Customizing Neomail Webmail with Better Buttons

[scott]

Background

Neomail is a free webmail gateway that is one of the more popular email readers for website users. It is generally one of the cleanest and well written email readers available. I have tried others, including SquirrelMail and some of the java based readers, but I keep coming back to Neomail for its simple interface. Unfortunately, a lot of people complain about the cryptic iconic interface in Neomail. The buttons are too small and of little meaning to new users, and I have had repeated requests to provide a different webmail gateway for my website clients.

One of my web hosts was promising a new webmail gateway for months, so I waited to see what it looked like. It sucked. So I finally decided to see how hard it would be to fix Neomail's icons. Turns out it isn't hard at all.

Here is the old look:



Here is the new look:



Below are the steps necessary to replace the Neomail icons with larger icon/text based buttons:

(Notice and Disclaimer : You must have FTP or SSH access to your web server (or mail server) and permission to change the neomail files, which most servers grant by default. I wrote this tutorial for Neomail 1.25, and although I believe it will work on any recent version with template support, I cannot guarantee or warrantee your success. So backup your files, and only attempt this tutorial if you can deal with the consequences of any unexpected errors, corruptions, or incompatibilities. Otherwise have fun!)

1) Download my zip file that contains my replacement buttons and a new template file. Click here to download the file (20KB). Unzip the contents into a folder on your computer.

2) Check out the cool icons that I made. These are GIF files using transparency. So if you get purple or black backgrounds on preview, that is the transparency layer. I created these icons for use on the grey background themes in Neomail. I am willing to create buttons for other themes, but I need to see sufficient interest first. The graphics used here are from the library of software graphics that Online Solutions has developed and uses in their software. We are granting permission for you to use these graphics in your Neomail installation. We do not grant permission to use these graphics in other applications, or to sell these graphics.

3) FTP or SSH into your web server and find the Neomail images directory under your webroot folder. If you don't know what a webroot folder is, or don't know where your webroot folder is, then STOP NOW, you shouldn't be doing this tutorial. Go get a web programmer to do it for you, or hire Online Solutions to do the customization. Anyway, the Neomail images are usually in a subfolder under the webroot. On most of my hosted accounts, I found the Neomail images in /www/htdocs/plugins/neomail/images. You may want to download the contents of this folder to some backup drive on your computer in case this tutorial doesn't work out for you. Once you find this folder, copy all the GIFs from my archive into this folder.

4) OPTIONAL STEP: If you want to customize Neomail to look like your company, you can replace the neomail.gif and neomail-bg.gif files to include your company logo.

5) You will need to find the Neomail templates folder on your web server. This will probably not be under the webroot. On my servers, this folder is /var/neomail/templates/en. Find this folder and appropriate language folder on your server and upload the replacement viewfolder.template file from my archive. The only change I made was to increase the space in the header table for the larger buttons. You may want to backup or rename the existing file so you can rollback if necessary. I usually rename the old template to viewfolder.template.old.

6) OPTIONAL STEP: You can also customize the header.template and footer.template to better fit your organization. I customized the header so my company name appears in the title tag as Online Solutions Webmail. I customized the footer with : Webmail Server by Online Solutions, Webmail Software by NeoMail version 1.25.

7) Test your Neomail install by checking your email. You may need to refresh to see the new buttons.

For us, Neomail continues to be the best webmail gateway available, and this tutorial fixes the only complaint we have had about Neomail. I hope this helps you as well.