Migrating from Horde to Roundcube
Horde has been part of cPanel for more than 20 years. In fact, the latest major version of Horde was added to cPanel back in 2013 when Malaysia celebrated its 50th birthday, as can be seen in this blog post by cPanel. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and cPanel is deprecating Horde in a future update that is expected to be released in the fourth quarter of 2022 or the first quarter of 2023.
WILL MY EMAILS BE LOST?!
Stay calm and do not worry; your emails will still be available on our server. It will just be viewed through a different interface. Your emails that you used to view in Horde will still be viewable on RoundCube.
So, no, your emails will NOT be lost!
Why Horde is being removed?
The official response from cPanel is that it does not support PHP 8, and the current PHP it is running on will reach its end-of-life (EOL) in November 2022. This means that security support is no longer provided for PHP 7.4, which also means that new vulnerabilities will go unpatched by the PHP team.
To provide a secure and safe environment for all users, cPanel has made the tough decision to remove Horde from the list of available webmail clients. This is not the first time cPanel has decided to remove a webmail client; older users of cPanel might remember SquirrelMail, which was removed by cPanel in 2019.
How does this affect me?
If you use webmail to access your emails, RoundCube will become the default interface. Your emails will be available in RoundCube as they are in Horde. You can even get used to RoundCube’s interface now and start checking your emails there.
What do I need to do to prepare for this?
You can consider exporting your contacts and calendars to RoundCube for backup purposes. You can view the guidelines in our Knowledgebase articles below.
At the moment, cPanel is currently working on tools that will automatically migrate the current Horde calendar and contact data to Roundcube. We will have more information available once the tools are ready, and our experienced technicians have performed testing for you.
When will this happen? Can I delay this?
There is no official deadline from cPanel yet; however, we believe that this will be released some time in December 2022.
Summary / Conclusion
As much as we like to have more time with Horde, it will pose a security vulnerability to all users. We will follow cPanel’s timeline for this, so that you can have a stable and good experience on our Linux hosting servers.
