CrossBox 2019

Hello ballers,

we hope that you’re enjoying your holidays :beers: and that you’ll like what we’ve prepared for you in 2019. We’ve been working hard (even during the holidays when everyone is slacking :partying_face:) to bring you many new cool features and improvements. We are opening this topic to have some quality feedback from the ballers before we push this into the mainline. So let’s start with the big ones:

RESELLER SUPPORT

In short: This allows resellers to have their own branded version of CrossBox including their own CrossBox URL and IMAP/SMTP/POP3 hostnames which they can advertise to the customers. Before this, many root providers resorted to installing the unbranded version because the resellers wanted to advertise everything as their own service (which is understandable).

So how does it work?
It’s really simple and uses something that everyone is accustomed to: a thing called WHM feature lists and in Plesk: service plans. As root, you can simply enable “branding” plugin in the feature list for resellers/users that you wish to have this capability and after that, when they log in to CrossBox as [email protected] they can brand CrossBox (name, logo, color theme) and make it available under their own domain (ex: mail.my-reseller-hosting.com or anything.my-domain.com).

Important accomplishment here is that the resellers themselves can enable this feature for their own customers too. This means that if the reseller enables this feature for the customer, the customer will also be able to create his own branding instead of using reseller’s or root’s. Multiple branding profiles under one account allow you to map differently branded apps to different domains.

We believe that CrossBox is the first Webmail App on the market that has full cPanel/Plesk resellers support and reseller/customer branding support. :trophy: Here is how it looks:

CNAME SUPPORT

If you use CrossBox via some provider and you wanted to have CrossBox available under your own domain (ex: mail.domain.com) instead of using provider’s, then I have some good news for you - now this is possible. You’ll be able to log in to CrossBox as [email protected] and you can mount CrossBox to anything.your-domain.com (as long as CNAME or A record points to the server hostname):

CALENDAR MODULE

The calendar module with full CardDAV support will also be available early in 2019. We didn’t want to implement it just so we could say “yes, we have it” - that’s not how we work. Instead, we took time and built something that is really as useful and productive as the rest of the CrossBox modules. After this gets pushed to the mainline, CrossBox will officially be 100% ActiveSync compatible:

ROOT ADMIN AREA

We’ve migrated the entire root admin area into the CrossBox itself and now everything is available under the same roof. This provides us with a great base to more easily implement “domain admin” feature which is requested a lot and which we plan to add in the near future. Here is how it looks like:

RESET PASSWORD

Users can now recover their email account password in several ways:

  • via a recovery email address that they specified in security settings
  • via authenticator code, if the account has 2FA enabled
  • by providing answers to secret questions that are specified in security settings
  • and as a last resort by contacting the administrator (entered message gets sent to reseller’s or root’s email address, depending on who owns the account):

I know its TLDR but we like to be as detailed as possible.

Please feel free to chip in as we very much welcome ballers’ opinions and feedbacks.

Happy holidays everyone!

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Incredible work guys, I look forward to seeing your product progress and gain popularity :slight_smile:

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Personally, I feel these updates bring CrossBox to a whole different level. Kudos.

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The UI looks really clean while also looking attractive. Good job guys.

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Fantastic work from your whole team! Super excited to use this! One question; will the calendar module support importing external DAV servers like baikal/sabredav?

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Awesome work. Looking forward to review this soon!

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Really nice work. Crossbox is better than pretty much every other webmail client I’ve ever used. Looking forward to trying this out now that MXRoute uses Crossbox!

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That’s a really cool suggestion. I’ll pass it onto the devs and we’ll discuss it further. Thanks!

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Rainloop still looks pretty darn good considering it still has a community version.

@CrossBox Any chance that we’ll get a community version too?

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That would be nice. I feel like a person (or small group of friends or family) with a handful of domains and that’s not making money off it should have a different pricing structure or even a free or open source version, compared to a web or email hosting service with tens of thousands of domains that makes money off the service (which is the demographic that Crossbox seems to be targeting today)

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Damn! I was so excited to test it out and was confused why I wasn’t seeing the CNAME support in mine, when I reread the original post and saw this :blush:

Anyway, I’m not sure if this is an issue with CrossBox at all, but the “welcome email” sent from cPanel is unreadable (due to issues with styles?):

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Yes, this was a “bug” in dark mode where it would change the color of the text to white (because it’s expecting a dark background). However, that particular background is hardcoded to white, thus text is not seen. A temporary solution is to switch to the light mode when you encounter an e-mail like this.

As a permanent solution, this behavior is already fixed and will get pushed in the next update (along with everything above).

@redbamboohouse
I see you tried it out. How are you liking it and where do you think there should be improvements? Cheers :beers:

Thanks for the feedback.

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Keep it up, you’ve got a pretty great product & an amazing future based on your development goals.

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When will you release this update?

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Soon ™

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As Soon As Thoroughly Tested And Ready For Production Use ™ which we’ll do our best to accomplish in January 2019. That update will include everything except the calendar module which is still not 100% done and which will be released in a separate update.

I must say that we have a pretty solid update system so you don’t have to worry about updating. It’s entirely automatic and in the case when you have a clustered setup, first the master server gets an update and then the master itself is used to deliver updates to your slaves. Also, updates only contain patches and database migrations so you don’t need to download the entire CrossBox installation again. This approach downloads only what is new and restarts services that are affected by the update, automagically :slight_smile: bringing your installation to an up-to-date-state and ready to go.

Actually, one of the main reasons why this is possible is because we don’t use system’s package managers (yum, apt, packman, etc…) to depend on or install any of the system’s libraries as we ship everything that CrossBox needs separately. The only library that you actually need to have on the system is glibc 2.12 and up. By removing the dependency on the system’s software we can deliver updates that always get you to the latest version of CrossBox, even though your system’s and other software’s packages remain unaffected.

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Just to let you guys know that the new update will also put “Max mails per hour”, “Queued”, and “Outgoing Mail Suspended” indicators just below the quota indicator.

This will help end users in better understanding the limits that the provider has set for the account. These indicators will only show if CrossBox runs on a cPanel server.

Here is how it looks like from the user’s perspective:

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Awesome.

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I see that this has now been released! Version 0.3.7 :slight_smile:

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Yes, here is the complete changelog:

https://crossbox.io/changelog/page/crossbox-changelog

However, not all providers will get the update immediately as it’s being rolled out incrementally. Everyone should have a new version by the end of the week though.

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