Recently cPanel made an announcement on their official blog about deprecation of Squirrelmail as a webmail option in cPanel.
As of cPanel & WHM version 74, cpanel will begin to deprecate support of SquirrelMail and stop shipping SquirrelMail for new installations of cPanel & WHM in version 76 followed by removing their support with version 78.
The news may come as a shock to many people who are used and habitual to use Squirrelmail as webmail option. Squirrelmail has been favourite webmail for years due to its simplicity and ease of managing emails using webmail.
But it seems, there has not been much progress in development of Squirrelmail which has forced cPanel to stop offering squirrelmail as an option. As per the official blog post from cPanel website,
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.
While we can certainly understand cPanel’s concern from security point of view, it would have been really helpful if Squirrelmail was able to cope up with developments and upgrades.
Following the removal of Squirrelmail eventually with release of cPanel version 78, WebHostUK will also stop offering SquirrelMail as a webmail option on our cPanel hosting servers. We urge our customers, who are using Squirrelmail, to consider using other alternative webmail options such as Horde or Roundcube and export any address book they may have under Squirrelmail.
Bye bye squirrelmail… !!
