Re: [gentoo-user] non-PHP webmail in portage?

[kashani]

Grant wrote:
>>> Does anyone know of a good (or OK) webmail client in portage that
>>> doesn't use PHP?  I use squirrelmail now but I have PHP installed only
>>> for that and I think PHP slows apache2 down a bit.
>>>
>>> - Grant
>>>
>> I don't think you'll find anything faster except maybe written in C, which
>> is doubtful. The only other language you might find webmail written in is
>> Perl/CGI and that is definitely not faster in my experience. PHP is about as
>> good as you will get IMHO.
>
> I actually don't mean to speed up squirrelmail and PHP.  The main
> function of that system is to run a website in perl, and I thought I
> might be bogging down apache2 a bit just by opening it up to PHP
> interpretation (-D PHP).  Is that the case?  It would also be nice not
> to be exposed to PHP exploits.  It just seems kind of silly to
> maintain and run PHP just for webmail.
>
> - Grant
>

	Adding -D PHP makes your memory footprint larger, but unless you're 
actually using PHP that's the only side affect of loading it. If you're 
concerned about security, make sure you're using the sushosin USE 
variable and keeping PHP and Squirrelmail up to date. Regardless of 
which language or mail package you use you're going to have to keep them 
updated.

	One other thing to think about is whether or not finding a Perl webmail 
system is going to make your life any easier. Say you do find one and it 
installs a ton of Perl modules like all Perl applications. Some of those 
will be updates of Perl modules that your actual site depends on which 
may or may not break the site. Now you've got two applications to QA 
when you update any Perl module that is a dependency of both.

kashani