupe.com/ajax/10-ajax-webmail-clients.html

But none really compare too favorably with Gmail. Zimbra was looking good before it went to yahoo and then VMware.

AtMail Open seems nice?

problem with most webmail apps seems that they want to be desktop apps for some reason and completely miss the point imho

I actually see two problems with switching off gmail (which I'm starting to think about doing, as google keeps getting evil-er).

One is how nice it is to have ubiquitous web-mail, integration with my Android, etc. Some of these problems I think I can solve with my own brain-sweat, and obviously this thread might help.

But the other is spam. Before gmail, I hated spam. After switching to gmail (I guess about 5 years ago), I gradually lost my memory of spam ; I get less than one piece of spam per month. Is spam gone these days? Are there good open-source low-maintenance solutions?

SUP is supposedly modeled after Gmail, if you enjoy the benefits of text tools. I myself am using mutt.

I really like http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~dpc22/prayer/ (prayer webmail).

It's very much hitting the basic, fast spot though, rather than the gmail style.

SquirrelMail (is open source) and has some nice paid themes http://nutsmail.com/

We really like Group Office, whilst it doesn't have the class of Gmail, or the search prowess it works really well for small teams.

If you are taking about using something like Sup then I think there is too much faff should you ever decide to migrate away from it. Whilst it looks and works great it is useless for interoperability with your phone etc..

Hula had shown a lot of promise, but it withered away: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_(software)

It was forked though as Bongo: http://bongo-project.org/Main_Page

I find the problem with most of the open source UI's out there is the lack of good search capabilities. It is just so easy to open up gmail and search for a document. Everything else that uses imap seems slow and old.

I have recently switched from Roundcube to Squirrelmail - the former worked annoyingly slow for me. I only had to tweak the source code a bit to get rid of these _ugly_ iframe borders.

I don't use web interface too much though.

Have you checked RoundCube out? It's a modern and open source self hosted email client - http://roundcube.net/

Thunderbird is getting pretty darn good lately.

Now that Firefox mobile is getting good too, maybe Thunderbird mobile will start to happen in 2012?

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If something that is hosted by a 3rd party 'in the cloud' is open source, does it really help? Since someone else is still managing your data.

http://inbox2.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3083935

Any AGPL webmail clients like gmail? I prefer Free Software to Open Source