TRex version 2.1.2

User's Guide - First view

REQUIREMENTS

What you need to use this program.

A server, with perl. It was tested with Perl 5.004, or so, and should run on any Perl 5 (keep in mind that each module can specify minimum Perl versions as 5.001, 5.003, etc.).
A few perl modules are needed. The next list is the modules needed for TRex and the versions tested (you can download them from CPAN at http://www.cpan.org):
- CGI (v2.36)
- CGI::Pretty (v1.03)
- Crypt::UnixCrypt (v1.0)
- Net::SMTP (v2.15)
- Net::POP3 (v2.21)
- MIME::Base64 (v2.14)
- Time::Local
- Fcntl
- Locale::Maketext (v0.18): This module also needs Lingua::EN::Inflect v1.86 or better.
- MIME::Tools (5.41): This module needs IO-stringy, Mail::Header, Mail::Field and Mail::Internet
- SOAP::Lite: Be careful because it needs any XML::Parser, but it only will work with XML::Parser::expat (that uses the C written expat), because of the taint checkings a pure Perl XML::Parse will not work (the parsing is plenty of taint checkings that use very beautifull time ... minutes we should say)
- Log::Log4perl: this also requires Log::Dispatch::File
- Tie::File (for mails storage module)
- MIME::Words
All the modules listed are not included in the distribution. To install them just use the CPAN bultin module. You have these choices (mainly !!):
- Run 'perl -MCPAN -e shell', and when a prompt appears just make 'install module::name' for each needed modules
- Run 'perl -MCPAN -e "install module::name"'
- Download them from http://search.cpan.org and make a crafty install ('perl Makefile.PL', 'make', 'make test' and 'make install')
Be carefull to became root to install these modules, and configuring the CPAN module to follow the needed module dependencies will help a lot to your health
A web server that runs scripts, such as Apache (BTW, was tested on Apache 1.3 and IIS 4.0). If you have access to the error log files, you might have an easier time setting up.
Users who already have a POP and SMTP server they can use for email.
Some operating system skills to set up the directories and customize the program. Really you only need to create directories and edit one file.
If you have a Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X/Darwin or Windows NT box, we have high confidence that all the functions will work and the screen will look like we meant to do it to. But most recent version of browsers on most platforms should be sufficient to use most of the features and see enough. We want that TRex runs smooth on all platforms, no preferences have been set.
Perl skills, only if you'd like to fix bugs, add features, etc. Really, you do not need to know perl to run TRex.

BROWSER and PLATFORM COMPATIBILITY

This email program was mainly written and tested on a Linux system (Red Hat distributions) with Mozilla (the most) and Internet Explorer. There has been testing done on other systems (mainly Linux, OpenBSD, Mac OS X/Darwin or Windows NT box), and we are moving towards multiplatform testing (if you want to participate on testing, drop us a line). Perl code runs equally smooth on different platforms and generate the same html for the user, but there may be differences that we do not know about. Please let us know if you run into problems on other systems.

There is a lot of javascript used in the HTML. We try to make everything cross-browser compatible, but it can't easily tested it all out.

FEATURES

Following is a partial list of the features in this program. The number of features is constantly growing, and many features not present in this list are featured in the program.

Check email through POP3 account
Send email through SMTP account
View text and image attachments on web page
Save attachments to disk or to web site
E-mail composition:
- Add attachments to outgoing mail from upload directory or another e-mail
- Spell checking (using aspell or ispell)
Folders :
- See number of messages, number unread, folder size in kB.
- Add, rename, delete folders
- Delete all messages from folder, mark all messages in folder as read
Search : By folder, time, from, subject, body
Upload files : Personal area for managing incoming and outgoing attachments
Forward or Reply to messages with some or all attachments
Resend message without altering, just enter email address.
Address Book
- Allows Nick Name field for email address shortcuts
- Add to address book from incoming mail addresses (including other recipients.)
- Add addresses to mail from address book
- Make Groups from contact list or from an email
Change personal info or password
Security :
- Password access
- Session time-out
- Log out
User creates own account

NON-FEATURES

This program does not provide email addresses. In other words, when users set up an account, they are expected to already have email access. It would be easy to add something on during the account setup procedure to set up an email account too.

Not very good browser support. We are moving to support HTML 4.01 and CSS (Cascade Style Sheets)