LINUXUSER Claws Mail FLEXIBLECustomize your mail environment with theCLAWS light and powerful Claws Mail

Sharpen your claws on this powerful and highly configurable email client. BY PAUL MANGAN

laws Mail [1] started in early Claws Mail provides message filtering, the left side; the message list appears in 2001 as Sylpheed-Claws, the de- as well as templates, tags, support for the top half of the screen above the cur- Cvelopment version of Sylpheed GnuPG, RSS feed reading, HTML render- rent message, and the QuickSearch bar [2]. Sylpheed-Claws provided a testbed ing, calendaring, and more. resides beneath the messages. (Claws for a handful of enthusiastic Sylpheed Mail also offers four other layouts to suit contributors and users to test patches. Getting Started different tastes and screen sizes.) Because many stable and useful features When you run Claws Mail for the first were not finding their way into Syl- time, the setup wizard provides a short Toolbar pheed, Sylpheed-Claws evolved on its series of dialogs for setting up a POP, The default toolbar layout allows quick own and was later renamed Claws Mail. IMAP, or Local account. If you have pre- access to all of the common operations, A small team of enthusiastic program- viously used Sylpheed, the wizard will such as fetching, sending, composing, mers continues to develop Claws Mail, import your settings. forwarding, and replying to messages. which has grown into a robust, user- The wizard also includes a special The status bar, which runs along the friendly email client. Template feature (described later in this bottom of the window, shows informa- Claws Mail is a standards-compliant, article) that system administrators can tion about currently running processes, desktop-neutral email client and news- use for rapid deployment. such as mail retrieval and filtering. But- reader with a GTK+ interface [3] re- Users will recognize the default look tons for switching between online and leased under the GPL license. This light- of the main window (Figure 1), which is offline modes, as well as an account weight mail reader is highly configurable fairly typical for email clients. The menu selector, are on the right, along with an and offers some unique and powerful bar at the top displays Claws Mail func- attachment column that lets users easily customization features. tions. Folders are shown in a column on access message attachments. LennyLT, photocase.com

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Examples of Actions

This action decodes uuencoded mes- sages with the xdeview decoder. If an encoded file is split into multiple mes- sages, the action decodes them all:

Menu Name: UUdeview Command Line: xdeview %F& This action pipes the Subject header value to a script:

Menu Name: Get Subject Command Line: grep "^Subject:U \ " %f | cut -d\ -f 2-| U script.sh This action performs a whois lookup on the selected text

Menu Name: whois Command Line: | whois '%s'

Figure 1: The Claws Mail Main Window. gram to retrieve mail, configure colors and fonts, select an icon theme, custom- To fetch new messages, click the Get You can use an external editor to ize the toolbars, set up external applica- Mail button on the toolbar. Claws lets compose messages and insert text files tions such as a web browser, configure you check incoming messages for spam directly into the body of a message. plugins, and much more. with one of the anti-spam plugins, and Each folder also has a smaller set of you can filter and sort the messages into Configuring Claws Mail options, known as Properties, that over- subfolders. Claws Mail offers a number of options rule preferences set elsewhere. This fea- If you would rather not click a button for configuring preferences and custom- ture is particularly useful if you use fil- to check your mail, you can configure izing the interface. The Account Prefer- tering to organize a large collection of Claws to fetch your messages automati- ences dialog lets the user define basic in- messages into many folders. A folder can cally. Use one of the notification plugins formation such as email addresses, sig- be associated with a default template, to configure automatic notification if a natures, incoming and outgoing server default dictionary, or a default account. new messages arrives. The Claws com- names, and ports. You can also configure mand interface also lets you execute an security parameters, such as SSL set- Filtering arbitrary command when a message ar- tings, SMTP authentication options, and Claws Mail comes with a filtering engine rives, thus providing unlimited options GnuPG keys. that enables matching based on any part for custom processing. The Common Preferences dialog offers of a received message. You can filter other configuration options, with which Composing you can choose to use an external pro- Listing 1: A Reply Template Composing a new mes- 01 On %date sage is as simple as click- ing the Compose button 02 %from wrote: on the toolbar. The mes- 03 sage composer is 04 %quoted_msg_no_sig equipped with spell 05 checking, wrapping, and an undo feature. Actions 06 %cursor and templates (described 07 later in this article) pro- 08 Regards vide additional possibili- 09 ties for creating and pro- cessing messages. Claws 10 Paul also offers a variety of pri- 11 vacy options, as well as a 12 -- return receipt feature and Figure 2: The Filtering Condition window lets you specify 13 |p{fortune} priority settings. filtering criteria.

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messages as they arrive or later. A filter- resembles the stan- ing rule consists of a condition or several dard introduction that conditions that a message must match often accompanies a (Figure 2), and one or more actions, message reply. Claws which are operations that are carried out Mail offers almost on a matching message. A message can, total flexibility to cus- for example, be matched by any header, tomize the text and any phrase in the body, an attachment format. In this case, type, a color label, whether the address the reply includes the is found in the address book, and so on. name of the respon- dent (Regards, Paul) Actions as well as a random Actions extend the possibilities of Claws Unix-style fortune at Mail, enabling the full power of the Unix the end of the mes- Figure 3: Manage your contacts with the Claws Mail address book. command line for processing mail. A sage. user can decode uuencoded messages, With the address book, you also can reformat message text using external Address Book pre-fill fields used in templates. Reading tools such as Par, or pass text selections The Claws Mail address book holds in- and writing to LDAP servers and vCards to external tools – the only limit is the formation about contacts (Figure 3). The is supported, and jPilot synchronization user’s imagination. user can configure a custom attributes is supported. The actions that are configured by list, allowing quick definition of impor- the user are accessible from the /Tools/ tant fields. QuickSearch Actions/... menus of both the main and The data held in the address book can Claws Mail offers other useful features, Compose windows. See the box titled be used for automatic address comple- such as the powerful QuickSearch tool, “Examples of Actions” for a sample of tion in the Compose window. Address which allows searching through folders some Claws Mail actions. book data can be used with anti-spam and sub-folders based on any criteria. plugins and whitelisting tools. QuickSearch can search in standard Processing headers, but it also has an Extended Claws also includes a feature called Setup Wizard for Sys mode, which enlists the full power of processing that is similar to filtering. Admins the filtering engine. Processing rules are attached to a folder System administrators can create a wiz- and can be run automatically when en- Conclusion ard configuration template with the cor- tering the folder. Claws also supports user-defined hot- rect values entered in the setup wizard, so users only need to enter their pass- keys and provides good mailing list sup- Templates words. Using the configuration tem- port. Several operations are available The Claws Mail’s template feature lets plate, the system administrator can de- from the command line that allow inter- you predefine templates for faster and fine the server addresses, add LDAP action with external applications, such easier composition. You can use tem- servers or people to the address book, as web browsers or file managers. More plates to fill the message headers or add filtering rules, and load plugins. than 20 plugins support features such as body with static or dynamic content. To set up a configuration template: RSS reading, PDF display, and personal This predefined content can include 1. Start Claws Mail with a user who does and public calendaring. symbols and settings for date elements, not have a ~/.claws-mail directory, If you like a lot of control over your tags, dictionaries, account properties, click through the wizard without en- email, and you’re looking for a powerful and information held in the address tering any settings, and then use the application that is light on resources, book. Commands within templates let Save button to exit the wizard. give Claws Mail a try. ■ you automatically insert files or program 2. Quit Claws Mail. output into a message. 3. Edit the newly created wizard tem- INFO The reply template shown in Listing 1 plate file ~/.claws-mail/accountrc.tmpl [1] Claws Mail: shows a familiar example. This template and save it. The template file is fully http:// www. claws-mail. org commented with instructions and [2] Sylpheed: Changing to Claws Mail details about each entry. http:// sylpheed. sraoss. jp/ en/ Claws Mail uses MH mailboxes, which 4. Delete both ~/.claws-mail/accountrc [3] GTK+, the GIMP Tool Kit: means it can share mailboxes with other and ~/.claws-mail/folderlist.xml, then http:// www. gtk. org MUAs, such as Mutt. Claws also comes recursively copy the .claws-mail direc- [4] Claws Mail User Manual: http:// www. with support for the MBOX format. The tory to /etc/skel/. If Claws Mail will use claws-mail. org/ documentation. php Tools page of the Claws Mail website MH folders, then also copy the Mail [5] Claws Mail plugins: http:// www. provides various scripts for converting directory to /etc/skel/. Then chown claws-mail. org/ plugins. php mailboxes, address books, and filtering both these directories in /etc/skel/ to [6] Claws Mail themes: http:// www. rules from other email applications. root:root. claws-mail. org/ themes. php

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