Wawamail gone?

[Merovingian]

I tried to login to my wawamail account just now, and it's gone. Not even a login page appears:
"Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage"

Has anyone heard anything about this?

[ReuvenNY]

The site id off, but the IMAP works.

[earlzsta]

Originally Posted by Merovingian

I tried to login to my wawamail account just now, and it's gone. Not even a login page appears:
"Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage"

Has anyone heard anything about this?

Hehe was just about to post and saw the thread

Yeah not sure what is going on there, I did get an email from Robert a few weeks ago. But he did not mention anything about this.

Not sure what is going on. I only access wawamail from the web interface :/

[King Of Email]

It appears to be gone for me as well. It was after all, a beta product and the operation of a small team of designers. Wawamail was the only Roundcube product I ever used that enabled the HTML compose, all the others did not even when that was selected. A program bug no doubt. At any rate Wawamail was the only Roundcube box I still used, having left all the others for one reason or another. Besides, Wawamail, the only other free Roundcube account I know of, of any size is Chulkana.com, connected to some global village/dating site. Storage is 1GB as opposed to Wawamail's unlimited amount. The link is here if anyone is interested:

http://mail.chulkana.com/emsu/emsignup.php

[xmailer]

It was my understanding from the time wawamail first came under discussion here that Beta testers were going to be given 10GB, however recently I noticed that my account has only been showing a capacity of 2GB. Not that that was a problem for me, since I believe I was only using 2 or 3% of my quota, with only a limited number of messages being autoforwarded there from other addresses.

In fact, I'd been using the Wawamail web interface for probably most of my (occasional) personal email sending recently, but had been becoming more aware of its being somewhat "buggy", at least with my system, and I can't say I care that much for Roundcube any more than I do most other AJAX-based systems, although this particular service/implemenation seemed to operate a little faster for me than most. But without some improvements in its features and functionality, I'm not sure how much patience I'll have to continue using it if/when it returns to operation.

[King Of Email]

xmailer, yeah Roundcube looked good at first, refreshing, and a break from from the rest of the pack. I even thought it might become a player. However, since then every Roundcube application I have used has fallen like dominoes and disappeared from the net except for a few. The same thing could be said about Hivemail, which I also once thought was the wave of the future in independent and off the shelf email applications I thought was going to set a new standard in email, but I was wrong. Even EUMX dumped its Roundcube interface which I rarely used. As for storage limits, my account read "unlimited" while a friend of mine's had a running percentage figure in the place where "unlimited" was displayed. Now we have the same amount: none. No big deal. In addition to Windows Live accounts, I have a few more to list before Thanksgiving. They're not unlimited, but what does that even mean after all?

[David MacQuigg]

It's my understanding that the reason this service didn't grow had nothing to do with RoundCube. All I heard on this forum was praise for the nice interface. That was certainly my reaction. I liked being able to drag and drop messages from one folder to another without the usual laborious interaction with the server. Compared to SquirrelMail, it seems like a clean, simple design with all the functions I need.

What are the missing features and functionality? Could you be more specific? What do we need to make this a viable service?

[xmailer]

Personally, I couldn't care less about "drag and drop." Checkboxes and buttons have always worked fine for me, in fact they've always seemed to work much more easily and reliably in any webmail. Come on, is checking boxes and clicking on a button really that hard? In fact, dragging and dropping actually seems to require more effort for me -- and I still have to select all the messages I want to drag if I want to move more than one at a time anyway.

As for features, although there are probably others that it would be difficilt to remember now that I'm unable to login to the service to refresh my memory, one of the most serious "lacks" to me personally was the lack of any filters whatsoever for the autosorting of messages, something I've long considered almost a requirement of a "full-fledged" webmail system, and something which most implementations of Squirrelmail I've used have had, just one reason (among numerous others) that I prefer Squirrelmail (among other interfaces) to Roundube and most, if not all, other AJAX-type interfaces I've tried. So, even though most of my incoming messages were of a similar enough nature (same sender, etc.) that I could have probably had the majority of them autosorted with even the most rudimentary of filters, in the lack of same, not feeling like going through them all to manually sort them on a frequent basis, the number of messages in my Wawamail Inbox just kept growing and growing and growing, the prospect of manually sorting them all becoming increasingly overwhelming as the number of them continued to increase.

There were also a number of "quirks" and/or bugs that may have been specific to the browser I usually used (IE6) and my preferred screen resolution, such as an inability to go back to the first page of my Inbox listing after going to page two or beyond, since the arrow for moving in that direction didn't appear on my screen. So the only way I could find to go back to the first page again was by first going to a different folder solely for the purpose of going back to the Inbox again so it would "default" to the first page to bring me back where I started. This also didn't make it particularly easy to sort my messages. Perhaps I could have solved this problem, and others, by changing to a newer or different browser, and/or by changing my screen resolution, but since both these still work fine for me as is with most every other site, a service would have to have had much more to offer than Wawamail in order to be worth my while changing these settings and having to live with them for everything else I didn't need them for just for my occasional use of Wawamail, or to be having to change them back and forth just to accomodate these issues.

I also discovered, shortly before wawamail disappeared, that if I tried to forward a message with an attachment, only the body of the email could be forwarded, it wasn't possible to forward the attachment(s) with it. I don't know whether that's an issue with Roundcube in general, since I can't recall noticing that one way or another with any other implementations of it I've briefly used, but that was my experience with Wawamail anyway. Generally I only found the service of much use for brief, simple text messages and replies.

In fact, for reasons I can't recall very clearly at the moment, I decided I didn't really like the Wawamail composer/editor that much, so I had actually most often been writing/editing my messages in Gmail, then copying and pasting them into the Wawamail compose window for sending, mainly for the fact that I could send mail appearing to be from a different address more "neatly" with Wawamail than with Gmail, with the latter's tendency to produce the "tacky" "sent on behalf of" line in certain email clients -- information which typically serves no useful purpose, and has no interest, to the recipients, but only tends to confuse them in my experience.

And I sometimes did my final editing/proofreading/spell checking in Wawamail, since I found it's spell checker to actually be superior to Gmail's, at least as of the last time I used the latter, which was quite awhile ago, since from the time I first began using it I found Gmail's spell checker to be inferior to those in most other webmail systems I've used, choking badly over any particularly long messages with an error message telling me that my message was "too long" to spell check in it's entirety. But Roundcube/Wawamail didn't seem to have such problems that I'd ever noticed.

So there's a few of the "highlights" -- some of the pros and cons for me personally -- that I can most easily recall about RoundCube/Wawamail just off the top of my head at the moment.

[David MacQuigg]

xmailer, Thank you for the detailed comments. My use of WawaMail/RoundCube over the last few months was less varied than yours, so I did not run into these issues.

On the issue of drag-n-drop vs checkboxes and buttons, I agree, that is just a matter of personal preferrence. There is a related performance issue however, having to do with how much of the processing can be done on the client side, as opposed to the server. I'm not sure now whether what I felt was a speedy drag-n-drop operation was due to the lack of "laborious" interactions with the server, or just the fact that WawaMail was running on a fast server. Now that I think about it, I believe the interactions had to be the same, since we are actually moving messages from one place to another on the server.

On the filtering issue, I'm struggling to understand how this could be done in RoundCube (or SquirrelMail), as opposed to the "Gate" process, which handles the incoming connection (see http://open-mail.org/temp/Fig_BP_MDA.html) As I understand it, RoundCube interacts only with the IMAP server. Roundcube does not see the message until it is actually in one of the mailboxes. My mail was sorted into various boxes by adding a rule to the Gate program. The rule acted on the tags at the beginning of each subject line, Most of the legitimate mail was whitelisted with a [] tag. The rest went to the Quarantine, where it could be sorted to put the[*] ham on top, and the [spam] on at the bottom.

Of course the user should not have to worry about Gate processes, etc. The plan was to have a single "Recipient Options" web-page, where all options relating to spam and virus checking could be set in one simple interface.

Perhaps I should take another look at SquirrelMail for the webmail part of our model email service. That was the original plan before I got started using RoundCube. I'll go with whatever you and others using our service prefer.

I've asked Robert to forward the MX record for wawamail.com to our Border Patrol server in Dallas. If you or anyone else who was using WawaMail would like your address at that domain forwarded to wherever, please send me a private message.

-- Dave

[Olfrygt]

My Wawamail account hasn't worked for a while , so I am considering dumping it.
(1) Website not available
(2) Pop3 doesn't work -- error n. 11001
(3) Strangely enough, smtp works from my email client, so wawamail hasn't completely gone.
Any new thoughts or information ?

[xmailer]

Originally Posted by Olfrygt

so I am considering dumping it.

Given the service's "almost" complete disappearance without warning and the best information we're able to obtain about it at this point, whatever the best intentions of its founder may have been, it seems to me that, bottom line, it has just joined the somewhat lengthy list of services starting essentially as a hobby then eventually just "dumping" their users (for all practical purposes anyway). As we've already been "dumped" by the service, I don't see that there's anything for us to "dump." Would you bother to "rejoin", or continue to use, a service after such an experience? I don't think I would.

(Although I admit that, although I never really "used" it beyond a few test messages, I did do so more than once with another "service" promoted here, Indyamail.com, whose EMD rep even recently went so far as to PM me here to invite me to give his service yet "another chance". But as he's now apparently abandoned the Socketmail interface and is merely offering Gmail under his own domain name, I can't think of any compelling reason to open a Gmail account through him rather than just doing so directly through Google, especially given his service's record to date.)

[David MacQuigg]

If I were Robert reading this thread, I might be annoyed. That is certainly the tone of his last message to me. It sounded like a legal notice - everyone was fully informed this was beta-testing only, etc.

I'm not annoyed at anyone here. I see thoughtful comments, but also some understandable frustration. I think that frustration should be directed not at Robert, but to the question of why there was so little interest in what appeared to be the start of a really excellent service. Perhaps the expectations were way too high - competing with Google, etc. Perhaps the missing features were a problem. If so, there should have been more discussion, something like - this is really great, just add the ability to sort messages into folders, and I'll tell all my friends to sign up. Perhaps a few comments like that in this public forum would have tipped the scales for the folks who were considering funding the project.

If anyone would like to continue this experiment, and can maintain a positive attitude, you are welcome to join me in setting up what I hope will be a "best of everything" service. Robert tells me the name wawamail.com will soon be available. You can register that name, or use your own. I will provide border services (spam filtering), you will provide the MDA (mail storage and distribution). A Roundcube setup would be great, but there are other good setups available. Right now I am using BurntMail.com for my own MDA, and I'm quite happy with it. Not as slick as Wawamail, but has all the functions I need, and the service is mature - not likely to go out of business without warning.

[Olfrygt]

Thank you both for your comments. I am contemplating what you have said.
My impression of Robert was that he was intelligent, competent, and helpful.
I do not like the name wawamail very much, and prefer short names like gmx.com.
However, we can't beta-test a service that is not operational.

[Bamb0]

Originally Posted by King Of Email

http://mail.chulkana.com/emsu/emsignup.php

Looks interesting...Thanx for the link!

[xmailer]

Originally Posted by David MacQuigg

If I were Robert reading this thread, I might be annoyed. That is certainly the tone of his last message to me. It sounded like a legal notice - everyone was fully informed this was beta-testing only, etc.

My above comments weren't in any way intended maliciously toward Robert, and I sincerely apologize if they might be taken that way, but I felt that I was only stating a fact --- that being that those of us who have been around here for awhile and/or who have tried many email services have seen many small services , started apparently as hobbies (or, if you prefer, "personal projects"), some announced as "Beta" and some not, come along and eventually stop functioning or just "disappear."

And I certainly said nothing meant to suggest or imply anything legally "questionable" was involved, so I don't see that any questions about "legal notice" are involved. I merely stated what appear to me to be the facts, and again, with nothing malicious or "personal" intended toward Robert, to whom I sincerely wish the best in any future endeavors, similar or otherwise. I was more then glad to be a part of his project while it lasted and feel no ill will whatsoever toward him and am sorry that, for whatever reason(s), he found it necessary to abandon it.

However, Robert himself only seemed to have a sort of sporadic interest, as far as was apparent here anyway, whch may have been through no fault of his own, if he may simply not had enough time or other resources to devote to it. But near as I can recall he nearly always got active constructive (or at least "constructively intended") feedback whenever he posted any kind of updates or other information, questions, etc. here. So I'm not sure on what you base you statement about there being "so little interest." In fact, it appeared to me that there was quite a bit of interest expressed here, perhaps expecially considering his early mention of only wanting/needing a relatively small number of beta testers. But as Olfrygt said, we can't beta test a non-operational service.