Free WebMail Client – How To Install RoundCube

When it comes to webmail clients, RoundCube has to be one of my favorites. Aside from its neat interface, RoundCube has a lot of useful features such as a find-as-you-type address book, a richtext editor and multiple sender identities among others.

If you’re already a cPanel user, you may have already tried RoundCube as it is bundled with the control panel. But the downside is that it is only accessible on port 2095 and this may prevent some people behind a firewall from using it. In this case, the only solution is to install it in a folder of your web hosting account.

How To Install RoundCube WebMail

First head over to http://www.roundcube.net and click on the Downloads link from the main menu. At the time of this writing, the latest version available is 0.2 beta.

Using a FTP client (such as Filezilla), create a folder for RoundCube in your public directory (i.e.: /public_html or /www in many cases). In my case, I created a folder named “rc” (for RoundCube obviously).

Extract the content from the .tar.gz archive and upload it to your webserver in the newly created folder. Once completed, your directory structure should be similar to this:

RoundCube will need to create files in the logs directory so make sure it is writeable by setting the permissions to 0777.

Now we need to create a MySQL database for RoundCube to store its data.

For cPanel users who are unfamiliar with this, please read How To Create a MySQL Database With cPanel.

One the database is created, open your browser to http://www.yourwebsite.com/rc/installer (or replace “rc” with the folder name you’ve created earlier) and click the Start Installation button. The installer will then make sure that your webserver meets RoundCube’s requirements. If the requirements are met, click on Next.

On the settings page, don’t forget to set the MySQL database parameters. Other that this, I’ve only added “localhost” (without the quotes) in the default_host field from the IMAP Settings section. You can add more IMAP servers if you want. I’ve left all the default values for the other settings.

Click on Create Config.

The installer will then generate two PHP configuration files. Click on the download link beside each of them and save them to your hard drive. Use your FTP client to upload them on your webserver to /path/to/roundcube/config. When you’re done, click on Continue.

RoundCube’s installer will then test the configuration settings. Make that everything is ok and click the Initialize database button. You can also send a test email and attempt to connect through IMAP.

Once you made sure everything is working properly, completely remove the installer folder (i.e.: /path/to/roundcube/installer) and you’re done!

RoundCube is very easy to install and provides one of the best free webmail interface that exists. Hopefully you’ll find it useful too!