Postilion Users Guide
A practical guide for learning to use the Postilion Mail User Agent

by Nic Bernstein

Chapter 1
Introduction

1.1  Welcome to Postilion!

I started to write Postilion in 1997 because I liked the mail reader, Mail.app, which comes with the NeXTstep operating system. I couldn't run that program on my desktop, so I started to look around for something I liked. I wanted a program which would support the IMAP specification for remote mailbox access, as well as supporting my existing unix and POP3 mailboxes. I found a program called TkRat, which could do all of this, but I didn't really like the way it looked, and I missed some of the features and feel of the NeXT program.

I then read a paper called ``The Cathedral and the Bazaar'' written by Eric S. Raymond. He described the process which he followed while writing the program Fetchmail, and I was inspired. One of the things which he said was that when starting on a new software project, one should find the program which comes closest to doing what you want, and then modify it.

I took this to heart, and Postilion was born from what was TkRat. I learned the Tcl/Tk programming language, and started hacking away at TkRat until I had produced a program which I called WMRat1. The first release was made in July of 1997. By September of 1997, I had received help from Marco van Hylckama Vlieg, who designed all of the icons for the program, and I learned the meaning of the term Postilion. I liked the name, and adopted it for my program.

I have benefitted considerably from the works of many other people, who are listed in the credits. Postilion would not exist without their help.

1.2  What this User's Guide is all about.

This manual is intended to help you learn how to use Postilion, a Mail User Agent (MUA) with a graphical user interface. While we will discuss issues pertaining to electronic mail systems, such as mailboxes and the like, this manual is not intended to serve as a replacement for any documentation which accompanies the other components of a complete mail system, such as Mail Transport Agents (MTAs) or other mail system facilities.

Postilion is designed to be as intuitive as possible for the new user, while still providing a rich feature set, and robust capabilities. As a result, while you can do many things with Postilion, you do not have to. There are many features of Postilion which you will never use, and others which you will use every day. The goal of this manual is to let you see what features are available, help you decide which ones to use, and provide the information necessary for you to use those features.

1.3  What is Postilion?

Postilion is, as we've stated, a Mail User Agent, or MUA. This is the part of an electronic mail system which the user interfaces with to view, compose, send, archive, find and print their email messages. An MUA is not necessarily responsible for such things as message delivery, message transport, message filtering, etc. These tasks are performed by other components such as a Mail Transport Agents (MTAs) like Procmail, Mail Delivery Agents (MDAs) like Sendmail, etc.

Postilion provides an interface from which you compose and send messages, it provides a ``hold'' to store a message for later completion. It provides flexible address books to use while composing, and a system to save correspondence (both incoming and outgoing) which matches your filing choice (i.e. by sender, recipient or date). It lets you manage hundreds of mailboxes, with thousands of messages, and provides many tools to simplify that task. It lets you search, sort and index, it will even let you store messages into a database.

Postilion interoperates fully with a number of important standards, including SMTP, IMAP, POP3, MIME, DSN and PGP. It can handle mailboxes in a variety of formats, and integrate them seamlessly on your desktop. You can group these mailboxes into managable hierarchies, move them about, cut them, paste them, delete them or store them into other formats.

If you use PGP, Postilion can help you manage your key-rings, sign or encrypt messages, send keys, etc.

Postilion can import address books from a variety of other formats, so that it can interoperate with other mail programs you may use. It is designed to provide useful system administration features for multi-user installations, such as shared mailboxes and mailbox hierarchies, shared addressbooks, and system wide defaults.

While Postilion may seem to be an all-singing, all-dancing program, it isn't. Some features have been left out, either because of time constraints or to avoid bloat. And Postilion is very configurable, so that you can turn off things that you don't like, and turn on those that you do.

Chapter 2
Installation

2.1  What is required?

There are some requirements before you can configure, build and install Postilion. There are also some options which may extend the program's capabilities. Where possible, I will provide URLs to help you locate the components required to get Postilion running. If you are installing from some sort of package2 file, then these steps may or may not apply to you. Please consult the instructions which accompanied your package for further details.

2.2  Libraries

The following libraries are required to install Postilion. In some cases I have grouped these with the assumption that if you are lacking the major system, you will be lacking all constituent libraries.

2.2.1  Required

2.2.2  Optional

2.3  Programs

These programs will provide enhancements along side of Postilion. They are not required.

2.4  Building Postilion

2.4.1  Decompress and un-tar the distribution

Once you ahve downloaded the Postilion distribution, you must uncompress and un-tar the archive. With GNU-Tar you can do this in one step:

tar -zxvf postilion-current.tar.gz

With other tars you must do this in a two step process:

gzip -d postilion-current.tar.gz

tar -xvf postilion-current.tar

2.4.2  Automatic configure-build-install program

There is a graphical installation program for Postilion which will take you through the entire configuration-build-install sequence. To access this, change directory to the Postilion directory and run the program ``setup''. You may do this by simply typing:

./setup

Or, if your installation of Tcl/Tk required that you put the ``wish'' interpreter in a non-standard location, you may try this approach:

/path/to/wish setup

If you do not have permissions to install programs on your system, the program will tell you what steps the system administrator must take to complete the installation.

2.4.3  Manual configure-build-install

Source Configuration

Prior to compiling Postilion, you will need to configure the source code for your system. This process will determine the best way to compile Postilion for your system. To configure Postilion, simpy type:

./configure

This will configure Postilion. If there are any insurmountable problems, you will receive a message telling you what went wrong.

For information on what options are supported by the configure program, type:

./configure -help

Compiling

Once configured, compilation is as simple as:

make

Testing

Before installation, you may test Postilion by doing this:

cd script

./postilion

You should see the Postilion startup message. You may exit once this has happened.

Installation

As root, you can install Postilion by typing:

make install

Chapter 3
Using Postilion

Now that you've successfully installed Postilion, you can start it by typing ``postilion'' at a command prompt from within X. When Postilion opens for the first time, you should see a window like this:

Pressing the button labled ``Create'' will create the necessary directory, and place some default configuration files in it. Pressing ``Do not create'' will allow the program to start, but it will be using defaults only, and will be somewhat limited. After this step, you should see the Introductory screen:

From this screen you can select your prefered language (currently English, Italian, Swedish and French), and whether or not you wish to see a changes window whenever you upgrade Postilion to a newer version. The changes window can be useful to learn about new or enhanced features.

3.1  The Browser window - an anatomy

The default opening window for Postilion is the Browser window (this is configurable). This is the window that presents a view of a mailbox, with a list of messages, and the contents of the currently selected message. There is a menu across the top, a row of buttons for commonly used functions, an optional Mailbox View widget, a message list from the current mailbox, and the contents of the current message.

The menus are, from left to right:

Below the menus, is the button bar. From left to right, the buttons are:

Below the button bar, there is a ``sash'' with a small triangle pointing down. A sash is a widget that lets you change the balance between two windows. In this case, clicking on the sash will drop down a mailbox view widget, which we will cover later.

Below the sash is the message list. This is a configurable list of messages in the current mailbox. In the default view, this displays:

The text of each line also appears in color to indicate whether it is New, Deleted, or Flagged (these colors are adjustable).

Below the message list is another sash which allows you to alter how long the message list is compared to the message viewing area below. If you wish, you can pull the sash all the way down, so the message list takes up the entire window, or all the way up, so that the message view takes up the entire body. When your cursor is over the sash, it changes from an arrow to a hand, so that you know when to drag it.

Lastly comes the message viewing area. In the default configuration this will show the From:, Subject:, Date:, To:, Cc: and Reply-To: headers, although this is configurable. Below that is the message text, or a button labled ``Show Body.'' The reason for this button is that for remote access mailboxes, such as IMAP, it is much faster to only retrieve the headers of the message, until such time as you decide you wish to see the rest of it (the body).


Footnotes:

1 The WM in WMRat came from the Window Maker window manager for X11, which I use, and for which I wanted to design an email program.

2 Packages in formats liek RPM, Debian, etc. are available


File translated from TEX by TTH, version 2.64.
On 24 Feb 2000, 19:08.