$Id: README,v 1.4 2001/08/19 18:03:03 joern Exp $ NAME JaM - Just a Mailer SYNOPSIS bin/jam.pl DESCRIPTION The working title for this piece of software is: "Highly Secure Personal Free Highspeed Archiving Gtk Perl Mailer Against Micro$oftism" which describes its purpose in a nutshell. But, primarily, it is: Just a Mailer. ;) It is designed exactly for Unix users like me. If other Unix users at least like reading mail my way, they may like this program, too ;) JaM handles big mail folders, has a powerful filter engine and a lean and quick Gtk+ GUI. It uses a MySQL database to store its data, which makes JaM capable of handling huge mail folders very quickly. If you're using Netscape Messenger and are fed up with its bugs, JaM is for you, because it can import your mail from the Netscape nsmail folder. Generally JaM is not designed to have any feature a mail client possibly may have! PREREQUISITES 1. An up and running MySQL database Currently only MySQL is supported as the storage backend. Attaching other RDMBS is possible but not currently realized. 2. Gtk+ version 1.2 or better JaM uses the Gtk+ toolkit for its gui. 3. html2ps html2ps is used for printing mails. 4. A bunch of Perl modules: DBI DBD::mysql Date::Manip Gtk Gtk::HTML MIME::Entity MIME::Parser MIME::Types MIME::WordDecoder Net::POP3 Net::SMTP Storable Unicode::String I recommend using the powerfull CPAN module to install these modules automatically. JaM ships with a CPAN Bundle file which contains the modules listed above, so installation of these may be as easy as to write: # perl -MCPAN -Ilib -e "install Bundle::JaM" after extracting the JaM archive and changing to the created installation directory. Unfortunately the DBD::MySQL CPAN distribution is currently experimental, so the Bundle has to point explicitely to the stable Msql-Mysql-modules distribution, what makes CPAN automatic version check fail. If you repeatedly install the JaM Bundle CPAN will always install DBD::MySQL, although it is installed already. You can interrupt via Ctrl+C when the installer asks you which drivers should be installed. Also installation of Gtk::HTML isn't easy, because it needs a lot of installed libraries. I know, that makes satisfying JaM's prerequisites a really hard task. But such is life, folks ;) SuSE 7.2 provides all needed libraries, just struggle arround with YaST a bit, if you're a lucky SuSE 7.2 owner ;) JaM will crash unpredictable if any of the needed modules are missing. There is no startup check routine, because some modules are loaded at runtime when needed. INSTALLATION There is no installation program. Just extract the archive wherever you want, eg. in /usr/local, and set a symlink to the version you want to use (the JaM archive creates a directory which includes the version number): # cd /usr/local # tar xfz /tmp/JaM-x.xx.tar.gz # ln -s JaM-x.xx/ JaM Install needed Perl modules, if not already done: # cd JaM # perl -MCPAN -Ilib -e "install Bundle::JaM" Now you can start JaM using: /usr/local/JaM/bin/jam.pl You can set a symlink inside a common bin directory. JaM find its installation directory automatically. # cd /usr/local/bin # ln -s /usr/local/JaM/bin/jam.pl . On first startup JaM recognizes, that the MySQL database needs to be initialized. It asks you some questions and will create the database for you. A help text will guide you through this. It then creates a .JaMrc file inside the users home directory, which contains the MySQL connection information. All other files of JaM did not to be writable by the user, so you can install JaM in a read only system area. Multiuser access is no problem at all. You also may set the JAMRC environment variable pointing to another .JaMrc file. This way multiple database instances per user are supported. UPDATING TO NEWER VERSION Updating is as easy as installing. Just extract the archive where you installed JaM and recreate the symlink, so that the new directory will be used. On next startup JaM will check your database schema version. If the schema needs to be updated, JaM suggests you to make a backup of your MySQL database. Then it can update the schema automatically. Update across several versions of JaM is supported. AUTHOR Joern Reder COPYRIGHT Copyright (C) 2001 by Joern Reder, All Rights Reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. SEE ALSO perl(1).