SquirrelMail will be removed from cPanel in the next update, this announcement explains why and when it’s being removed and our plans to replace it.
How did SquirrelMail come to cPanel?
SquirrelMail was added to cPanel back when webmail first became an option for cPanel users more than a decade ago. It hasn’t changed much in appearance or feature set since its introduction. Few webmail applications have provided such a stable, feature-rich experience. Its stability drew a faithful following among all types of users. Technical support personnel especially appreciated it, because of its predictability. While other webmail applications failed, SquirrelMail was reliable.
Why SquirrelMail is being removed?
An all too common story with open source projects is a loss of invested developers. A once active, vibrant developer community diminishes as other things take priority. When that happens, its users often leave as well.
SquirrelMail’s last update was May 30th, 2013, with their last release on July 12, 2011. In that seven years, 4 versions of PHP have reached End of Life, and we have worked with others in the community to maintain SquirrelMail. Unfortunately, recent security patches have significant problems, forcing us into 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 provides. Rather than continuing to ship an unmaintained application, we decided to remove SquirrelMail.
When is SquirrelMail being removed?
SquirrelMail has being partially discontinued in cPanel Version 76 and support is no longer available for it. In cPanel Version 78 SquirrelMail will be fully discontinued and will no longer be available as an option for webmail in cPanel.
We recommend using RoundCube to read your emails through cPanel’s webmail interface as the interface is much more user friendly and all your emails from SquirrelMail can be viewed in RoundCube as e-mails are automatically synced between all webmail clients.
Is SquirrelMail being replaced?
Unfortunately, the cPanel team have no plans to replace SquirrelMail with another webmail application at this time. However, AfterLogic Lite has being recommended by some users in cPanel suggestions, but this suggestion hasn’t gained enough votes to warrant implementing it into cPanel. However, we will be looking into implementing AfterLogic Lite ourselves in the near future if cPanel doesn’t provide a suitable alternative to the discontinued SquirrelMail webmail application.
Editor Notes: Some Information provided in this announcement has being deprived from cPanel’s article at https://blog.cpanel.com/the-death-of-squirrelmail/.
