I managed to get back from vacation in one piece. As I told you in this post we went from Costa Rica, to Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatamala and then Mexico.

I was very excited to go to that part of the world because it's one of the last contents we still have to visit (we now only have Australia on our list). It was more beautiful then I could hope.

Costa Rica is incredibly green. It's most famous for it's eco-tourism nowadays. We stayed in La Fortuna (where we didn't see the Arenal  vulcano because of the clouds) and later in Monteverde. In Monteverde we did a boat trip along some beautiful islands and of course did the Canopy tour Monteverde is famous for.

The Canopy tour is basically going from one mountain side to the other over treetops and rivers on a very thin cable. You have 13 slides which vary in height and length. The best one is 60 meters high and 1km long.

From Costa Rica we went on the Nicaragua, Grenada. Nicaragua was also a country I was very anxious to see, but in the end it was a bit dissapointing. The nature is incredible, but the people are poorer then I expected. This resulted in beggars at your breakfast table and women that pissed on the street right in front of you where you were about to set your foot down. From there on we went to León, the former capital of Nicaragua. León is a bit bigger and that is a bit easier going for the tourists like us

From León we went Vulcano boarding. I myself never heard of it, but you basically walk up a active vulcano in 1,5 hours in the hottest part of the day (38 C) on black sand with a wind that could blow you of it any minute to then when you arrive at the top sit on your board and slide down at 60 mph. Now who in his right mind would do that .

It was super super cool to do.

From there on we went further to Copan where we went to visit the Ruins. Its amazing that these ruins are so well preserved. Those Maya people sure knew how to build a decent temple.

For the people who are interested in reading the rest of the story or are interested in some more photo's you can view them here.

I usually just use IMAP for my e-mail within Outlook on my office computer and IMAP with Thunderbird when I'm home on my laptop with Ubuntu, but my laptop gave me some troubles at home so I took my girlfriends laptop and fired up my webmail.

Damn!, Squirellmail is so incredibly ugly and gui-unfriendly compared to Horde or any other webmail project you come across. Not only do the themes stink, but it misses out on several basic functionality like sieve filtering and per-user SpamAssassin preferences.

I had some spare time on my hands so I went looking for a Squirellmail alternative. Very quickly you will find that there aren't that many (good) webmail clients around. There is GoogleMail, Horde, Roundcube, Zimbra and a few lesser known ones. GoogleMail isn't an option since we don't like to host our e-mail elsewhere, Zimbra isn't because it is more of an collaboration suite then it is a webmail client and Horde isn't an option once you compare it to Roundcube

RoundCube is an excellent open source experience for an AJAX webmail, and what will really attract you to Roundcube is its advanced user interface with drag and drop functionnalities which make it very easy to organize your email. RoundCube Webmail is written in PHP and requires a MySQL database. The user interface is fully skinnable using XHTML and CSS 2. Roundcube also offers extensions in the form of plugins. This enables you to use SpamAssassin options per-user, Sievefiltering per-user, etc.

Roundcube was definitely the webmail program the fitted our needs most. We quickly installed it next to our Squirellmail installation. The installation was super-easy and super-fast. Then installed the ManageSieve and SpamAssassin plugins and I thought we were good to go.

Then a colleague mentioned that he couldn't set a auto-reply from within RoundCube. He was planning to take a few days off and wanted to set an out-of-the-office notification. I quickly looked in the RoundCube repository for a auto-reply function but it is only available for a specific Windows mailserver. On the forums of RoundCube the programmers state that there will be no such official plugin or feature made available since they think it is not something the webmail program should manage.

I disagree.

I think users should be able to set their auto-reply message from within their webmail and not having to go trough Usermin or Webmin to do so.

Since SquirellMail DID have the auto-reply functionality available and SquirellMail also runs on PHP and MySQL I decided to just take that plugin and port it to RoundCube. I wrapped the whole thing in a RoundCube plugin format and voila, it works brilliantly.

The plugin writes a file to the users homedir where the SendMail server picks it up and fires the 'Vacation' plugin that sends an auto-reply.

Anyone who wants the plugin can download it here.

Update - If you can't use FTP to put the forward files you may try using the squirrelmail_vacation_proxy program. Not that I do not support this program nor the use of it.

You may download it here.

Update - There is now a SourceForge project concerning this plugin. You can download the files there and contribute to it as well.

Support and questions can also be put in the projects forum.

Now lets just hope that the big pig flu turns out not to be that big as the WHO is trying to make us believe...

Day-by-day:

1 San José (Costa Rica);
2 La Fortuna Arenal;
3 La Fortuna Arenal;
4 Monteverde;
5 Monteverde;
6 Granada (Nicaragua);
7 Granada;
8 Léon;
9 León;
10 Comayagua (Honduras);
11 Copán;
12 Copán;
13 Antigua (Guatemala);
14 Antigua;
15 Panajachel;
16 Panajachel;
17 San Cristóbal de las Casas (Mexico);
18 San Cristóbal de las Casas;
19 Palenque;
20 Nachtbus naar Playa del Carmen;
21 Playa del Carmen;
22 Playa del Carmen;
23 Vliegtuig;
24 Aankomst Amsterdam;