Death of SquirrelMail

  • Thursday, 28th June, 2018
  • 22:48pm

cPanel will begin to deprecate support for SquirrelMail with cPanel & WHM version 74. cPanel will remove support for SquirrelMail with version 78. Since this change will disrupt some users, we are providing some background that helps to explain the reasons behind this change.

SquirrelMail was added to cPanel when webmail first became an option for cPanel users more than a decade ago. There have not been any significant change in the appearance or feature set since its introduction. For many users SquirrelMail has been a reliable webmail application with a stable, feature-rich experience. Its stability drew a faithful following among all types of users.

Why SquirrelMail is being removed

SquirrelMail is an open source projects which has experienced a loss of invested developers. The results of the shrinking developer community has resulted in no updates since May 30th, 2013 and the last software last release on July 12, 2011. In that seven years, 4 versions of PHP have reached End of Life, and cPanel has worked with others in the community to maintain SquirrelMail. Unfortunately, recent security patches have significant problems, forcing a choice. Exclude the security fix and ship SquirrelMail with known security flaws, ship a secure version with known interface issues, or attempt to fix the problems.

Webmail users now expect a better experience than SquirrelMail can provide. Rather than continuing to ship an unmaintained application, cPanel has decided to remove SquirrelMail.

SquirrelMail’s Replacement

Removing SquirrelMail from cPanels webmail options leaves cPanel Users with Horde and Roundcube. We have looked, but we haven’t found any obvious replacements for SquirrelMail.

Changing the Default cPanel Webmail Application

We urge SquirrelMail users to switch to Horde or Roundcube. To change the Default cPanel Webmail Application see the following Knowledgebase Article:


https://www.alpineweb.com/backroom/knowledgebase/114/Change-default-cPanel-Webmail-application.html

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