It’s been a couple of months now since the successful release of @Mail 5.2 which marked quite a milestone in our PHP port with it becoming a very mature and feature rich Webmail system. However we’ve continued our hard work and managed to further improve AtMail with quite a few bug fixes and feature improvements to make AtMail still even better!

In preparation for the release of AtMail 5.3 we have decided to make a Beta available to our existing clients. We’ve found it very stable in our testing and would encourage our clients to visit the Client Portal and download the beta tarball and check it out.

Included in the new release is Websync support for Outlook 2007/2003 running under Vista. Download the latest Websync utility at: http://atmail.com/websync/websync-53.exe

AtMail 5.3 will include:

• Support for SQLite database backend (Webmail Client mode only)
• Improved email address parsing (comma bug resolved)
• Improved parsing of embedded emails. AtMail will now recurse through layers of embedded emails and extract the content of them all.
• Support for ms-tnef (winmail.dat) attachments. Requires the tnef program installed on your server.
• New Plugin framework added
• Improved support for multi-server setups using a central config (via a plugin)
• Improved filtering of control characters that break the AJAX/XUL interfaces
• Resolved bug where wrong From address sometimes shown.
• Advanced FF interface now supports Start Page at login
• Improved filename detection for attachments
• Default date format as set in Webadmin is now applied properly to new users
• iPhone is no longer redirected to the WAP login page as it can handle regular simple interface
• Having an ampersand (&) in your Display Name will no longer break the Adv FF interface when you login
• Email tabs in advanced interfaces now display certain characters in subject text correctly (not as html entities)
• Webadmin can now sort User list by LastLogin field
• Improved HTML > Text conversion when replying/forwarding HTML messages in text mode on AJAX interface
• Improved support for spaces in folder names - no longer breaks XUL next/prev button
• an more…

A full change-log will be available upon final release of AtMail 5.3

So if you are an existing client and have the time please check it out and give us your feedback - we want to make AtMail the best Webmail and Messaging platform available!

The AtMail development team have been hard at work designing a new “Simple” interface for the Webmail client.

We are aiming to consolidate the interfaces of AtMail into two, one “Advanced” interface that works for both IE and Firefox, and a new optimized simple interface.

Both interfaces will utilize the same backend code for requests, Ajax functions, and XML structure for messages, address-book and calendar data. Just presented with a different interface, depending on the utilization of the Webmail ( Business users can use the Advanced interface with more features, and home users the simple interface may be better suited )

Attached are some mock screenshots of the new “optimized” simple interface - Feedback is welcome!

Message listing page

Readmail panel

In addition, we have created a new concept for a login-page of AtMail, that combines the entire interface with the login-page as a floating DIV. Users can simply login to their account with ease, and the interface fades into their mailbox listing without any page reloads or redirects.

View the new login page online, and you can access any sample account at demo.atmail.com

Create a user account on the demo page, then click the new login page to access that account. Otherwise login to the demo account demo_evf8@demo.atmail.com, password demo using the new login page above.

That’s the latest from the development team of AtMail, you can look forward to some new additions to AtMail in Feb/March 08!