Ishmail - Information SuperHighway Mail (original) (raw)

News

2001 Jul 31: Ishmail-2.1.0 is released.

What Is Ishmail?

Ishmail is a graphical mail reader for Unix systems. In addition to features you would expect in any decent GUI mail client, Ishmail:

• is based on the UNIX philosophy
• supports UNIX (mbox), mh and MMDF folder formats
• e-mail aliases (also aliases for groups of people).
• shares folders and aliases with programs such as pine, elm, Z-mail, and sendmail
• internal IMAP and POP support
• PGP support
• easy integration with procmail, fetchmail, sendmail...
• the internal editor can be configured to use emacs key bindings, or you can use an external editor
• spell checking using any external spellchecker (like ispell or Aspell)
• can pass messages to external commands
• message sorting by multiple criteria
• message threading by subject
• advanced message searching with regular expressions
• can specify patterns (using UNIX regular expressions) to look for in message headers, then take action when a match is found. Each pattern can have a different action. These actions include:
  • Automatically file the message in a specific folder (mail filtering)
  • Run an alert command (for example, play a specific sound).
  • Display a specific icon pixmap. extremely customizable: select your own
  • shortcut keys, buttons, colors, just about anything

Ishmail's History

Ishmail was originally developed as a commercial product by H & L Software. In May, 1999, H & L dropped the product and released the source code under the GNU General Public License. As of this writing, the original H & L website, www.ishmail.com, is still in operation.

Kevin Remhof began maintaining a separate website for Ishmail, but no significant progress was made with the program.

In early 2000, Kenneth Herron andEvgeny Stambulchikindependently began to work with Ishmail. The two made contact after Evgeny started a Sourceforgeproject for the program, and two decided to proceed with Evgeny's source code base.

Building Ishmail

Ishmail is written almost entirely in C++, with some C. Ishmail requires X11, XPM, and either Lesstifor Motif.
The Ishmail build system uses Autoconf.

Links

The Sourceforge Ishmail Project page

Ishmail Frequently Asked Questions

Screenshots

The latest release: ishmail-2.1.0.tar.gz

H & L's Ishmail documentation