aMail version 2.1.2

User's Guide - First view

REQUIREMENTS

What you need to use this program.

A server, with perl. It was tested with Perl 5.004, or so, and should run on any Perl 5 (keep in mind that each module can specify minimum Perl versions as 5.001, 5.003, etc.).
A few perl modules are needed. The next list is the modules needed for aMail and the versions tested (you can download them from CPAN at http://www.cpan.,org):
- CGI (v2.36)
- CGI::Pretty (v1.03)
- Crypt::UnixCrypt (v1.0)
- Net::SMTP (v2.15)
- Net::POP3 (v2.21)
- MIME::Base64 (v2.14)
- Time::Local
- Fcntl
- Locale::Maketext (v0.18): This module also needs Lingua::EN::Inflect v1.86 or better.
- MIME-Tools 5.41: This module needs IO-stringy 1.22
All the modules listed are included in the distribution. To install them just change to the directory modules, change to each directory inside it and execute the next commands for each one :
Perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install
A web server that runs scripts, such as Apache (BTW, was tested on Apache 1.3 and IIS 4.0). If you have access to the error log files, you might have an easier time setting up.
Users who already have a POP and SMTP server they can use for email.
Some operating system skills to set up the directories and customize the program. Really you only need to create directories and edit one file.
If you have a Linux, OpenBSD or Windows NT box, we have high confidence that all the functions will work and the screen will look like we meant it to. But most recent version of browsers on most platforms should be sufficient to use most of the features and see enough. We want that aMail runs smooth on all platforms, no preferences have been set.
Perl skills, only if you'd like to fix bugs, add features, etc. Really, you do not need to know perl to use this mail program.

BROWSER and PLATFORM COMPATIBILITY

This email program was mainly written and tested on a Linux system (Red Hat 6.1) with Netscape 4.7x. There has been testing done on other systems (mainly OpenBSD and Windows NT), and we are moving towards multiplatform testing (if you want to participate on testing, drop us a line). Perl code runs the same on different platforms and generate the same html for the user, but there may be differences that we do not know about. Please let us know if you run into problems on other systems.

The position and placement of the frames looks great on my monitor using Linux. It doesn't look as good when it runs on windows98 with Netscape or IE. If you think some of the frames are the wrong size, the sizes can be changed by editing the file amail.pl.

There is a lot of javascript used in the HTML. We try to make everything cross-browser compatible, but it can't easily tested it all out. In the future more work on testing will be carried out on different systems (once more, if you want to participate on testing, drop us a line). Right now, HTML totally fails on very old browsers, it was successfully used on IE5 and Netscape (4.?) but the placement looks worse and some javascript fails. If you find javascript errors and know how to fix them, please let us know.

FEATURES

Following is a partial list of the features in this program. The number of features is constantly growing, and many features not present in this list are featured in the program.

Check email through POP3 account
Send email through SMTP account
View text and image attachments on web page
Save attachments to disk or to web site
E-mail composition:
- Add attachments to outgoing mail from upload directory or another e-mail
- Spell checking (using aspell or ispell)
Folders :
- See number of messages, number unread, folder size in kB.
- Add, rename, delete folders
- Delete all messages from folder, mark all messages in folder as read
Search : By folder, time, from, subject, body
Upload files : Personal area for managing incoming and outgoing attachments
Forward or Reply to messages with some or all attachments
Resend message without altering, just enter email address.
Address Book
- Allows Nick Name field for email address shortcuts
- Add to address book from incoming mail addresses (including other recipients.)
- Add addresses to mail from address book
- Make Groups from contact list or from an email
Change personal info or password
Security :
- Password access
- Session time-out
- Log out
User creates own account

NON-FEATURES

This program does not provide email addresses. In other words, when users set up an account, they are expected to already have email access. It would be easy to add something on during the account setup procedure to set up an email account too.

Not very good browser support. We are moving to support HTML 4.01 and CSS (Cascade Style Sheets)