App Development: Odds and Ends

After getting my first ‘mobile’ phone a month back – yes, I finally made the jump into the current decade – I figured I’d see what reading my personal e-mail would be like. Below are my findings based on trying out each of the four e-mail applications provided by my web host.

All findings were based solely on my Nexus 5 Android 4.4.4 using Chrome 36.0.1985.128

RoundCube – 0.9.5
Good for deleting e-mail after e-mail, one after another, click, click, click.
Setting: Preferences -> Displaying Messages -> After message delete/move display the next message
Note: Could not change settings in mobile.
From main mail list – Just highlight one, then click delete, delete, delete.
Also after this setting is made, when viewing an e-mail, deleting it will move you to the next.
Difficult to read e-mail (see note below).
Landscape – Message section of screen was vertically squished
Portrait – Message section of screen was horizontally squished
Note: This was better after changing the User Interface Skin, but prefer the default skin for desktop version.
Setting: Preferences -> User Interface -> Interface skin: Classic
From main mail list – Cannot move to other folders (you can drag, but they don’t drop).

SquirrelMail – 1.4.22
Decent for reading mail.
Good for deleting mail groups of e-mail – check, check, check, delete.
Good for moving mail to other folders – check, check, select folder, move.
Con: When page refreshes (which is after any mail action is taken) the screen rezooms back out (if you had zoomed in).
Acts just like desktop version with no mobile quirks.

@Mail – 1.05
From main mail list – Could not find a way read e-mails. Double-clicking adjusts zoom. Clicking “Read Mail”, even after selecting an e-mail, refreshes the page.
From main mail list – Could not find a way to delete mails.

Horde – 3.3.13
Only has mobile (text-only) version (not necessarily a bad thing).
Initial main mail list is chronilogically reversed (latest mail is at bottom). You can reverse sort date by clicking # at the top of the list, but expect screen to rezoom.
Can only delete mail while reading it. Cannot delete from main mail list.

Conclusion –
For me, although I’ve grown to prefer RoundCube over Squirrelmail for my desktop mail reading, despite the potential frustration with rezooming, I’ll likely be using SquirrelMail for my traveling e-mail mass delete/reading activities.

Side Note: Regarding my desktop preference for RoundCube, I do go back to SquirrelMail when I want to do a global folder search through e-mails. SquirrelMail allows you to search across all mail folders for your search criteria. I also miss all the message highlighting I had setup in SquirrelMail. But Roundcube’s interface just has something over SquirrelMail which I find more suitable for my daily mail activities. Plus, in Roundcube, if your inbox is selected, the browser shows the number of unread mails in the browser’s tab, so you can check for new mail even when the browser is minimized.