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Every journey has an end, and this is the End of SquirrelMail; SquirrelMail is one of the older webmail offered by cPanel.

cPanel announced it would deprecate the support of SquirrelMail; what does that mean? It means SquirrelMail will longer be available through cPanel.

How does SquirrelMail come to cPanel?

SquirrelMail was added to cPanel back when webmail first became an option for cPanel users more than a decade ago. It hasn’t changed much in appearance or feature set since its introduction. Few webmail applications have provided such a stable, feature-rich experience. Its stability drew a faithful following among all types of users. Technical support personnel especially appreciated it because of its predictability. While other webmail applications failed, SquirrelMail was reliable.

Why is SquirrelMail being removed?

An all too familiar story with open source projects is a loss of invested developers. A once active, vibrant developer community diminishes as other things take priority. When that happens, its users often leave as well.

SquirrelMail’s last update was May 30, 2013, and its final release was on July 12, 2011. In that seven years, four versions of PHP have reached the 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.

SquirrelMail’s replacement

Removing SquirrelMail from our webmail options leaves us with only Afterlogic webmail, Horde, and Roundcube.

When will it be removed?

From the first day in 2019, SquirrelMail will no longer be available through our options.