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NearlyFreeMail is a Web-based e-mail client (webmail) designed for NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (NFSN) members. It uses NFSN's e-mail-to-URL forwarding service for incoming messages, and the open-source SwiftMailer library (i.e. mail() on steroids) for outgoing messages.

The goal is to allow NFSN members to send and receive e-mail with their own domain names, without relying on third-party e-mail service providers such as Google Apps. For some people, an all-NFSN solution like this could have significant privacy benefits. For others, it may add to the geek factor of their NFSN experience. It might not cost less than other options, though -- it's only "nearly" free, after all.

NearlyFreeMail is free software. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 3 or later. Third-party components included with this distribution may be covered by other open-source licenses.

Screenshots can be found here.

NearlyFreeMail is experimental software. Do not rely on this software for critical correspondence. NearlyFreeMail depends on implementation details of NFSN's e-mail-to-URL gateway, which may change or disappear altogether. Bugs in this software and/or network glitches could also cause your messages to get sucked into a black hole without a trace.

NearlyFreeMail is neither endorsed nor supported by NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. The author is not affiliated with NFSN in any way, other than being just another happy customer. Please do not contact NFSN about bugs in this software.

As of this writing, NearlyFreeMail supports:

• Multiple accounts, each with multiple aliases
• Sending and receiving plain-text messages with your own domain name (Sorry, no HTML)
• Attachments up to ~7MB (Larger messages may be rejected by NFSN)
• Reply, reply all, and forward (With appropriate In-Reply-To: and References: headers)
• Basic spam filtering (Based on spam scores assigned by NFSN's e-mail forwarder)
• Draft auto-saving (This is the only feature that requires JavaScript)
• Unicode (Incoming messages may be in any character set; outgoing messages are always UTF-8)
• SQLite or MySQL for data storage
• Exporting folders in the mbox format (Can be imported into Mozilla Thunderbird)
• Signatures
• Folders
• Address book

More features may be added if there is demand and if the author has time. Updates, if any, will be published on the author's GitHub page.

Please also read "Known Issues" below.

To install and use NearlyFreeMail, you need:

• An account with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET
• A domain name, with name servers pointing to NearlyFreeSpeech.NET
• Enough money to purchase e-mail forwarding service which is quite expensive
• A dynamic site, with the server type PHP 5.3 or higher

Currently, a lot of things are hard-coded in a way that would make it inconvenient to use NearlyFreeMail anywhere except in NFSN's pay-as-you-go shared hosting environment. For example, all messages and attachments are stored in the "protected" directory in a single SQLite database (this prevents annoying situations where you have to repossess files and subdirectories owned by "web"); and some features of included third-party libraries are disabled due to incompatibilities with NFSN's strict policies.

NearlyFreeMail follows web standards for the most part, except where browser-specific hack are required. It should appear and function as intended in all modern desktop browsers, such as Firefox 3.6 and higher, Internet Explorer 8 and higher, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. It is known to break noticeably in Internet Explorer 7 and lower, and there are no plans to fix this. Mobile browsers have not been tested.

Log in to your site with SSH. Issue the following commands, in that order:

cd /home/public
git clone git://github.com/kijin/nearlyfreemail.git
chgrp web /home/public/nearlyfreemail/index.php
echo "deny from all" > /home/public/nearlyfreemail/.git/.htaccess
mkdir /home/protected/nearlyfreemail
touch /home/protected/nearlyfreemail/db.sqlite
chgrp -R web /home/protected/nearlyfreemail

If you would like to use an SQLite database for data storage, skip to Step 3. If you would like to use MySQL instead, proceed to Step 2.

While logged in with SSH, issue the following command:

cp /home/public/nearlyfreemail/program/bootstrap/mysql.php /home/protected/nearlyfreemail

Then, using your favorite text editor, edit /home/protected/nearlyfreemail/mysql.php and fill in your MySQL connection information.

$mysql['host'] = 'your_mysql_hostname.db';
$mysql['port'] = 3306;
$mysql['username'] = 'your_username';
$mysql['password'] = 'your_password';
$mysql['dbname'] = 'your_database_name';

Visit http://yoursite.nfshost.com/nearlyfreemail in your browser. Follow the instructions to create your first all-NFSN e-mail account. The welcome screen will tell you how to configure e-mail forwarding for your domain.

You may move NearlyFreeMail to the document root of your site, or to any other directory, simply by moving all the files and directories to the desired location. You must go to your NFSN control panel and update the forwarding URL if you change the installed location of NearlyFreeMail. Also, don't forget the dotfiles: .htaccess and .git.

If you would like to help fix bugs, it might be a good idea to enable the error log in your site. To assist debugging, NearlyFreeMail produces a generous amount of diagnostic messages when e-mail is received. These are deposited into your error log, so that you can see which (if any) e-mail failed to deliver.

If your server type is PHP 5.4 or higher, you need to add the following line to /home/conf/php.ini in order to enable error logging. (In PHP 5.3, this is automatically handled by the included .htaccess directives.)

log_errors = On

To keep your copy of NearlyFreeMail up to date, log in to your SSH account again, go to the directory where you have installed NearlyFreeMail, and issue the following command:

git pull

That's it. No tarballs to decompress and upload, no files to chmod or rename! Do this from time to time, so that you may receive new features and critical security fixes.

The author will try to keep NearlyFreeMail protected from known attack vectors on a best effort basis. However, since the security of a web application depends heavily on its environment, you are also responsible for protecting your own copy of NearlyFreeMail. There are two things that you must guard particularly closely: your passphrase, and the randomly generated URL that you will receive upon installation. Whoever knows this URL can spam you to oblivion, so do not give it to anyone except NFSN. Outgoing messages, on the other hand, are subject to NFSN's sending limits. This should be more than enough unless you frequently try to e-mail a lot of people.

It is strongly recommended that you use SSL when connecting to your copy of NearlyFreeMail. NearlyFreeMail will warn you if you install it or attempt to log in without SSL. As of March 2013, NFSN offers SSL for free on request for all nfshost.com subdomains, and you can purchase your own SSL certificates from third parties as well.

Even if you use SSL, the random URL generated by NearlyFreeMail will use plain HTTP by default. This is intentional, because communication within NFSN's network is assumed to be secure, and also because self-signed SSL certificates might cause problems with mail delivery.

DO NOT attempt to redirect the forwarding URL to any other URL, whether HTTP or HTTPS. It has been reported that NFSN's email forwarding gateway isn't fond of redirects. If you want to set up a blanket redirect from HTTP to HTTPS on your site, make sure that you also set up an exclusion for the forwarding URL.

DO NOT use HTTP authentication (basic or digest) to your site. If you use HTTP authentication on your site, NFSN will not be able to deliver any incoming messages. The best that you can do realistically to keep NearlyFreeMail hidden from random attackers would be to stash it in a subdirectory with a name that is hard to guess. (The recipients of your messages, however, will be able to infer the location by reading the headers automatically added by NFSN.) Don't forget to update the forwarding URL if you move your installation of NearlyFreeMail.

Incoming attachments with names that include non-ASCII characters will be renamed to body1, body2, etc. This is because NFSN renames such files when forwarding them. A workaround will be developed in the future.

Autosave will save the list of recipients, subject, and content of your draft, but it will not automatically save attachments that have yet to be uploaded. If you want to save attachments as well, click the "Save Draft" button. This shortcoming will be fixed in the future.

The message source is stored separately from the content and any attachments. This leads NearlyFreeMail to consume up to twice as much storage as the actual size of the message. ("Up to" twice as much, but usually less, since the message source is compressed before storage.)

NearlyFreemail currently does not work properly in a multi-domain site.

Deleting large messages will not automatically reduce the size of the SQLite database file. In order to reclaim unused space, you must manually vacuum the database using the following command:

sqlite3 /home/protected/nearlyfreemail/db.sqlite vacuum

Do not do this too often, because vacuuming a large SQLite database may consume a lot of server resources.