Extending Claws Mail
Provided plugins
Claws Mail' capabilities are extended by plugins. It comes with
the plugins listed below included, all of which are built automatically
if the required libraries are present.
Plugins are installed in $PREFIX/lib/claws-mail/plugins/ and have a suffix of
.so
. To load a plugin go to
Configuration/Plugins
and click the
Load Plugin
button. Select the plugin that you want and
click Open
button.
If you don't find the plugin you're looking for, it is possible that
your Operating System distribution provides it in a separate package.
In this case, search for the plugin in your package manager.
Bogofilter
The Bogofilter plugin comes with two major features:
The ability to scan incoming mail received from a POP, IMAP or LOCAL
account using Bogofilter. It can optionally delete mail identified
as spam or save it to a designated folder. Mail scanning can be turned
off.
The ability for users to teach Bogofilter to recognise spam or ham.
You can train Bogofilter by marking messages as spam or ham from the
Message List contextual menu, or using the relevant toolbar button in
the main window or the message window (see
Configuration/Preferences/Customize toolbars
). Messages
marked as spam are optionally saved to a designated folder.
Plugin preferences can be found in
Configuration/Preferences/Plugins/Bogofilter
.
Bogofilter's advantage over Spamassassin is its speed.
Bogofilter is available from http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net/.
Dillo HTML Viewer
Enables the viewing of HTML messages using the Dillo web browser,
version 0.7.0 or newer. It uses Dillo's --local
option by default for safe browsing. Preferences can be found in
/Configuration/Preferences/Plugins/Dillo Browser
.
Dillo is available from http://www.dillo.org/.
PGP/Core, PGP/Inline and PGP/MIME
Handles PGP signed and/or encrypted mails. You can decrypt mails,
verify signatures or sign and encrypt your own mails. Uses GnuPG/GPGME,
ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt/gpgme/.
SpamAssassin
The SpamAssassin plugin comes with two major features:
The ability to scan incoming mail received from a POP, IMAP or LOCAL
account using SpamAssassin. It can optionally delete mail identified
as spam or save it to a designated folder. Mail scanning can be turned
off, which is useful if your email is scanned on your server.
The ability for users to teach SpamAssassin to recognise spam or ham.
You can train SpamAssassin by marking messages as spam or ham from the
Message List contextual menu, or using the relevant toolbar button in
the main window or the message window (see
Configuration/Preferences/Customize toolbars
). Messages
marked as spam are optionally saved to a designated folder.
Plugin preferences can be found in
Configuration/Preferences/Plugins/SpamAssassin
.
SpamAssassin's advantage over Bogofilter is that it's not only a bayesian
filter, but it also performs various local and network tests to
determine spaminess.
SpamAssassin is available from http://spamassassin.apache.org/. Version 3.1.x or higher is
required to use the learning feature in TCP mode.
Trayicon
Places an icon in the system tray that indicates whether you have any
new mail. A tooltip also shows the current new, unread and total number
of messages.
More plugins
Other plugins have been written too, which are available as separate
downloads. At the time of this writing, there are a number of plugins
available at http://www.claws-mail.org/plugins.php:
Acpi Notifier
Enables new mail notification via the LEDs found on some laptops like
Acer, Asus, Fujitsu and IBM laptops.
AttachWarner
Reminds you about possibly forgotten attachments. Checks for common
expressions found when attaching a file and warns you if no attachment
was added to the mail you're sending.
AttRemover
Allows you to remove attachments from emails.
CacheSaver
Saves the caches every 60 seconds (or user-defined period). It helps
avoiding the loss of metadata if your computer (or
Claws Mail!) crashes. (NOTE: using this plugin can slow
down Claws Mail.)
Fetchinfo
Inserts headers containing some download information, like UIDL,
Claws Mail' account name, POP server, user ID and retrieval time.
GtkHtml2 Viewer
Like Dillo, enables the viewing of HTML messages, but in a nicer way
(antialiased fonts).
Mail Archiver
Enables folders and subfolders to be archived in several different
formats.
mailMBOX
Handles mailboxes in MBox format.
NewMail
Writes a msg header summary to a log file, (Default:
~/Mail/NewLog), on arrival of new mail
after sorting.
Notification
Provides various ways to notify the user of new and unread email.
PDF Viewer
Provides direct rendering of PDF and PostScript attachments
in the Claws Mail message view. It also allows browsing, zooming and
displaying detailed information about such attachments.
Perl
Intended to extend the filtering possibilities of Claws Mail. It
provides a Perl interface to Claws Mail' filtering mechanism,
allowing the use of full Perl power in email filters.
RSSyl
Allows you to read your favorite newsfeeds in Claws. RSS 1.0, 2.0 and
Atom feeds are currently supported.
S/MIME
Handles S/MIME signed and/or encrypted mails. You can decrypt mails,
verify signatures or sign and encrypt your own mails. Uses GnuPG/GPGME
and GpgSM, ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt/gpgme/.
SpamReport
This plugin reports spam to various places.
Currently only spam-signal.fr and spamcop.net are supported.
SynCE
Assists in keeping the address book of a Windows CE device (Pocket
PC, iPAQ, Smartphone, etc.) in sync with Claws Mail' address book,
with respect to email addresses.
vCalendar
Enables vCalendar message handling like that produced by Evolution or
Outlook, and Webcal subscriptions.
If you're a developer, writing a plugin to extend Claws Mail'
capabilities is probably the best and easiest solution. We will
provide hosting to your code, and will be glad to answer your questions
in the mailing-list or on the IRC channels,
#claws on Freenode or IRCnet.
Network access from the plugins
Some of the external plugins, for example RSSyl, vCalendar or GtkHtml
Viewer, need Internet access for their operations (retrieving feeds in
the case of RSSyl or vCalendar, and fetching images in the case of
GtkHtml Viewer). These plugins use the Curl library. Hence, if your
Internet access is restricted by a proxy, you will need to tell libCurl
to use this proxy. This is done by setting an environment variable,
http_proxy. For example,
http_proxy=http://user:passwd@myproxy.example.com:8080
will tell libCurl to connect to port 8080 of the machine
myproxy.example.com, with the user user
and password
passwd
to connect to the Internet.
You can either set this variable before starting Claws Mail, by
using for example
http_proxy=http://user:passwd@myproxy.example.com:8080
claws-mail, or set it in your
~/.bashrc file (or your shell equivalent), by
adding the following lineOther shells may have
diferent syntaxes, check your shell's manual page.:
export http_proxy=http://user:passwd@myproxy.example.com:8080
(you'll have to reconnect to have it taken into account).