Lichen Webmail

Lichen is an open-source IMAP client that puts a friendly AJAX interface on your e-mail. Its aim is to be painless to install and easy to customise, while also being functional in any modern Web browser.

News

We’re not dead! ... introducing 0.4

24 May 2008

After a ridiculously long hiatus, we’re back with a new release: Lichen 0.4!

This release marks a return to active development (hooray!), and is also the last Lichen release that will work with PHP 4. It’s got a raft of changes, including ...

improved switching between mailboxes and messages
a new notification and feedback system
more selection options
working support for older browsers without JavaScript support
an updated HTMLPurifier library that fixes a cross-site scripting vulnerability
many bugfixes for PHP 4 users

As with 0.3, this release is not ready for production use, but it is ripe for testing ... please visit Trac if you encounter bugs!

On the shoulders of giants

Lichen is built on top of several other open-source projects:

mootools makes our JavaScript nicer

Swift Mailer does the hard work of sending messages

Nuvola icons make the default theme look pretty

HTML Purifier processes HTML messages in the current release

the HTML-AJAX and Date libraries from PEAR add functions for PHP4

and PHP is the foundation of it all

What you’ll need

A Web browser: Firefox 1.5 or higher, Internet Explorer 6 or higher, Safari 2 or higher, Opera 9.1 or higher (we’re working on support for Konqueror)

An IMAP server (we like Dovecot, but have also tested UW-IMAP and Courier)

A Web server (typically Apache)

PHP version 4.4 or higher, but we recommend PHP 5.2.

(Mac users: OS X’s bundled PHP lacks Gettext and IMAP support; use a prebuilt package instead.)

Your PHP must have IMAP support built-in.

(On most Linux distributions, you’ll have to install the php-imap package.)

Lichen's next release, version 0.5, will require PHP 5.2 or higher.