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

[Grant]

>>>> 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

Maybe PHP isn't so bad then.

> 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.

A daily 'emerge --sync && emerge -avDuN world' is on my list of
favorite things to do.

>        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

Thanks for the advice and it sounds like running PHP isn't so bad after all.

- Grant