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AFAICT the best alternative, interface-wise, is Roundcube, and it doesn't seem particularly exciting (it's also written in PHP... which doesn't necessarily have to count against it, but makes me a little wary).

I've foolishly started to build my own, which at some point may become good enough to open source (I certainly don't want to commercialize it).

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Roundcube it is. If one is looking for threading and the more advanced options available in Gmail there's not much of an alternative as it stands right now.

Interestingly, I remember in 2006 Roundcube was already being touted as a gmail lookalike. Back when being able to move your emails from one folder to another using drag-n-drop in the browser made you feel /slick/ :)

http://trac.roundcube.net/browser/trunk/roundcubemail

Looks like pretty straightforward PHP4. I wouldn't really hold that against it unless you plan to do development with it.

Roundcube is by far the most clean, intuitive and beautiful opensource webmail client out there.

> it's also written in PHP... which doesn't necessarily have to count against it, but makes me a little wary

why that?

Because it's PHP. Duh.

</sarcasm>

The quality of the code in your average PHP project is... less than stellar. Low quality code typically results in exploitable bugs (XSS, CSRF, SQL injection, remote code execution, local filesystem access, etc.).