Fast e-mail-client with POP3 support
 

Hi,
i am looking for a better mailclient than the builtin.

I should be able to retrieve mails from a POP3-Server automatically every few minutes. (With Pine i wasn't able to configure this)

The displaying/deleting of mails should be fast. The N770-client is much to slow. (A Sylpheed pre-alpha version seemed to be quite fast, but the rest is unusable)

When i quit the client, the retrieving of mail should stop. (This wish sounds strange, but if i close the N770-Client it seems still to continue with retrieving mail every "x" minutes. Is there a possibility to completely stop the client?)

The fontsize in the list of mails should be selectable, so that i not only the half of the subjects.

...


Thanks
bsterix

Who voted:
bad, but i know better alternatives

How about posting the better alternative??

Thanks

You've already mentioned it: Sylpheed.

Worked for me. Last weekend I managed to get it compiled in the Maemo 2.1 scratchbox, but it's still not fully integrated into the Hildon Application Framework.

Cheers,

Andrew

Actually another alternative is "pine".
It's a Terminal application, but has everything you need.

Here: http://david.woodhou.se/maemo-pine.html

and from Applications:

Repository: [WWW] http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/nokia770
Distribution: mistral
Component: user

(http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/nokia.../binary-armel/)

Why bother ? Gmail works just fine :-)

fpp: less so if you've got only patchy GPRS coverage on your way to work.

How can i configure N770-Pine to get mails from a POP3-Account every 5 minutes (or any other timeintervall)?

I have already tried pine, but couldnt find this feature for POP3-Accounts.

The rest of pine was quite OK.

Thanks
bsterix

Are there binaries for OS-2006 available? Is development in progress?

I dunno yet :)
I am setting up everything now.. I've found several documents that explain how Pine can directly interface with IMAP, POP3, SMTP (with or without SSL)...
Some suggest to locally fetch emails and then use Pine (that's what is usually done on a regolar Unix machine). They suggest "fetchmail" that has to be recompiled on the Nokia (easy task, it's pure C).
I am looking at how to configure it. I will post back as soon as I have everything clear.

Pine is easy to use and powerful, but this comes at a price: configuration.

--
anidel

With POP3 you can't have automatic notification of incoming email like with IMAP. See this FAQ,

http://www.cs.uu.nl/wais/html/na-dir...resources.html

You should be able to set up fetchmail to suck mail at regular intervals... then configure pine to check the incoming email folder and it will notify you of new email. Would be a lot cleaner if your ISP supported IMAP.

Pine is fast and clean... furthermore, as has been pointed out before, setting the option 'mouse-in-xterm' enables you control pine fully by simply tapping on the screen with the stylus... very nice!

One downside for me is that input to pine on the Nokia 770 turns out to be in UTF-8... you can set Pine to use this character-set, by default it tries to use ISO-8859-1, but then one does have problems receiving / sending emails with foreighn characters... if you only care about normal ASCII characters then everything works superb. I truly wish we had the capability to set the locale in xterm to ISO-8859-x, as needed (and then configure pine accordingly), but apparently maemo is missing those locale files.

-- Denis

Exactly this is my problem with pine (as written in the original :( post)

is there a Gmail notifier for IT2006 available?

Yesterday (I think it was), I got Sylpheed working in Scratchbox on Maemo 2.1, complete with Task Navigator integration. A 2006 OS alpha build is not far away, depending on how much time I get to package it up.

I also need to work out what I've patched differently to the 2005 OS package so I can release the patch too ;-)

I'm wary to give a timescale, but it's on the order of days...

Sorry for the delay.

Cheers,

Andrew

Hi,

I'm keen on know if your Sylpheed supports also IMAP.

Best regards,
Buffi

Feature list is here: http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/features.html :-)

This is great news. The only possible downside is that three-pane applications designed for desktops are not always very usable with a screen rez like the 770's.

I found the approach taken by the person who ported the Pan newsreader to maemo, where panes were replaced by tabs (coming into focus in a natural way), extremely interesting and effective. I think an email client would lend itself to that sort of treatment just as well.

Personally, my own settings had it in 2-panel mode, with messages opening in a new window. Once the guts of the program are fully Hildonised, more sensible default view options is on the TODO list.

Can't wait long enough for this! :)

Sylpheed seems to have good multilingual support. Do you know if it works well with ISO-8859-x character set encodings -- for both receiving and sending email. The problem with pine is that when run under Osso Xterm the display works in UTF-8 encoding... and pine can't map between UTF-8 and the ISO-8859-x encodings.

-- Denis

Sylpheed 2.2.0rc has been recompiled for 2006 OS:

http://www.bleb.org/software/770/#sylpheed

Again, this is only an alpha...

Well it's quite nice for an alpha !
As you said, it looks usable enough in two-pane mode (even more so when full screen mode is available).
Is there a way to "select all" messages for deletion ?
Thanks for the nice package,
fp

Edit > Select all ?

I installed it, and its quite OK. Much better than the version for OS-2005.

One Question: is it possible to go to the next/previous message when i am in the message-window (as with the arrow up/down in the builtin client).

Well, that's the first thing I tried, of course, but nothing happens (visually), and if I then do a "move to Trash", only the currently selected message is moved... Am I doing something wrong ?

bsterix: No idea, I'm afraid.

fpp: Dunno, but Edit > Select Thread... was working for me.

Another email client...
 

Another alternative would appear to be Telomer (though according to the author it is only just approaching an end-user eady state. Blog postings relating to Telomer can be found here:

http://blog.dave.cridland.net/?p=21

and here (with screenshot):

http://blog.dave.cridland.net/?p=22

I should delcare an interest here, I work for the same company as the author and have been bugging him for some time to get this finished so I can stop struggling with webmail on my 770.

WillS

Dave Cridland's stuff looks interesting, but is dependent on an IMAP server (and prefers one which supports the Lemonade profiles).

Unfortunately, at the moment, I'm using POP3 with Gmail. Unless someone fancies taking libgmail or Net::Webmail::Gmail and producing an IMAP proxy for it?

Cheers,

Andrew

Another question on sylpheed:
Is it possible to open a link in an email. The links are already highlighted (in green), i.e. sylpheed recognizes the link.
How can i open it in the "standard-browser"?

Maybe the "actions" feature would do it, but i dont exactly know which command could do it.

Open the menu, and look at Common Preferences > Details > External commands > Web browser.

That'll need to point at a shell script along the lines of: http://maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-dev...ry/002403.html

Obviously at some point that should be all combined into the end-deb, but in the mean time, I don't see why that shouldn't work (although I've not tested it!)

HTH,

Andrew

I tried this script. When i call it from the commandline, everything works,
but if i configure it in sylpheed, it isnt called if i doubleclick an URL in an email.

i put the script in my "home":

/home/user/n770browse.sh
made it executable (chmod 777)

an wrote

/home/user/n770browse.sh '%s'

in sylpheed "Common Preferences > Details > External commands > Web browser"

even sh /home/user/n770browse.sh '%s'

doesnt call the script ;-(

Anything obvious in /home/user/sylpheed.log?

Something like "cant execute command" but nothing really helpfull

Does anybody know an easy command, which can be executed by sylpheed, to play a sound (e.g. the same as the builtin client) when new mails arrive?
If possible a "small" command, not something big as mplayer to play a sound.

You can apt-get install gstreamer-tools (IIRC) which gives you gst-launch which you can use to play something through gstreamer.

Hang on, let me find the appropriate diary entry... ah, here: http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=01/2006#07

HTH,

Andrew

New version of Sylpheed available.

All windows are integrated (although not optimised), so the next step before putting it in a repo is modifying the defaults to be more sensible; and making the other configuration windows scrollable.

Comments, as ever, welcome.

Andrew, thanks for continuing to work on porting Sylpheed! Nokia did a lot of things right with the 770, but the email app definitely wasn't one of them. I greatly appreciate your continued efforts and look forward to using it when it is end user ready.

Wow, it's great, thank you!
But can you please make interface & message list fonts smaller?
I believe it will instantly add a lot to usability

That would be very helpful!
Thanks

It's on the todo list, but I'm not sure how easy it is (I've not looked at it at all).

I'm just using a theme with smaller fonts at the moment (but I think they could be smaller still in the Sylpheed window)

A next/previus-mail button in the mailwindows would also be helpful.

I'm afraid adding new stuff is further down the list than just improving the port; adding it as a feature request on the upstream Sylpheed is more likely to get it done:

http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/

Admittedly, once I've sorted some of the issues with the current port, I'll move it forward to the current version, 2.2.10 which may well have some of these features.

Any patches against my Subversion repository are, of course, welcome.