There exist many web-based email clients that ship under open source licenses and are free to use in self-hosted mode. There are powerful groupware tools such as Horde Mail<\/a> and relics like SquirrelMail<\/a> (mail for nuts!) whose development stopped nearly a decade ago but are still supported. There is the newer generation of somewhat more modern, better-looking and mobile device compatible clients like RoundCube<\/a> and Rainloop<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have tried all of them, but I was never entirely happy. And although I have a powerful desktop mail client (Mailbird<\/a>), I still wanted to find a good web-based solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After about an hour of research, I believe I finally discovered The One: Afterlogic WebMail Lite PHP<\/a>. (Well… not exactly ‘The One’ because it also has a .NET version for Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), if you are into such perversions, but you get my idea.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Webmail Lite offers a minimalistic interface designed using modern HTML5 and CSS3 technology; it is localized into more than 30 languages, including those who use RTL alphabets; it integrates the official Microsoft online viewer for MS Office documents; it uses 2FA (two-factor authentication); it even supports OpenPGP!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most importantly, it is under active development (latest release is from April 2022). So I immediately decided to give it a go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Webmail Lite ships as a 20MB ZIP archive that can be extracted in any folder of a web server, which means that I can install it as a sub-folder for an existing website, the same way I did with InfiniteWP<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This will save me from having to create a separate website just for that purpose. Those who are on the WPX Business Plan<\/strong><\/a> will certainly appreciate the fact that using Webmail Lite will not use up their domain quota.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once I decompressed the ZIP file into However, I was not yet ready to log into the user part of the program. According to the installation docs, first I needed to perform a compatibility check by heading to I did that with a small amount of anxiety but thankfully, the installer had deemed the WPX.net environment compatible with its requirements and allowed me to continue:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The setup procedure for Webmail Lite is simple. I have to set up the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let us go on one by one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the place where you can change the access details for the admin account. The default configuration will accept a username of ‘superadmin’ and empty password.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The superadmin username is freely changeable and I strongly<\/i> suggest that you pick up something that doesn’t bear any remote resemblance to an admin username.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I leave the ‘old password’ field blank and supply a long & strong new password. Saving the settings, and I am done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Without logging off, I open an anonymous session in another browser window to see if my settings work. They do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Afterlogic Webmail Lite stores all email-related metadata into an MySQL database, and I need to create one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have to enter my WPX client dashboard<\/a> and go to Databases, then click on ‘Add database’. I give it a meaningful name:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I then need to create a database user. This is a bit more complicated because of a bug in the UI. I first click on the ‘Add database user’ button:<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a peculiarity in the WPX GUI here that you need to be aware of. When you click on ‘Add database user’ and type a name, this is NOT the username you will get. Instead, the control panel will append a pseudo-random suffix to the name you choose and will tell you that user ‘whatever’ has been created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However the username given in that window is also NOT the username you will get. In order to see the full and correct username, you need to click on ‘List database users’. Only there you will get the full name of your DB user.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I go back and type all details (DB username, password and DB name; I leave 127.0.0.1 as entered as Host) and click on ‘Test connection’. A green status message in the top right corner of the window tells me I am good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nearly done here \u2014 I only have to create the DB structure, which I do by clicking on the ‘Create\/Update tables’ button. It takes less than 3 seconds. I am unsure if I have to also click on ‘Update configuration’. The description tells me that I need to do it to update module configuration, but to the best of my knowledge I have not installed any modules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A side note<\/strong>: Webmail Lite has a list of add-on modules that add functionality such as the ability to show reCaptcha at login, export messages as .zip archive or save them as PDF files, and so on. You should check out the module directory<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I decide to click on ‘Update configuration’ and nothing breaks. I get another confirmation that the operation was performed successfully. I think I am done here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Afterlogic Webmail Lite allows the administrator to log debug errors and also to keep track of user activity. I enable debug logging and adjust the verbosity to ‘Warnings’. This will allow me to see how well the software will work using the PHP version that runs on this vhost (8.0). I don’t care about user activity logging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the next screen, I have to choose a ‘name for the site’ (meaning, the title that will show in the browser tab) and a theme. ‘Sand’ is the the best. I leave language as ‘autodetect’ and choose a 24-hour time format by selecting 13:00.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Done here, a little more remains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This data could have easily been placed elsewhere, for example on the home screen. Whatever. If you are reading this in the distant future, I state for the record that my review for Afterlogic WebMail Lite PHP is based on version Webmail Lite allows users to log in by authenticating via their Facebook and\/or Google profile. Each one requires a platform application. I will not be doing this right now, but if you want to do it, here’s how to begin:<\/p>\n\n\n\n On this tab, I need to define the behavior of the Webmail Lite application when a user logs in with valid email credentials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Enabling the first option, ‘Allow auto-provisioning of new users’ means that if the application connects successfully with one of the configured mail servers, it will automatically create a local profile for this user and keep track of his email automatically. The alternative is to assign this task to the administrator to do it manually, which might be better for security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second option allows webmail users to add 3rd party mailboxes and to use them via the web GUI of the Webmail Lite application. While good to have at my disposal, I don’t see myself ever using this feature. Insuring good deliverability will require extra work adding or changing existing DNS records (SPF, DMARC).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because my objective is to simply find a solution for accessing email on WPX-hosted domains via a web-based GUI that is better than the built-one, this feature is out of scope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I will leave this one disabled and move on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The only thing that remains is to actually set up our mail server. First, I will need to create a new mailbox for tests, and get the email credentials along with it. Back to the WPX host client area I must go, this time to E-mail Boxes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have blurred the incoming\/outgoing server name and IP address so that you don’t get distracted when following this tutorial and decide to copy them. You should obtain the specific values from your own mailbox control panel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One advantage of the WPX.net shared hosting service is that every web host has its own fully configured mail server. I will try to access the mail server via local address (127.0.0.1) instead of using the public server IP. This will probably make my connection a tad faster (because traffic will never leave the local machine) and safer (for the very same reason).<\/p>\n\n\n\n While still here, I create for myself a brand new mailbox for testing purposes via the ‘Add a new e-mail box’ button in the lower right corner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am so close to the moment of truth! This is how I provisioned my mail server:<\/p>\n\n\n\n As you can see, I limited it to a single domain, but this is entirely by choice. You may have multiple domains added to your WPX.net hosting account, and you can either list all of them, or leave the field ‘Domains’ blank. Because I am not fully familiar with the product though, I would recommend that you list domains by hand instead of leaving the field blank, as this could potentially limit the possibility for abuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Observe that SMTP authentication should be configured to require full email address and password; this is how the WPX.net mail server is configured to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sieve<\/a> is a web server language that allows precise filtering of email message by issuing commands either server-side or client-side. The software stack that runs on WPX.net hosting servers supports sieve, but I am not sure if it is enabled, and that is why for the time being at least I will leave it disabled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The purpose of the ‘IMAP and SMTP hosts for external mail clients’ checkbox and the fields below it is purely informational: users have the ability to see server settings from within their webmail GUI, and if the SMTP\/IMAP server is specified as localhost (as I did), you should put the real server hostname or IP address here for the benefit of your users who might want to replicate their mailbox on a mobile device as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The moment of truth has come. I configured the Afterlogic webmail GUI, and now it is time to attempt login with the credentials for the new mailbox I created earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After a second or two… I am in! Here is how my brand-new and very empty webmail looks like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next stop is to run the mailbox through some mail warming exercises; as a result, over the next couple of days I will receive up to 150 automatically generated messages from random addresses, and the mail warming service will also issue some outgoing messages that will end up in my sent mail folder. This way, the test mailbox will quickly achieve a lived-in look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While waiting for all of this, I will also shoot a message to my favorite mail deliverability testing tool<\/a> to see how well it will work. The GUI is simple and functional; it obviously lacks the utility and polish of Gmail or Zoho Mail, but in my humble opinion isn’t half bad either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I would have preferred to have the Importance, Sensitivity and Reading confirmation bar at the bottom, and the Send button in the lower right corner instead of the upper left but I’ve seen worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mail-tester awards me a 9\/10 score, which is in line with my expectations. For more details about that missing last point, see my earlier post on configuring SMTP within WordPress<\/a>, and use the ToC to scroll down to ‘And what does a DKIM record do?’ near the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At this moment, I realized I was facing an issue: my outgoing emails were not being stored in the Sent folder. After some poking around I figured out the root cause. For whatever reason, not all mail folders that we are accustomed to use were enabled by default. Changing this is a per-account setting accessible via Settings\u27a1Email Account\u27a1Manage Folders:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The less pleasant part of this discovery was that this is supported at folder level only (i.e. I can’t get everything in one pass):<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, this is a very important feature to have at our disposal. Having this export capability at hand, one could backup their email manually, which is still much better than before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I also want to see how email is stored within the database. Because if the database is structured sufficiently well, then email becomes easy to backup and truly portable between hosts, which solves our problems with email data ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To do my analysis, I will use my favorite tool, Adminer<\/a>. This seemingly malnourished phpMyAdmin relative is just as powerful as its more popular and beefier sibling, yet is fully portable and runs as a single PHP file. Let’s grab a copy of the latest Adminer version<\/a> and have a look at the data model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unless I have missed something, it seems that Webmail Lite has a hybrid approach towards storing configuration settings. Some of these (e.g. email identities, lists of contacts, etc.) are stored inside the database. Other, more general settings reside inside the Most importantly, Webmail Lite does not seem to store actual emails in its own database. It only uses the DB for storing application settings and metadata.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A part of me was hoping this would not be so, and that the emails would be stored inside as well. This would make mailbox portability much easier, but alas it was not to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not storing the emails in the database does not mean the end of the world though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/span>Installing Afterlogic WebMail Lite<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
webmail\/<\/code>, the first phase of the installation was done. I was able to load the GUI and it greeted me with a beautiful login screen:<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"webmaAfterlogic](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/webmail-lite-login-screen-multilanguage.jpeg\")
<\/a>webmail\/adminpanel\/?install<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"WebMail](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/webmail-lite-preinstall-check.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/span>How to Set Up Webmail Lite<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/span>Admin Account Access<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"WebMail](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/webmail-lite-setup-01-admin-access.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/span>Database Setup<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"WebMail](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/webmail-lite-setup-02-database-access.jpeg\")
<\/a>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/image-42.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/image-43.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"WPX](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/webmail-lite-setup-05-database-list-users.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"WPX](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/webmail-lite-setup-06-database-show-usersname.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/span>Enable\/Disable Logging<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/image-2-1024x496.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/span>Name, Theme and Localization<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/image-3-1024x496.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/span>About Panel<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
9.4.0.build4-build-a3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/span>Social Login<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/span>Mail Settings<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/image-4-1024x496.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/span>Setting up a Mail Server<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/image-44.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/image-45-749x1024.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/image-5-993x1024.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/span>Logging as Webmail User for the First Time<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/image-6-1024x496.jpeg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/image-7-1024x496.jpeg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/image-8-1024x531.jpeg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/image-46-1024x895.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/span>Folder Management<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"WebMail](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/webmail-lite-setup-20-mail-folder-setup.png\")
![\"WebMail](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/webmail-lite-setup-19-webmail-mail-import-export-limitations.png\")
<\/span>Storing Settings: internal DB Structure and contents of ‘data’ folder<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\/data<\/code> subfolder as config files in JSON format.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/image-47.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/span>Importing and Exporting Emails<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wpx.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/image-48.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n