Fixing slow SquirrelMail version 1.4.15.

If you’ve got a large inbox and you’re using SquirrelMail to view it, you may notice page loading times are poor using the default configuration. There is a simple fix that will allow SquirrelMail to load emails using multiple threads and server sorting which means that the performance will improve significantly when accessing your email via a web browser.

Edit your config/config.php file:

nano /etc/squirrelmail/config.php


find the lines:


$allow_thread_sort = false;
$allow_server_sort = false;

and change them to:

$allow_thread_sort = true;
$allow_server_sort = true;


You need to restart your web server (assuming apache):


/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And then login to your web mail page. With any luck you’ll have noticed a significant performance boost. For further performance tuning information see the SquirrelMail website guide at: http://www.squirrelmail.org/docs/admin/admin-6.html