I suck at product announcements, probably because I have no perceptible marketing skills. Usually I just whip out a list of technical details that even I can’t edit because I fall asleep by the third bullet point – A list that significantly limits the number of people who care one iota about what I’m blathering on about. What was I blathering on about? That’s right, sucky product announcements. Let’s pile another one on the heap, shall we?

This is the official wiz-bang super exciting announcement for a NEW shiny NEW Open Source webmail program called “Cypht” (pronounced “sift”). Did I mention it was NEW? New does not necessarily mean better you say? Well, I had not thought about that before deciding to emphasize it. Seriously however, in the world of Open Source webmail, new is actually exciting (and subjective I guess since I have been working on this for like a year already).

Will this software disrupt the E-mail paradigm while streamlining workflow to maximize interpersonal communication channels using a ground breaking application stack and development process? Nope. From a user perspective it’s like a lot of web-based E-mail programs you are already familiar with. From a developer perspective the code is experimental, with a focus on a smart overall design that offsets some of the downfalls of building a complex program in PHP.

Wait, don’t go just because I said PHP. It’s not like the other PHP based webmail programs I have worked on, but it’s also not just another vanilla web-based E-mail client. One of the core ideas and most interesting features is the concept of viewing aggregated E-mail from multiple sources, without actually forwarding the messages to a central account. Let me esplain:

I have a few Gmail accounts. An old Yahoo E-mail. Throw in a few other domains I own and I have about 5 or so accounts I want to keep up with (to varying degrees). I don’t want to auto-forward them all to a single account, I like keeping my work E-mail separate from my personal messages. So I said to myself,

“Self, why not build a webmail application that does that? One that could give self fast access to a list of all the unread messages in all self’s inboxes from the last 2 days. Or something like that. Oh and search and stuff.”

And so it came to pass, that said webmail was created and continues to be tinkered with. I have droned on endlessly about this software on this blog in the past, so if you are one of the people who came here for the “Linux on a Macbook Pro” post (which is why most people come here) and clicked on the wrong link, this probably sounds familiar.

Since this is not really new, not even new to this blog, why the awful product announcement? Is it just an excuse to rehash old post material until someone pays attention to your stupid program? Maybe, but I think we are getting a little off-track, and for the record its my blog so I will be the one asking the questions around here partner.

Did I mention I like lists of technical details? Here comes one!

• Really small page sizes, like the entire page + JS + CSS + Ajax requests is less than the Google home page. With normal browser caching and HTML5 local session storage the data transferred is reduced to a stupifyingly small amount.
• An extra emphasis on security and privacy throughout the application. This is an Open Source program meant to be safe and useful, not an ad generating machine mining your E-mail.
• It’s not your dad’s webmail! Unless you are one of my daughters in which case it is your dad’s webmail.
• Valid HTML5 pages with accessibility friendly markup and mobile views.
• A module system that is like a plugin system on crank. It’s all friggen modules!
• At this point in development, Cypht is a decent E-mail and news reader with limited outbound message support (in this context limited means don’t use it).
• A huge following on Github of 1, combined with a large developer base of 1. This thing is taking off I tell you!
• A website with tons of impressive sounding acronyms like IMAP, POP3, SMTP, HHVM, RSS, SSL, PHP, 2FA, PBKDF2, AES, and more!
• Other stuff!

Still here? I’m as surprised as you are. This concludes today’s craptacular product announcement. This blog will now return to its irregular schedule of posts about video games or goats or whatever.