Today we changed the name of Sylpheed-Claws to Claws Mail, as we move further from our Sylpheed origin. This will help those people who still mistakenly think that Sylpheed-Claws is the development or bleeding edge version of Sylpheed - which it ceased to be a long, long time ago - and will stop people referring to Claws as 'sylpheed', (which is something that began to bug me more than it should have) - it is even packaged as 'Sylpheed (claws version)' for one distro. There is little that is shared between the two anymore, they don't even share the same license: Sylpheed is (partly) LGPL whereas Claws Mail is, of course, GPL - there's nothing lesser about Claws Mail.

Goodbye Sylpheed-Claws, Hello Claws Mail.

The Sylpheed-Claws meeting took place in Bristol over the 14th and 15th of October, I'd been meaning to blog about it sooner, but I didn't for one reason and another. It was good to finally meet everyone, (not everyone, but Colin, Hoa, Ricardo, and wwp), since we have been engaging in all manner of discussions on IRC over the last few years. Everyone seemed in person like they have seemed on IRC, so there were no surprises.

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.

The latest release of GCstar, version 0.4, the collections manager, has support for importing Borrower information from Sylpheed-Claws' address book. Hopefully a later version will support mailing via Sylpheed-Claws also. Hmmm, perhaps I could find the time to create a patch to do that?

Yesterday Sylpheed-Claws version 2.2.1 was released. This was a bug-fix release from the stable branch, details of the fixes can be found in the release notes. As per usual, I updated the freshmeat.net project listing.

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!!

On 21-Nov-2001 Melvin Hadasht submitted a Mailing list support patch for Sylpheed-Claws 0.6.5claws25 on the old, dusty, now obsolete Sylpheed Patch Page. Looking back over the mailing list archives, it appears that it received virtually no response - I don't know why.

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!

Sylpheed-Claws 2.2.0 was released today, along with the accompanying Extra Plugins package. There were, of course, several improvements and fixes implemented, as can be seen from the Release Notes. My particular favourite was 'Fix returned quick search results when search term contains an underscore', not the most glamourous change perhaps, but the most practical for my uses.

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.

Two days ago, January 30th, saw the release of version 2.0.0 of Sylpheed-Claws; yesterday saw the release of the accompanying Extra Plugins package. A lot of extra Claws-hours went into the build up to this release, (as the Release Notes and ChangeLog demonstrate), due to the fondness for, and the relevance that is attached to, whole numbers. In addition to this, 16 translations were updated, most of them complete, and a new user manual was created. So, firm handshakes all round. 2.0.1 here we come.

I finally wrote a new perl script, filter_conv_new.pl, to convert Sylpheed's newer, (>= 0.9.99), type of filter rules to Sylpheed-Claws filtering rules. This complements the previous script that converted the old format Sylpheed rules.

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.

Since yesterday, (in SVN), the KIPI plugin SendImages has support for Sylpheed-Claws. This means that DigiKam, KimDaba, ShowImg, and GwenView can now all send images via Sylpheed-Claws. Sweet!

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

A week ago Colin added a plugin licence check to Sylpheed-Claws. Naturally enough, this checks that the plugin is licenced under the GPL and refuses to load a plugin that is not licenced under the GPL. (Inspired by the current kernel discussions and patches around the use of EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(), for example, see here, here, and here.)

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…' *