Moving from Thunderbird to Claws Mail is getting easier. Now, in addition to the mailbox conversion script, (tbird2claws.py), we have added a script that converts Thunderbird filtering rules to Claws Mail filtering rules, thunderbird-filters-convertor.pl. So, in next to no time you can start a leaner, meaner email experience.

Component: Sidebar Widgets Plugin, version 1.0.20060711
Patch: SidebarWidgets_no-title-means-no-header_plus_rem-wordpress.com-meta-link.patch
Apply this patch in the /wp-content/plugins/widgets/ directory.
Description: This patch does 2 things:
1. It affects the Text widgets, removing the empty header, (<h2 class="widgettitle">&nbsp;</h2>), that is added to a text widget that has no title. The empty header is an annoyance because it adds an empty space where no space is needed.
2. It affects the Meta widget, removing the link to wordpress.com. The link is unnecessary.

Component: WordPress core, version 2.1
Patch: WordPress-2.1_show_blogroll_descriptions.patch
Apply this patch in the /wp-includes/ directory.
Description: The default behaviour for the blogroll links display in WordPress 2.1, (using the Links widget of Sidebar Widgets Plugin, version 1.0.20060711), is to not show the link descriptions, which is the opposite behaviour of previous versions of WordPress. This patch reverses that, making showing the descriptions the default. It patches the _walk_bookmarks function in the file /wp-includes/bookmark-template.php. (There is no way to change the default behaviour, with or without this patch.)

Of course, don't believe everything you read, especially if you read it in a newsgroup.

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.

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!