Last modified: Fri Dec 8 09:23:17 PST 1995 exmh version: 1.6.5 Brent.Welch@eng.sun.com exmh is a TCL/TK based interface to the MH mail system. Version 1.6* is compatible with Tk 4.1, Tk4.0, Tk3.6, and Tk3.3 Some features (e.g., color face icons) only work with Tk 4.0 or greater. exmh is known to work with MH versions 6.7 and 6.8.* Experienced EXMH installers should check FLASHES below and the exmh.CHANGES file. ************************************************** New EXMH installers: Please read through *all* of this, thanks, especially the part at the end about the TK send command. See also the on-line FAQ file under the Help... menu. There are 4 man pages for exmh - make sure your users can access them. (Soon they will be HTML viewable from within exmh, but not yet. The HTML is hiding in the html subdirectory, or see http://www.sunlabs.com/~bwelch/exmh/man/index.html) exmh.l - a tutorial exmh-use.l - a more comprehensive user guide exmh-custom.l - a guide to exmh customization exmh-ref.l - a terse description of all buttons and menu entries. ************************************************** Please encourage your exmh users to REGISTER via the Register menu entry under the Help... menu. This let's me track exmh usage and get user feedback. I won't abuse this registration - there is no obligation associated with registration, but I would like all exmh users to do it. All registration does is send me a mail message. You get to add your comments, pro and con, about exmh. I've learned a lot from the 1000+ registrations I have received so far. Thanks! EXMH lives "high in the food chain". You'll need some additional softare: ************************************************** REQUIRED PACKAGES Find TCL and TK on ftp.sunlabs.com:/pub/tcl ftp.aud.alcatel.com:/tcl ftp.cs.berkeley.edu:/ucb/tcl Find MH on ftp.ics.uci.edu:/pub/mh Find Metamail (for MIME support, including 8-bit charsets) on thumper.bellcore.com:/pub/nsb **************************************************** OPTIONAL PACKAGES Find Faces on cs.indiana.edu:/pub/faces Expect is available as pub/expect/expect.tar.Z from ftp.cme.nist.gov Japanization patch for Tcl and Tk srawgw.sra.co.jp:/pub/lang/tcl/jp tcl7.3jp-patch.gz, tcl7.3jp-update1.gz, tcl7.3jp-update2.gz, tk3.6jp-patch.gz, tk3.6jp-update1.gz, tk3.6jp-update2.gz. It seems that they will move the archives to ftp.sra.co.jp near future. Find Glimpse, the full text search engine, at University of Arizona: http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu:1994/ ----------------------------------------------- TK 3.6 BUG that causes core dump when iconified ----------------------------------------------- There is a bug in TK >= 3.3 in the text widget that exmh manages to tickle. It occurs when the exmh window is iconified, and it causes a core dump. However, there is a patch that fixes this in the misc/tkText.patch file. If you have TK 3.6 and have applied Ousterhout's first patch, then you are ok. -------------------------------------------- AIX BUG that results in no buttons or menus -------------------------------------------- The Aix 3.2 compiler does not compile tkOption.c correctly when optimization is turned on. The symptom of this is a message like exmh: Error in ./lib/app-defaults: missing colon on line 2 and there are no buttons or menus in the interface. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- See help.FAQ for answers to some frequently asked questions. This information is now available via the FAQ button in exmh. FLASHES 1.6.5 includes an overhaul of the Flist module that highlights folders with unseen messages, and counts unseen messages in total. This also detects 8-bit characters in all cases within Sedit. CLIPBOARD support for OpenWindows users (Tk 4.* only) TMPDIR and EXMHTMPDIR environment variables honored to map /tmp 1.6.4 has fixes for the bugs in 1.6.3 1.6.3 collects many minor enhancements, plus integrated ispell support for Sedit, and new faces code from John LoVerso. Check out the new "Faces Row" option to display all matching faces. 1.6.2 collects several minor enhancements 1.6.1 fixes two minor bugs and adds support for Sun Attachments. 1.6 released as Brent moves from PARC to Sun Labs. Exmh lives. This release is stable with Tk 3.6 and Tk 4.0b3. The FTP site and WWW Page will migrate to Sun shortly, although parcftp will continue to host exmh for a while. Mail to welch@parc.xerox.com will start bouncing, so update your bug mail address ("maintainer") to Brent.Welch@eng.sun.com (valid after May 1, 1995) Multidrop+Inc style inc has been added. Set up your .xmhcheck file to use the MyIncTmp folder. Any messages in that folder get sorted by slocal. The man page has been chopped into 4 documents: exmh.l - a tutorial exmh-use.l - a more comprehensive user guide exmh-custom.l - a guide to exmh customization exmh-ref.l - a terse description of all buttons and menu entries. Performance Hints: Squeeze the last drop out of message display by disabling the separator bars in message display. (Show Graphic Part Separator under MIME) Really large folders make exmh run slowly. Take this as a hint to reorganize things into sub-folders if you have more than 500 or so messages in a folder. Bound the unseen folder search by defining the .mh_profile Folder-Unseen: pattern pattern pattern entry to name the folders to search under. The default is *, so all folders are searched. Reverse Video: It takes just a few resource settings in your ~/.exmh-defaults-mono file to get reverse video on a black and white display: ! For widgets *Background: black *Foreground: white ! For highlights *c_background: black *c_foreground: white Colorized headers: Did you know you can colorize rfc822 headers in the message display by setting *m_tagnames and related X resources? This feature has been around for some time, but seems to be little-known. Here's what I have in my ~/.exmh-defaults-color file. *m_tagnames: hidden subject from x-filters-matched content-type x-mailer repl ied replied-to *m_hidden: -font 6x10 *m_subject: -foreground blue *m_x-filters-matched: -foreground "medium sea green" *m_content-type: -foreground "medium sea green" *m_x-mailer: -foreground "medium sea green" *m_from: -foreground blue *m_replied: -foreground "violet red" The *c_ family of resources has expanded a bit to allow control of both foreground and background colors for current, unseen, moved, and delete messages. MAILING LISTS There are now three exmh-related mailing lists. YOU ONLY NEED TO PICK ONE LIST. Send your subscription requests to: exmh-announce-request - to receive release notices exmh-users-request - to get exmh-announce + user discussion exmh-workers-request - to get all of the above plus exmh hacker discussion The mailing lists have the following addresses, but please send your subscription requests to the -request aliases. exmh-users@parc.xerox.com exmh-workers@parc.xerox.com ACKKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks go to Ed Oskiewicz for inspiring me with an initial verison, which is much modified by now. Thanks also go to many beta testers that put up with buggy versions and suggested many features that are now part of exmh. Feature requests that come with code diffs to implement them are especially nice. Thanks to Xerox/PARC for tolerating my work on exmh, and to Sun Microsystems Laboratories for continuing to do so. Honorable mentions: John LoVerso (loverso@osf.org) who contributed the popup nested folder display. Chris Garrigues (cwg@mcc.com) who rewrote the mime display code. Marc VanHeyningen (mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu) who wrote the mailcap parsing code. Allen Downey, downey@cs.berkeley.edu who provided PGP support. Scott Stanton, sstanton@eng.sun.com who contributed the alias browser. Anders Klments, klements@it.kth.se also updated the PGP code, and more Stefan Monnier, monnier@di.epfl.ch updated and maintains the PGP code Martin Hamilton, martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk who provided the URL highlighting Achim Bohnet, ach@rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de for cleanup and generalization. FEATURES As well as providing the usual layer on top of MH commands, exmh has a number of other features: MIME support! Displays richtext and enriched directly. Parses multipart messages. A popup menu under the right button can invoke external viewers (metamail) for things not directly supported. Built-in editor allows simple composition of text/enriched format and multipart messages (via Insert Part). Color feedback in the scan listing so you can easily identify unseen messages (blue), the current message (red), deleted messages (gray background), and moved messages (yellow background). Xresources control these color choices. Monochrome displays highlight unseen messages with underline, current message in reverse video, deleted messages with cross-hatching background, and moved messages with stippled background. A folder display with one label per folder. Color highlights indicate the current folder (red), folders with unseen messages in them (blue), and the target folder for moves (yellow background). Nested folders are highlighted by a shadow box. A cache of recently visted folder buttons is also maintained. Monochrome highlights are reverse video for the current folder, bold box for folders with unseen messages, and stippled box for the target of move operations. Clever scan caching. MH users know that scan is slow, so exmh tries hard to cache the current state of the folder to avoid scanning. Moves and deletes within exmh do not invalidate the cache, and background incs that add new messages are handled by merging them into the scan listing. The scan cache is compatible with xmh. Facesaver bitmap display. If you have a facesaver database on your system, exmh displays the bitmap face of the person that sent the current message (or their organization). Otherwise, it just displays a boring EXMH logo. Background inc. You can set exmh to run inc periodically, or just to periodically count up the messages in your mail spool file. (Depends on proper TK send functioning. See notes below.) Various inc styles. Exmh knows about three styles of inc usage: Inc from your spool file to your inbox folder. Inc from your spool file or POP host to a set of dropboxes as specified by your ~/.xmhcheck file. Inc from your spool file directly into folders. Exmh can run the MH filtering program (slocal) for you, or you can let an external agent presort mail into folders for you. Searching over folder listing and message body. A dialog-box interface to MH pick. A simple editor with emacs-like bindings is provided by default. It has an interface that lets you tweak key bindings. Editor interface. You can hook up exmh to TCL based-editors like mxedit quite easily. A script is also provided, exmh-async, for using terminal based editors like vi. The emacsclient.README file has hand-wavy instructions for using emacsclient to talk to an emacs server. Glimpse interface. You can index all your mail with glimpse and search for messages by content. The search works across all folders and runs quite fast. The indexes are only about 10% of the space of your mail database. User preferences. You can tune exmh through a dialog box. The settings are saved in an Xresource-style file named .exmh-defaults. You can also put font and color resource specifications in this file, plus there are a few random parameters not exposed via preferences. User hacking support. A user library of TCL routines is supported. The main implementation is chopped up into many smallish modules. So, you can modify a copy of some module to put your favorite mail reader hack in without affecting others (or convincing me to put it into the main line). There are also a number of places where hook procedures are used so you can refine the behavior of things like composing a reply message. Details in the man page. INSTALLATION Installation is done via the exmh.install script. Invoke it as: wish -f exmh.install This puts up a dialog box that lets you patch various file system specific pathnames and enable or disable features that your system cannot support (e.g., facesaver, sound). You can test out exmh via this dialog before installing it. Upon startup, exmh.install looks around for .exmhinstall files from previous installations. It will ask you which one you want to use, unless there is already one in the current directory. You can also use the Conf button to look for config files. This lets you maintain a set of config files, .exmhinstall.* if you need this for multiple architectures, for example. In the install dialog, the "Script Library" and the "Install lib directory" are usually the same place. The script library is the run-time value of the library directory, while the install lib directory is the install-time value. The Test button now automatically changes the run-time value to "./lib" in order to test before installing. So, the only reason for the distinction between install-time and run-time is for AFS environments where writable and read-only volumes might have different names. Remember to choose a script library directory that exmh can take up all for itself. The install is *not* smart enough to make an exmh subdirectory in a common lib dir (e.g., /usr/local/lib). WARNING: you need to specify an alternate location - the install is *not yet* smart enough to handle leaving the script library where you unpacked the tar file. After you set things up in the dialog box, then hit some buttons: 1. Patch - to apply site-dependent patches to exmh. The configuration is saved into a .exmhinstall file. 2. TclIndex - to compute the auto-load library index. 3. Test - to run the patched script. 4. Verify - to see what the Install will do. 5. Install - to install exmh. If the install fails to work gracefully on your system, let me know! One common error is to get a complaint about the procedure "Exmh" not being defined. This happens when the value of the script library is not correct. VERY IMPORTANT. PLEASE READ. SOURCE OF MANY PROBLEMS. READ THIS HERE :-) exmh depends on the TK send facility for its background processing. With TK 3.3, send now uses xauthority mechanisms by default, unless you compile TK with -DTK_NO_SECURITY. A manifestation of problems are that background processing doesn't work: new messages are not scanned into the current folder, the flag icon doesn't behave, and so on. Similarly, use of the exmh-async wrapper script also fails. If you cannot recompile wish, then the trick is to get your X server process started with the right incantation. You can easily test send (and my installation process should have...) Just run wish, and type in the following command to it: send exmh {Exmh_Status "Hello world"} Obviously, make sure exmh is running first. If you get an error, you need to recompile the TK library, or learn how to start up the X server so it does the right Xauthentication stuff. Here is one example, for SunOS openwindows. This is an excerpt from a .xerverrc file: if [ ! \( -d $HOME -a -w $HOME \) ]; then echo "Warning: Can't write X authority file" 1>&2 ; auth_args="" else authfname=$HOME/.xnews.`uname -n`$DISPLAY ${OPENWINHOME}/lib/mkcookie $authfname -auth magic-cookie auth_args="-auth $authfname" fi ; ${OPENWINHOME}/bin/xnews $auth_args $server_args $xnews_config_args ;; The general picture of whats going on is this: 1) some program generates a magic cookie (arbitrary string) and writes this to a file. 2) The name of this file is passed to the X server 3) The X server writes an entry for the DISPLAY into your ~/.Xauthority file. 4) Xlib reads ~/.Xauthority when you create a window, and passes the cookie value back to the X server. If you have the xauth program and your server doesn't like to be told about the intermediate file, then you can use xauth to write into the ~/.Xauthority file for you, and apparenty the right thing will happen. If this sounds vague, it is. For precise details, do some experimentation or ask your local X guru. If you come up with particular solutions, feel free to post them to comp.lang.tcl so other folks with similar configurations can learn how to do the right thing as well. See also misc/Xauthority for similar info. CONCLUDING REMARKS If you end up using exmh on a regular basis, also let me know! If I can tell my managers that there are N users of my mail reader, there is a greater chance I'll have time to hack up more tools in the future (and still get paid). There is a Register User menu entry under the Help... menu that you can use for this purpose. Encourage your users to do this if you are an administrator at a large site. Finally, please take time to read the man page before asking too many questions. If exmh gets an internal error it will display a dialog box with a TCL trace back and a What Happened: area. You can type short note into that area, and then hit the "mail to" button in order to file a bug report. I'll consider feature requests, but basically I'd appreciate it if you'd code up your feature and send me some diffs or just the whole file that is affected. Many of the neat features in exmh were originally contributed by its users. -- Brent.Welch@Sun.COM