Time-stamp: <2008-08-05 23:00:04 snl@cluefactory.com>
(c) 2006-2008 by Sean Levy <snl@cluefactory.com>. All Rights Reserved
==[ INTRODUCTION: TNG ]=====================================================
Flail is currently a pile of perl code that gives you a Unix command-line
interface to your mail. It's morally the equivalent of the old /bin/mail
program, but with perl integrated into it and a few more commands than the
bare minimum.
What I would like Flail to become is a toolkit for hackers to construct
their own MUAs easily, because that's effectively what I do. I hack and
tweak and more or less live in my MUA when it comes to email. I expect many
other hackers do as well. If hacking your mailer sounds like something you
might do before breakfast, then flail might be for you, and should become
increasingly so.
==[ YE OLDE INTRODUCTION ]==================================================
Flail is a flexible, lightweight, minimalist mailer with a command-line
interface. It is written in Perl, and is unabashedly designed to make Perl
hackers happy. Using flail it's a cinch to assemble useful bits of
mail-related Perl code into a fairly powerful mail reading and filtering
environment with no frills, GUIs or other such stuff.
At one point flail integrated seamlessly with GnuPG, but that code suffers
from some bit-rot at the moment. Nevertheless, it plays nice with external
programs, has a Unix-like command structure (adapted to email), and is
infinitely extensible. Better GnuPG support is coming, since I use
it every day (ASCII ARMOR UBER ALLES).
I use flail to read all of my mail, from several maildrops, with several
identities, all on my cruddy little laptop. All the power of Perl regexps,
etc. at my fingertips, in a situation where I often want it: filtering
through the goop that is email.
If you don't write code for a living, you might find flail off-putting. I
would like to do something about that as time goes on, but for now it is
what it is: a mailer shamelessly aimed at a target audience of people like
me.
You're out there, right?
Of course you are. I hear your voices in my head.
All the time.
==[ INSTALLATION ]==========================================================
(1) Build Makefile:
$ perl Makefile.PL
# OR: perhaps you prefer to keep stuff out of e.g. /usr/bin:
$ perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/usr/local INSTALLDIRS=site
If your system is missing any CPAN modules that we depend on, they will be
noted at this point. Go install them before continuing, then retry step 1.
(2) Install
$ make
$ sudo make install
Sadly there is no test suite yet. This sucks. The flail 1.x version will
have a real test suite.
In any event, that's it. You should be able to type:
$ flail
and get a prompt. To get a short usage message, try
$ flail -h
You can read the man page with either
$ flail -hv
or
$ man flail
Inside of flail, use the "help manual" command to see the same thing.
===[ Getting Those Missing Modules ]========================================
If step 1 complains about missing dependencies, your next course of action
is highly system-dependent.
Under OpenBSD and FreeBSD, you would probably start poking around under
the /usr/ports tree to find the correct p5-xxx ports to install. Do a "man
ports" to get more information. Under NetBSD, it's called pkgsrc, but is
much the same thing.
Under MacOSX, you might consider using fink to find the missing packages.
Under Linux, well, who knows. I've gotten flail working under Ubuntu just
by using 'sudo perl -MCPAN -e CPAN::shell' to track down the various modules
I require. Beware that you'll need a slew of -dev packages installed or
else libraries will be missing when you try to install modules from CPAN.
If all else fails, you may have to download the CPAN modules from cpan.org
itself and install them by hand. The installation instructions for your
typical CPAN module are almost identical to those for flail itself:
(1) Unpack the module
(2) Run: perl Makefile.PL
(3) If it complains about dependencies, go fulfill them using this
very same procedure
(4) When the deps are satisfied: make; sudo make install
==[ Examples ]==============================================================
Starting with version 0.2.3, some more elaborate examples come with
the distribution, and get installed in $PREFIX/share/examples/flail,
e.g. /usr/local/share/examples/flail on a typical BSD system. These
include scripts I use in my config to filter my email, etc. The
dot.flailrc also gets put in this directory, which you can adapt to
your own purposes as well. You can look in the eg/ subdir of the
distribution for these examples, too.
==[ A word on mail protocols: IMAP, POP3, ... ]=============================
Flail does have rudimentary but working IMAP and POP3 support. It has
worked for me against several IMAP and POP servers. That much said, I don't
really use any of that, so YMMV. Instead, I use fetchmail, maildrop and bmf
(plus some scripts included in eg/) to process my mail, and always read my
mail from the system mail spool on my laptop, where all of my mail ends up.
I highly recommend fetchmail as an alternative to actually talking to your
mail server from flail. He's taken care of pretty much anything that can
come up already, and fetchmail is beaten on constantly by hordes of people.
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$Id: README,v 1.4 2006/06/29 22:13:30 attila Exp $
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