Postilion, a clone of the NeXT Mail.app

Current version 0.9.2 (Sat Apr 17 19:27:24 CDT 1999)

Postilion is a mail user agent based upon the popular TkRat program. The main changes to TkRat are in the user interface portion, so all of the underlying functionality of TkRat remains. This includes MIME support, Virtual folders, PGP support, support for unix mail files, MH folders, POP and IMAP.

Many other features and enhancements have been added to Postilion, ranging from robust support for IMAP in a shared folder environment, to subtle touches which make mail browsing just a bit more pleasent of an experience. Almost everything that has been put into this program is the result of user requests, including my own.

Great effort has been made to support multiuser environments with support for system wide configurations, mailboxes and addressbooks; shared folders, etc. Many of these features require the use of IMAP mailboxes. When you build Postilion, you will also build an IMAP4rev1 server which you can experiment with. See the imap4 directory for details.

One of the main features of TkRat which has not survived the transition well at all is multilanguage interface support (TkRat had built-in support for English, Swedish and Italian). The reason for this is that I have changed much of the text, yet I do not know these languages for translation. Instructions are included for how to do translations, and I solicit any interested party to contribute their translations (please contact me before starting, just so I can coordinate efforts).

Mailing List!

There is now a mailing list for Postilion. To subscribe, send a message with the word "subscribe" in the body, to postilion-request@postilion.org.

What's on this page?

The goal of the work on Postilion is to capture the look and feel of Mail.app while retaining the rich capabilities of TkRat. This is almost entirely completed. For a tour of the interface, see the user interface

Here's a list of what remains to be done:

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Right here: postilion-current.tar.gz to get the full distribution of the latest version.

There is an i386 binary RPM available here , and a source RPM available here . They were assembled and are maintained by Ryan Weaver <ryanw@infohwy.com>

There is a Debian package available here . It was assembled and is maintained by Dale James Thompson <thompd1@texhoma.net>

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This program REQUIRES Tcl/Tk8.0p2 in order to function. If you do not have Tcl/Tk8.0p2 installed on your system, don't bother installing this software. If you want Tcl/Tk8.0p2, you may get it from:

http://www.scriptics.com/software/8.0.html

Postilion looks it's best when compiled and run with TkStep8.0.4 instead of the regular Tk. You can get TkStep8.0.4 from:

http://touchwood.ee.uts.edu.au/TkSTEP/TkSTEP.html

I strongly recommend that everyone upgrade to TkStep8.0.4 This is a much improved release with support for XPM, and TIFF image types, as well as DND support and other features.

Along with the TkStep distribution, you will also need the following libraries to get TkStep to work:

Postilion supports Jan Nijtmans' <nijtmans@nici.kun.nl> Img library to display multiple image types (JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, XPM, XBM, PDF...). I strongly recommend that you get this package, without it Postilion only provides viewing support for GIF images. You may get the Img library here:

ftp://ftp.neosoft.com/pub/tcl/sorted/packages-8.0/graphics/Img/1.1.4

You will find all necessary graphics libraries are included in the distribution. Postilion will work with any version of the library you choose to use.

I also recommend that you get the WMOffiX suite of applications, if you don't already have it, to allow for drag and drop operation.

I also strongly recommend the Fetchmail package for those using intermittent ppp conections to the mail service. This is by far a better approach than trying to get Postilion to handle an assortment of inboxes. You can get fetchmail here fetchmail ftp directory or from the home page.

Along the same lines, for those wishing to implement filtering beyond the message selection modes offered by Postilion, I recommend the use of the Procmail package. It comes standard with most Linux distributions, and can be gotten from MetaLab if you don't have it.

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This is Beta software, so use it at your own risk! The underlying program, TkRat, is very mature and stable. Since the only changes I'm making are to the user interface, no significant instabilities should be introduced into the system.

Please read all documentation before contacting me with bug reports.

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Latest release is 0.9.2 (Sat Apr 17 19:27:24 CDT 1999)

Some nagging bugs include:

• You get Unkown floating point error = 84
  This happens if you have LC_NUMERIC, LC_ALL or LANG set to a locale which does not have a dot ('.') as the decimal separator. The solution is to set the environment variable LC_NUMERIC to C before starting tkrat. For example by issuing setenv LC_ NUMERIC C; postilion.
• You get /usr/lib/libtcl8.0.so: undefined symbol: stat
  I do not know exactly what causes this error. It only occurs on some linux-systems when you use the binary rpm. It can be solved by recompiling postilion from source.

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