According to some people, there's this whole "Web 2.0" thing going on right now, and I'm glad to say that IlohaMail isn't completely left behind:

• TextDrive, a fairly prominent "Web 2.0 Hosting Company", appears to be using IlohaMail for hosted webmail service. It appears they may be switching to a Joyent product (they just merged with Joyent, so I don't blame them), but if they are, it hasn't happened yet...
  
• RoundCube, an OpenSource Ajaxy webmail project uses IlohaMail's IMAP library under it's hood. So, okay, it's only part IlohaMail, but that's what OpenSource is all about.
  
• Speaking of Ajax, the latest devel version of IlohaMail in CVS actually has some nifty Ajax features. People have reported some issues with it, but hopefully we get things stablized and out the door soon...
  

For the last 5 years, IlohaMail has been mostly a one-man operation, with me (Ryo) being that One Man. Sure, I got lots of help and support from others, but I controlled the source and made all the decisions. One of the benefits to this "benevolent dictator" approach was that IlohaMail stayed true to my original vision, with relatively little feature creep that plagues many Open Source projects (i.e. none of that "it's a webmail that also does your laundry and builds nuclear reactors... poorly and slowly!" crap). Of course, the downside was that the project experienced periods of inactivity lasting months, where patches didn't go in, and new releases didn't go out. The last 6 months or so has been one of those periods, and it's killing IlohaMail.

So, over the last week or so, a group of dedicated community members and I have begun planning and activating a succession plan. Over the next weeks and months, IlohaMail will become more open and more community-driven. I'll still stick around and help where I can, but many of the critical tasks in maintaining, developing, and supporting IlohaMail will be taken on by members of the IlohaMail.org community.

This is a big change for me and for IlohaMail. But I am fully confident that IlohaMail, the product and the community, will improve and thrive in this new phase. Finally, if you would like to help out and take part in the ongoing discussions, please join us on the developer mailing list.

--Ryo Chijiiwa (Author, IlohaMail)

I finally got my hands on (a now somewhat dated) issue 6.04 of PHP Magazine, which included an article about IlohaMail by David Costa. Here are some choice quotes:

I was disappointed by the performance of Squirrelmail under PHP 5. In fact, I was unable to successfully run any version prior to 1.4.3a on PHP 5, and even 1.4.3a didn't have the stunning installation simplicity and speed provided by IlohaMail.

Peek into the IlohaMail source code and you will notice that this application has been well developed and well commented. Much of the credit goes to the lead developer Ryo Chijiiwa. This is certainly an important aspect: There are thousands of PHP free applications online, but not many are well coded and therefore easy to expand, customize, and maintain.

IlohaMail is one of the best webmail solutions available. It's strength resides in its ease of installation, minimal requirements, flexibility, speed, and excellent code.

A demo of the next major update to IlohaMail, version 0.9, is now open to the public. Log in to an existing IMAP or POP3 account at one of the URLs below:

non-SSL: http://devdemo.ilohamail.org
SSL: https://ssl.ilohamail.org/devmail

Ask someone to name two PHP webmail packages, and they'll probably name SquirrelMail and IMP/Horde. But if you ask Google the same question, it'll give you a slightly better answer:

This release fixes a character set encoding issue in the toolbar and folder list, and a bug in the POP3 library which inserted extra newline characters. This release also includes minor bug fixes, language updates, and some security enhancements.

Lycos-Europe's hosting branch, operating in 7 countries and serving some 3 million customers and users, will begin distributing IlohaMail to hosting customers through its "1Click!" auto-installation service. The service currently offers 20 GPL'd scripts, and IlohaMail will be one of 20 new scripts to be added to the service at the end of this month. "We are very enthusiastic to adapt Ilohamail in the OneclickSite for this new release" says Sebastien Fiquemont, a staff member working on 1Click!, and notes that "This script seems to work well on our [Linux] platform".

In related news, Kagoya Inc of Kyoto, Japan, will also begin offering IlohaMail to customers through a similar service, called "Easy CGI". Kagoya purportedly operates over a thousand servers.

Lycos-Europe: http://www.lycos-europe.com
1Click!: http://1clicksite.com
Kagoya: http://www.kagoya.net/en/

Starting with 0.9-20050102, snapshots of IlohaMail 0.9-devel will be made available on the SourceForge project page, and announcements will be made on FreshMeat.net as well. The aim is to intensify and expedite development of the 0.9-devel branch, in order to achieve stability by late Spring, or early Summer 2005.

IlohaMail 0.8.14-rc1 has been released. This release candidate for the next update in 0.8-stable includes a completely rework UTF7 handler for IMAP folders. This release also include a security fix, and a number of bug fixes and minor enhancements.

There's an article about IlohaMail on ISP-Planet this week.