Further details and downloads can be found on the Unofficial Claws Mail ClamAV™ Plugin page.

Since google launched gmail IMAP the Claws Mail development team (and several Claws Mail users) seem to have devoted a proportionately high amount of time to answering questions and working around problems that arise through gmail's IMAP implementation. The same must surely be true of other open source teams. How many wasted man-hours must that add up to through all the different development teams and how many more useful things could have been achieved in that time? How far will they set things back?

Don't believe the hype!

    * New features
          o The vertical 3-paned view mode was added.
          o The feature to save SSL peer certificate was added.
          o The option 'Treat HTML only message as attachment' was
            added.
          o The feature to confirm missing attachments was added.
          o The feature to confirm recipients before sending was added.

Why is this amusing? It is amusing because Claws Mail, (née Sylpheed-Claws), started life as the development branch of Sylpheed, where new features could be added, tested and improved before going into the Sylpheed main branch — at least, that was the agreement which was reached and the agreement which instigated the start of the Sylpheed-Claws project — in order to make Sylpheed better rather than to make a better Sylpheed. To cut a long story short, although the movement of code from Claws to Sylpheed was happening early in the project, (Actions, Colour Labels and Templates originated in Claws, for example), this movement slowed and then ground to a halt. We had code and features in Claws that were well-tested and stable and yet the migration to Sylpheed was not happening, and little or no reason was communicated as to why this stagnation was occurring. Eventually it became obvious, without ever being said, that the features/code already written in Claws were not ever going to get into Sylpheed, and that Sylpheed was a one-man-band, a one-party system, as it were. So, naturally, the Claws Mail team decided to fork the project and go in its own direction. We started out with the aim to make Sylpheed better, and ended up with a better Sylpheed.

o The vertical 3-paned view mode was added.

In Claws Mail since version 2.8.0 (February 2007). Claws Mail also has additional 'Wide message', 'Wide message list' and 'Small screen' layouts.

o The feature to save SSL peer certificate was added.

In Claws Mail since version 0.8.5claws (October 2002)

o The option 'Treat HTML only message as attachment' was added.

With Claws Mail's clearer display/layout, an option such as this is unnecessary and irrelevant.

o The feature to confirm missing attachments was added.

Added as a plugin for Claws Mail in November 2006.

o The feature to confirm recipients before sending was added.

This feature is not in Claws Mail, but I wonder who actually needs a feature like this?

Coming up: An exhaustive list of the differences between Claws Mail and Sylpheed. (See what features Sylpheed might have in 5 years!!)

It is available from the Unofficial Claws Mail ClamAV™ Plugin page here on this blog.

This latest release of the plugin will build against the ClamAV™ 0.93 (libclamav 4:1:0) release and all older versions, once it is patched, of course. The necessary patch is also available from that page.

I will continue to maintain this unofficial plugin for at least as long as I am using the plugin.

See the page for more details.

The article is now written and published in issue 90 and can be downloaded in PDF format via this page.

Too bad about the seagull feet, I would have preferred to see The Manticore, a "gigantic red lion with a human face and three rows of teeth [whose] nails are twisted into talons, like drills and […] teeth are cut like those of a saw"^[1], or Humbaba, who "had the paws of a lion and a body covered with horny scales; his feet had the claws of a vulture, and on his head were the horns of a wild bull".^[1]

[1] Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings

Now, a quick recap on what I'm talking about:

• Claws Mail upgraded its license from "GPLv2 or later" to "GPLv3 or later".
• The Claws Mail team were alerted to the licensing problem, (a GPLv3+ app cannot link to a GPLv2-only library), by Debian Bug Report 462963.
• The Claws Mail team implemented what they thought was a possible solution: Making the ClamAV™ plugin a standalone plugin instead of it being part of the main Claws Mail package and downgrading the plugin's license to GPLv2+, (at the agreement of all the authors of the new code that has been added since the change to GPLv3+, which was just Colin).
• In the meantime the Claws Mail team sought confirmation of their solution from the Software Freedom Law Center and were informed that the proposed solution was not legally distributable.
• The Claws Mail team dropped the ClamAV™ plugin.

Some interesting points to note: When the ClamAV™ plugin was first released, libclamav was released under a 'GPLv2 or later' license. The 'or later' clause was first dropped in ClamAV™ version 0.91rc1, (libclamav version 2:4:0), which was released on the 30th May 2007. On the 17th August 2007 it was announced that SourceFire^® had acquired ClamAV™. One can clearly see that there could be a connection here, and imagine that discussions between the ClamAV™ developers and SourceFire^® had been taking place. Then one may recall that Snort^®, the network intrusion detection system, was also acquired by SourceFire^® and it also downgraded its license to GPLv2-only — and not without some controversy; for example, see this post, Snort license changes revisited, on the Inliniac blog.

In my opinion, a license change is an important thing, particularly a downgrade in the licensing of a library, which could impact on several other projects. But, when looking at the NEWS and README files of ClamAV™ version 0.91rc1 there is nothing to be found about the license change, which seems a little strange. Even stranger is that the ChangeLog doesn't mention it either! That's a bizarre oversight by whoever writes those files.

Downgrade Claws Mail? Are you crazy?

A few Claws Mail users, having upgraded without taking the time to read the release notes, and suddenly finding themselves without a ClamAV™ plugin, and panicking, (well, possibly panicking), have asked how to downgrade Claws Mail so that they can get the plugin back.

It is possible to call clamscan, clamd, or clamdscan using Filtering or Actions as an alternative, for example:

Filtering:
Filtering condition: ~test "clamscan --quiet %F"
Action:              move "#mh/Mail/trash"

Action:
Menu Name:    clamscan
Command Line: clamscan -i '%p'

The best solution, it seems to me, would be for these users to keep a copy of the ClamAV™ plugin and build it themselves — as long as they do not distribute their copy of the source code they would be within the bounds of the law, as the problem here is only the distribution of source code under incompatible licenses, not in personal use.

Here is a copy of the ClamAV™ plugin source code which has been patched so that it will only build with libclamav version 2:3:0 or earlier, that is, the last version of libclamav to be released with a 'GPLv2 or later' license, making it legal to distribute. There is nothing stopping you from taking this code and patching your own local copy so that the restriction is lifted, the only caveat is that you must not distribute your locally patched copy.

You could use a patch like this and then run ./autogen.sh:

--- configure.ac        2008-02-28 10:19:45.000000000 +0000
+++ configure.ac.orig   2008-02-29 10:41:51.000000000 +0000
@@ -89,7 +89,7 @@
 AC_SUBST(GTK_CFLAGS)
 AC_SUBST(GTK_LIBS)

-PKG_CHECK_MODULES(CLAMAV, libclamav < = 2:3:0)
+PKG_CHECK_MODULES(CLAMAV, libclamav)
 AC_SUBST(CLAMAV_CFLAGS)
 AC_SUBST(CLAMAV_LIBS)

Claws Mail ClamAV™ Plugin version 3.3cvs3: clamav-plugin-3.3cvs3.tar.gz (requires libclamav <= 2:3:0)

UPDATE: Go to the Unofficial Claws Mail ClamAV™ Plugin page for the latest version.

It seems that Sourcefire^®, the company who employ the core ClamAV™ developers, wish all the ClamAV™ code to be published under GPLv2 only, and this is Incompatible™ with the GPLv3+ license that Claws Mail has.

You might Think™ that it would make Sense™ for a library to be licensed under 'GPLv2 or any later version', but apparently not. So, Goodbye To ClamAv™. Now the Bogofilter Plugin will have to catch all the Spam™ for me, as, Essentially™, that was what the ClamAV™ plugin was doing for Me™.

Of course, being a member of the Claws Mail development team, I am particularly, (perhaps only), interested in what he has to say regarding Claws Mail, (or The Mail Claw, as the article puts it, sic), but, in passing, I'll point out the first error that I noticed: In the opening, introductory paragraphs he says, 'Some computer users also like to encrypt messages to provide protection against sniffing or to have a digital signature to validate the sender.' Of course, a digital signature does not validate the sender, what it does is show that the signed content has not be tampered with en route. Not a good start. Then we soon realise that the author's preferred application is KMail, his preferred desktop environment is KDE, and his preferred distro is SuSE. Rather than a fair, unbiased review, we get one very much based upon the reviewer's personal preferences. His opinion is the benchmark.

The author doesn't use Claws Mail, and it seems that he fired it up just for the purposes of the article. Unfortunately, it is obvious that he didn't allow himself the time to really explore it and rushed the whole thing. In my opinion, this is not really desirable behaviour from journalism, not for the magazine itself, who paid him for the article and rely upon their journalists for quality writing, and not for the readers and purchasers of the magazine who should get something better in exchange for their money.

So, what's wrong with the information that is given?

• "When looking for Claws Mail packages, make sure you do not confuse them with Sylpheed packages."
This is like saying, when looking for an application do not confuse it with another application that has a different name. Is that stupid or what??
The article actually does its best to engender this confusion. In the title it says 'Claws Mail', when we reach the section about Claws Mail it gives the heading 'The Mail Claw', then it starts by talking about Sylpheed. Next the Overview box has the title 'Sylpheed Claws Overview'. Mirko seems confused, indeed.

• "For example, SUSE users can turn to Packman for packages. Besides the claws-mail package, you will also need to install claws-mail-extra-plugins."
Or they could use the official repository. You don't need to install the extra-plugins package, there's no literal need for this — it depends upon whether you want the extra functionality that these extra-plugins provide. The main plugins, distributed with the Claws Mail source tarball, are actually part of the Claws Mail SuSE RPM package.

• "Figure 10: Claws Mail provides a lean alternative to the three Linux mail global players."
Nothing wrong with the caption, but the image it accompanies shows that Mirko has used his KMail maildir mailbox for Claws Mail. Because of this, each folder has 'cur', 'new' and 'tmp' subfolders; Also because of this, it shows Claws Mail's standard inbox/sent/drafts/queue/trash folders and also normal folders with the names 'drafts', 'outbox', and 'sent_mail'.

• "Figure 12: Claws Mail has much ground to gain. The current version has only rudimentary functionality."
This caption is completely misleading. It actually accompanies an image of an address book dialogue. I believe that the intention was to refer to the address book as having 'rudimentary functionality' but that is not what it says. If you've used Claws Mail then you will know that it does not have 'only rudimentary functionality'.

• "Claws Mail lacks a usable address book, simple integration of GPG, and a spam filter."
Not true! Claws Mail's address book is not as fully-featured as others, but this does not make it 'unusable', this is just nonsense!
GPG integration is as simple as using the GUI to load the plugins, there's nothing too complicated in that it seems to me. Thunderbird needs an Extension for GPG support, but I don't see the same criticism leveled at Thunderbird in this article.
Lacks a spam filter? Here the author is unaware of what he wrote just before, '…there are plugins for integrating SpamAssassin…', he also neglects to mention the other spam filter, the Bogofilter plugin.

• The Overview boxes
Mailing Lists
KMail gets 5/5, Claws Mail gets 3/5.
Claws Mail has good mailing list support. I believe that, in his rush to finish his article, the author didn't even discover Claws Mail's mailing list support. I believe that Claws Mail's mailing list is at least as powerful as Kmail's and, at the same time, is more flexible.
Filtering
KMail gets 5/5, Thunderbird gets 5/5, Claws Mail gets 4/5
Having written filter conversion scripts, I know that there are things that Claws Mail can do in its filtering that the other two cannot.
Security GPG/ HTML
Claws Mail 2/5
An unreasonably low score. Claws Mail supports PGP/MIME, PGP/Inline, S/MIME; it also has an anti-virus plugin, using Clam AntiVirus; it has anti-phishing support built in; the two HTML viewer plugins do not load remote content by default. What more do you want??
Spam filter
Claws Mail 3/5
Claws Mail offers a choice of either SpamAssassin or Bogofilter to deal with spam. They can use address book whitelisting, can be trained via toolbar buttons or menu items, can deal with 'unsure' mails, the SpamAssassin plugin can use a remotely running SpamAssassin, can be configured in a number of ways. Claws Mail also offers the SpamReport plugin to report spam to central databases.

• "The difference between the Create Filter Rule and Create Processing Rule in the drop-down list is not entirely apparent. Both take you to the same dialog."
Wrong! They take you to similar dialogues, but the not the same dialogue. The difference between Filtering and Processing is well documented, in the manual and FAQ, etc. The reviewer should RTFM!

• "[Claws Mail] also lacks a couple of functions, such as a tray icon (which you can download as a plugin.)"
Evolution also requires a plugin for the trayicon, but this wasn't mentioned.

The author thinks that when functions are provided by plugins this means the app lacks those functions. Would he say, for example, that the audio player Audacious is useless and can't play any audio because those features are provided by plugins?

The author completely fails to mention the powerful Claws Mail Actions feature.

I could continue with this blog post but I feel that I've already spent more time on this than the author did on his article.

Could there be any morals to draw from this post?
Don't believe what you read?
Don't buy Linux Magazine, its articles are poorly researched?

Clearly, I am disappointed by this slack and lazy journalism.

As the n800 runs GNU/Linux and a modified Debian, using it is fun and easy. I don't have a wi-fi connection, so it's not as much fun as is it might be; I have to download packages on my main PC and then copy them onto the n800 via USB, so it's not quite as easy either. I wanted to upgrade the firmware, as you do when you get a new device such as this, but it was no-go, just forever waiting at "Suitable USB device not found, waiting". I guess that the device-mapping has changed since flasher-3.0 was written, but I'm still not sure. Anyway, this sort of stuff doesn't stand in my way.

Here are a few screenshots (click the image for a larger version)

Claws Mail XTerm desktop

Having one of these devices is a big incentive to actually spend a little more time looking at the maemo bug reports and feature requests, and to spend time contributing to Jean-Luc Biord's Maemo port, but not to the detriment of Claws Mail as a desktop app, that will retain the main focus.

Let the hacking commence!

Claws Mail Maemo port: http://www.claws-mail.org/maemo/
Claws Mail at the Maemo Garage: https://garage.maemo.org/projects/claws-mail
Jean-Luc Biord's page at maemopeople.org: http://www.maemopeople.org/index.php/jlbrd/

The Claws Mail 2.6.1 thread on alt.comp.freeware is full of it. Susan Bugher writes of Claws Mail/Sylpheed-Claws and Sylpheed, "I've been trying to sort out the current situation with these apps", but apparently didn't think of asking anyone on the Claws Mail development team. "It used to be that both Sylpheed and Sylpheed-Claws could be found at: http://sylpheed-claws.sourceforge.net/ …"

The truth is that Sylpheed could never be found at http://sylpheed-claws.sourceforge.net; the Sylpheed tarballs were, for a short while, being mirrored on SF, but they were always hidden and couldn't be viewed on the Files Page. This stopped when Claws Mail and Sylpheed went their separate ways.

"The Claws team seems to have taken over at SF", she continues.

More than that, the Claws team didn't recently take over at SF, but started the whole Sylpheed-Claws thing at SF and were in charge from day one.

"Thanks, Susan, for finding this out", says Jeffrey Needle, funnily enough.

Later in the thread Jeffrey Needle says, "I think they're selling short by not supporting Windows, but that's their choice." The use of stocks and shares terminology is an interesting one, since the whole freeware thing is about free as in free beer, and shows their lack of understanding of or lack of respect for free as in freedom. Free beer is great, but in the morning you find that you're still surrounded by the same old shit, and that hangover doesn't make it any better. Besides, we do our bit to help make things easier for the guys over at the gpg4win project.

Goodbye Sylpheed-Claws, Hello Claws Mail.

It wasn't much of a geek meeting, although we did discuss Sylpheed-Claws for some of the time, but was more of a social gathering. We drank cider in the hotel room, (the cider wasn't finished despite me providing the best cider in the world), and then went to a pub in St Nicholas's Market, walking through the throngs of drunken revellers, much to wwp's 'delight'. Also taking in a round of pizzas – wwp's was the one with the pepper! (say 'When'!) Colin walked around with his camera around his neck, but fortunately no-one decided to try to steal it!

The following day we visited the sites, on foot. The distance that we walked was quite a bit further than I had remembered it being, everyone undertook it with a smile but I'm sure I was being secretly cursed for making everyone endure such a distance!

All things considered, I'd have to say that the meeting came to an end too quickly, but, of course, there's always the possibility of another meeting in the future. It was a pleasure to meet you guys.

Today we discovered (and fixed) a failing in the URI check which protects against phishing attacks, and, feeling that this was nasty enough, we promptly released version 2.2.2, (release notes). So I duly updated the freshmeat.net project page again. Shortly afterwards I received a mail from freshmeat saying, 'Since this project has had a front page announcement within the last few days, this second release will not appear on the front page'. We're too fresh for freshmeat!!

Recently, on the freenode #sylpheed channel, cromo drew attention to that patch and asked how easy it would be to modify it to the current code. Well, it's now in CVS, version 2.2.0cvs2.

Thanks Melvin!

Releaseforge made the job easier, as usual, with the added bonus that my (simple, one-liner) patch was recently accepted, (Releaseforge version 0.9.9).

Other recent news on the Sylpheed-Claws project includes the replacement of the phpwiki version of the Claws FAQ with a MediaWiki version. This conversion was helped in part by the PHPWiki to MediaWiki online syntax converter, which got the conversion started and cut down on some of the manual editing that was necessary.

The Gnomaws theme was also updated, (the Spam/Ham icons were added), and made available from the the Themes page. This theme is the work of Aleksandar Urošević.

Download: http://www.claws-mail.org/tools/sylpheed-filter_conv_new.tar.gz

Usage: perl filter_conv_new.pl

Requirement: XML::SimpleObject

The script looks for filter.xml, the file that holds Sylpheed's filter rules, first in '~/.sylpheed-2.0', the config directory of Sylpheed >= 2.0.0, failing that, it looks in the old config directory, '~/.sylpheed', and converts all enabled rules, writing its output to '~/[CLAWS CONFIG DIR]/matcherrc' , (the script determines the location of Claws' config directory). Only those rules that are enabled in Sylpheed are converted, as, in Sylpheed-Claws, all rules are enabled at all times. I thought about adding an option to enable the conversion of disabled rules, but decided to leave it out, at least for now.

It passed all my tests, and seems to manage with any filter rule that Sylpheed can throw at it, so that's that: finis!

UPDATE
Since Claws Mail (formerly Sylpheed-Claws) allowed disabling of filter rules this script was updated to support enabled/disabled rule conversion. The same URL above will get you the updated script.

Thanks goes to Tom Albers for modifying and committing my patch.

This was a small code addition but not an insignificant one: it is a political act that makes a clear statement. It is a statement with which I am in full agreement. In my opinion, too often free open source software is leaning too heavily on the 'apologetic' when declaring its free status. From the LGPL downwards, this watering-down is not a good thing and will only lead to free software being assimilated into the proprietary, closed sourced, closed minded software industry, thus losing any power of change that it currently seeks to entertain. It is a submissive stance whose only lasting effect will be in the act of declaring its submissiveness. This needs to stop. Free software is not yet a fire, it is merely a spark, but already some are stepping outside to help fetch the water to put it out, some are swapping their freedoms for nothing in return. It is but a speck in the blackness yet, sad as it is, we cling to it as there is so little else to cling to. As is said, '…so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so…' *

I registered the project, and added the first listing, at OpenUsability.org. Having the project listed there is intended to "serve as a collaboration platform for Sylpheed-Claws developers and OpenUsability experts", whether this will bear fruit remains to be seen. I am not sure who these 'usability experts' are, or whether they have anything of worth, (or even just anything), to add to the project. Theoretically, it could be a worthwhile exercise…

I also created a separate project at freshmeat for new release listings. Mainly so we can clearly emphasise that Claws is still GPL, whereas main is now LGPL, and also to help dispel the myth that Claws is Sylpheed-Testing.

I have set up a mailing list to help the coordination effort, sylpheed-claws-doc-writers, open to anyone who wants to lend their time. Go subscribe now!

The Claws site has been redesigned in the style of Planet Sylpheed. It was a long time coming, but now it is there – and not a tooth or toothbrush in sight. It may still need a little tweaking. Next will be updated content.

An image of the old design is included here for the incomplete historian.

These packages have been created by Ricardo and are the very same Claws packages that will make it into the official repository. They are Claws 1.9.13 and 1.0.5. An unofficial libetpan 0.38 package has also been created by Ricardo, especially for Claws 1.9.13, this package, however, will not reach the official debian repository as Ricardo is not the libetpan maintainer for Debian.

    deb http://claws.sylpheed.org/debian/ unstable main
    deb-src http://claws.sylpheed.org/debian/ unstable main

The release process went along nice and quickly once the notes and packages were created, thanks to ReleaseForge, which allowed me to create the release and submit the SF news item in what seemed at least half the time it would have taken using SF's laborious FRS , just beating release day SF downtime by a matter of minutes.

The SF downtime did bite, however, during the Freshmeat announcement submission as Freshmeat failed to verify, first, the ChangeLog url and then the CVS tree url. After a few hours of staying away it was fine, of course.

ReleaseForge's freshmeat announcement support failed again with the message, "Unable to login to Freshmeat. Please verify your username and password". I'm quite sure, though, that this has nothing to do with names or passwords, and that the real problem stems from the fact that there is no project on Freshmeat called 'Sylpheed-Claws', as Sylpheed-Claws, (on Freshmeat), is a branch of the Sylpheed Freshmeat project, and that is more than ReleaseForge can cope with. However, I don't want to do ReleaseForge down, as its support for the SF FRS is surely every SF project admin's dream.

Currently listening to: Donald Byrd, "The Emperor" (Ethiopian Knights)

Anyway, the releases took some time to put together, (as so much has changed, (meaning that the release notes take that much longer to compile)), but the process was speeded up a little towards the end by my use of ReleaseForge, (an alternative to the SourceForge File Release System (FRS)). I didn't use its full power, (and, besides, it failed for the 1.9.12 release due to some bad character malarkey in the ChangeLog, (a problem that I didn't even take a note about, so close was I to the goal at the time, that I couldn't delay any longer to (try to) resolve problems), but it worked for 1.0.5), and I just used it to complete the SourceForge file release page, (which is great in itself, as (having 6 files per release) I avoided having to update the page (almost) countless times). I will trial the SF news submission next time around. Incidently, I couldn't trial the Freshmeat announcement feature, as it wouldn't accept my username or password, so I did that in the regular fashion. Still, I think this will prove useful, and I'll continue to use it.