The Webtop is your own, personal web-based email system. Not Hotmail, not yahoo mail... you don't subscribe or create an account with us... you download the webmail software, install it on your own server, and run the whole system on your own. There are now privacy concerns, no disk space limitations (other than your own hard drive), and no hassles.

What can the Webtop do?

First, see the "Features list" section of the web site... that will give you a complete list of features. But, to start with - the webtop will:

• support multiple users with one installation and each user can have multiple POP email accounts
• sending and receiving both text and HTML emails are supported
• full email and spam filtering
• multiple hierarchical email folders supported
• search through your email messages
• use an integrated calendar, notepad, webdrive (online file storage), email reminders, and contacts list
• Setup email "groups" (or mailing lists) where you can email any number of users by specifying a group name
• Import and export all of your email using the "mbox" email format

The Webtop supports SMTP and POP3. IMAP is not currently supported.

Does the Webtop support IMAP?

The goal of the Webtop was to be both a good email client as well as a powerful information management server. The Webtop is designed to pull all messages down to your local server so that you don't have to worry about a disk space quota with your email provider. With that in mind, IMAP was not designed into the core architecture of the Webtop. It is possible that we will be incorporating IMAP functionality in the future - but this is not a planned feature at this time.

Can I import email from Outlook into the Webtop?

Yes - in a round-about way. You can use the Mozilla email client to import mail from Outlook into Mozilla. Mozilla will then store the email in the "mbox" file format. The Webtop is then capable of import mbox files - so you can take the Mozilla mbox files and import them into the Webtop.

Is SSL supported?

Yes.

The Webtop is fully capable of integrating with other 3rd party web servers and servlet engines. We have found that running the Apache web server (www.apache.org) with Caucho's Resin servlet engine (www.caucho.com) is a good combination. By doing this, you can configure apache to run with SSL encryption and, hence, encrypting traffic to and from the Webtop.

If you are planning on using the Webtop's embedded web server and servlet engine, SSL encryption is supported "out of the box". The embedded web server and servlet engine services are provided by the excellent Jetty server (jetty.mortbay.com).

How can I "integrate / modify the user interface" of the Webtop for my own purposes?

Please see the "UI Customization Guide" located both in the documents section of the yourwebtop.com web site and the "UI_Customization_Guide.doc" document located in the /docs directory of a Webtop installation.

I have my own authentication scheme for my users (LDAP, SSO, custom...) - how can I use it to authenticate Webtop users?

We are currently working to modify the authentication scheme to be more modular in order to account for the myriad of authentication possibilities. If you have a specific request or need, please contact us at info@yourwebtop.com.

What operating systems does the Webtop support?

The Webtop is written in Java and can run on any operating system that can run Java. Java version 1.3+ is required.

What databases does the Webtop support?

The Webtop uses Java's JDBC functionality... so, technically, any database that has a JDBC driver can work with the Webtop. The two currently supported databases are Oracle 8i+ and MySQL 3.23+. If you would like to run the Webtop on another database, you will need to take the following steps:

1. Add the JDBC driver for your database to the WEB-INF/lib directory
2. Modify the webtop.properties file to specify the JDBC driver and JDBC url string (as well as the username/password to connect to the database)
3. Modify either the Oracle or MySQL sql creation script (located in the /sql directory) to work with your database

Does the Webtop use its own POP / SMTP servers?

No, the Webtop uses whatever POP and SMTP servers you specify when you setup a new email account. You can connect to as many POP and SMTP servers as you need to for however many email accounts you use.

Does the Webtop integrate with the Palm OS or Windows CE?

No, the PDA market appears to be in flux right now... the time and effort required to support PDA integration does not appear to make sense at this time.