Extending Claws Mail
Plugins
Claws Mail's capabilities are extended by plugins, which are
listed below.
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.
Some plugins provide the same functionality as others, (for example, the
3 anti-Spam plugins). In this case you will have to choose which
one to load, as Claws Mail will refuse to load more than one of
the same type.
There is a list of all 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.
More information: www.claws-mail.org/plugin.php?plugin=acpinotifier
AddressKeeper
Saves all unknown recipient addresses (To
,
Cc
and/or Bcc
) to a designated
addressbook folder.
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.
More information: www.claws-mail.org/plugin.php?plugin=attachwarner
AttRemover
Allows you to remove attachments from emails.
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/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 only can filter emails after an initial learning (mark some
spams as Spam, and some legitimate emails as Ham).
Bogofilter is available from http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net/.
BSFilter
BSFilter is a plugin that is very similar to the Bogofilter plugin
but uses the bsfilter (bsfilter.org/index-e.html) bayesian spam filter as a backend.
Like Bogofilter, you have to train it with spam and ham
messages in order for bsfilter to start recognising spam.
Plugin preferences can be found in
Configuration/Preferences/Plugins/BSFilter
.
Clamd
Allows scanning all messages received from IMAP, POP or local accounts
using the clam daemon part of the ClamAV (AntiVirus) software (http://www.clamav.net/).
Fancy
Enables the rendering of HTML messages using the GTK+ port of the
WebKit library.
Fetchinfo
Inserts headers containing some download information, like UIDL,
Claws Mail' account name, POP server, user ID and retrieval time.
GData
Provides an interface to Google services using the gdata library.
Currently, the only implemented functionality is to include Google
Contacts in the Tab-address completion.
GeoLocation
Provides geolocation functionality based on the addresses contained
in the messages.
Libravatar
Enables the display of avatar images associated with user profiles at
libravatar.org or the user's avatar enabled domains.
More information: www.claws-mail.org/plugin.php?plugin=libravatar
Mail Archiver
Enables folders and subfolders to be archived in several different
formats.
mailMBOX
Handles mailboxes in MBox format.
NewMail
Writes a message 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.
More information: www.claws-mail.org/plugin.php?plugin=notification
PDF Viewer
Allows rendering of PDF and PostScript attachments using the Poppler
library and GhostScript external program.
More information: www.claws-mail.org/plugin.php?plugin=pdf_viewer
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.
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/.
More information: www.claws-mail.org/plugin.php?plugin=gpg
Python
This plugin provides Python integration features.
More information: www.claws-mail.org/plugin.php?plugin=python
RSSyl
Allows you to read your favorite newsfeeds in Claws. RSS 1.0, 2.0 and
Atom feeds are currently supported.
More information: www.claws-mail.org/plugin.php?plugin=rssyl
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/.
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/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.
SpamReport
This plugin reports spam to various places.
Currently the sites spam-signal.fr and spamcop.net are supported, and the Debian lists (lists.debian.org)
spam nomination system.
TNEF parse
This plugin enables reading application/ms-tnef attachments.
More information: www.claws-mail.org/plugin.php?plugin=tnef_parser
vCalendar
Enables vCalendar message handling like that produced by Evolution or
Outlook, and Webcal subscriptions.
More information: www.claws-mail.org/plugin.php?plugin=vcalendar
If you're a developer, writing a plugin to extend Claws Mail's
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, Libravatar
or Fancy, need Internet access for their operations (retrieving feeds in
the case of RSSyl or vCalendar, and fetching images in the case of
Libravatar or Fancy). 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 you can 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).