| Introduction To Mahogany |
Please see the advertisement section below for a brief list of other features and more information about Mahogany.
Mahogany is being developed by a team of volunteers (and we are always looking for more help from the community) and we are naturally using the free libraries and tools: we use the free cross-platform wxWidgets C++ application framework for the GUI part (its wxGTK port uses yet another free library GTK+) and the free c-client library developed at the University of Washington for mail folder access. Finally, SSL support is implemented using OpenSSL.
The Mahogany project is graciously hosted at SourceForge.
| Latest News |
- March 7, 2012: Minor progress
Mahogany development still continues and even though there have been no big feature additions lately, a few bugs were fixed and some UI improvements were made, notably the "Quick Filter" dialog is now more convenient to use as it allows to create and set up the folders in which the messages should be filtered directly inside it, try it out when you need to create a new message filter the next time.Windows users can download the latest snapshot (notice that you may need to install Microsoft run-time libraries if you don't have them already) while Unix users can build from sources which are now available from the git repository.
- August 4, 2008: Support for OpenPGP message signing
While Mahogany had support for verifying the incoming messages signatures (and decrypting them) since quite a long time, it didn't use OpenPGP for the outgoing messages. Starting from now it supports outgoing message signing and, provided there is sufficient interest, encryption support will be added next.As usual, Unix users need to build the svn sources to test the new features while Windows ones can simply download the latest snapshot.
- April 14, 2008: Unicode News
Mahogany development still continues, albeit at rather slow pace. The latest big change is the switch to using the Unicode version of wxWidgets libraries which should fix many issues with handling UTF-8 messages which were only imperfectly supported in the past. There is still no stable wxWidgets release which can be used to build Mahogany in Unicode mode so Unix users need to get both M and wxWidgets from svn and build them. But Windows users can get the snapshot of the latest version. Notice that this snapshot contains just the program binary itself and is meant to be extracted into the existing Mahogany directory. Please let us know about your experience with it if you try it out! - August 1, 2006: Finally a New Release
The development still goes on and, after many delays, there is finally a new release available. The main new feature is the integration of DSPAM spam filter but many other improvements have been made as well.Here are the direct links to the Windows binary, the sources.
Notice that Ubuntu Linux users can just add
deb http://apt.tt-solutions.com/ubuntu/ dapper main
to /etc/apt/sources.list and execute apt-get update and apt-get install mahogany (only x86 package is currently available). - May 6, 2002: Mahogany runs under Mac OS X!
Thanks to Ujwal Sathyam it is now possible to run Mahogany under Mac, see the screenshots here and here!There are still some problems however and we welcome any help from developers familiar with Mac!
- Dec 28, 2001: Special New Year $ 3,000,000 rebate!
According to the statistics generated by SLOCcount, Mahogany development must have costed $ 3,261,238 - but you get it for free! ;-)Happy New Year!
| Why Choose Mahogany? |
There is a huge number of already existing email clients with new ones being started all the time. Many of them are free (see this list), so why have yet another one? Of course, one reason is that Mahogany had been started before many of these projects came into existence but this is not a valid reason. The official reason is that Mahogany is going to be the ideal mail client combining the best features from all the others with many of its own but this is probably not very convincing. There are others which are much better though:
- Mahogany is cross-platform
The experience shows that using different clients simultaneously leads to the problems so an ideal mail client should be available for all machines the user works with. Mahogany runs under Unix (too many flavours to enumerate here) and Win32 (we would like to have a version for Mac OS X too) which is still not ideal but much better than 99% of the other email clients. - Everything is configurable
Who doesn't hate the programs who know everything better than the user and decide what to do without referring to him nor letting to change their operation? We surely do! This is why Mahogany is written with flexibility in mind: everything is configurable, if you have found something that cannot be changed, please report this to us a s a bug. Moreover, all program options are folder-specific meaning that you can configure them in completely different ways for different mailboxes. And if this were not enough, Mahogany also supports multiple identities which increases even further the possibility to fine tune the program to your taste.But this doesn't mean that you have to spend hours learning different options just to start using the program - on the contrary, it is perfectly plug-and-play as all options have reasonable default values. But you can really change everything if you need or want it later using a simple GUI interface.
- IMAP support
Mahogany is built around IMAP4 support. It also supports POP3 but it is mainly an IMAP client and was one from the very beginning unlike many existing POP3 clients to which the IMAP support has been added as an afterthought.Mahogany aims to gain the most of the possibilities of the IMAP protocol. It supports server-side operations when available, limits the amount of data retrieved from server to the strict minimum thus making it possible to work with huge IMAP folders and, generally, follows the letter and spirit of the IMAP RFC.
- Mahogany plays nice with the others
Don't you hate the clients which lock you in their own non-standard and not documented mailbox format? We don't and this is why not only Mahogany uses the standard formats and protocols wherever they exist but also provides means to import the data from other programs and, for the rare cases where we use our own formats, export them in another format.As an extension of this, Mahogany doesn't try to do everything itself. It has the possibility to show HTML messages but it doesn't aim to be a full blown WWW browser - rather, it lets you use your favourite one to open the URLs. It also will use your editor (some people just don't imagine writing mail using anything other than ViM), your image viewing and sound playing programs and so on.
- Modern GUI
Probably two of the nicest email clients available for Unix are Mutt and Pine but neither has a particularly modern UI. Our aim is to write a nicely looking and easy to use but yet not horribly bloated program.Of course, developing good UI is hard and this is why the user feedback is so important to us. Also, what is nice for one user can be extremely annoying to another, this is why all UI extra (progress dialogs, confirmation and explanation messages and so on) can be suppressed in Mahogany according to the everything-is-configurable principle above.
- Many cool features
Combining all the good features of the existing mail programs is not easy but the progress has been good so far.Other features not mentioned above are: built-in Python interpreter which allows to extend Mahogany using user-written scripts, built-in filters using a real programming language but also a GUI editor for them and automatic filter creation for the most common cases, templates for message composition, multiple identities (or personalities), support for calendar (scheduling) plugin, powerful and flexible address book (in addition to our native format, Emacs BBDB and vCards are supported, as well as importing and exporting in a variety of formats) and smart address completion in the composer, support for synchronization with Palm, built-in HTML viewer, X-Face support, support for receiving faxes send via EFax and much more.
| Help Wanted! |
Anybody can help, no special skills are required - only the motivation and willingness to work on an OpenSource project are.
More precisely, we need:
- Developers
To make sure that Mahogany continues to evolve quickly, we really need more developers for our team. There are lots of new features that could be added, some of them fairly straightforward and simple, but we just don't find enough time to do everything. If you are familiar with C++ programming under either of the supported platforms and would like to help to add your favourite features, please get in touch with us. You can count on lots of support from the team and it's a good chance to leave mark on a great OpenSource project. - Translators
If you would like to help with translating Mahogany in your language or updating an existing translation (many of them need a face lift), please have a look at our translator's page. - Testers
Please make sure that you report any bugs (should the impossible happen :-) you find using our bug tracker. If you don't tell us about the bugs, it is impossible for us to fix them!You can also use the bug tracker to file the requests for new features (or improvements to the existing) ones - please do it if you have any good ideas. Alternatively, don't hesitate to post your suggestions to the M-Users mailing list!
- MacOS Help
Update: there is now a Mac OS X port maintainer (Ujwal Sathyam) which is great news for Mahogany under Mac. However more help is still needed, don't hesitate to join the effort!Both, wxWidgets and the mail handling library used by Mahogany support the Mac OS X and it has always been our intent to port Mahogany to Mac. Unfortunately, we don't have neither access to Mac hardware (please contact us if you can help!) nor the skills to do it.
If you are a Mac developer and would like to port a nice, modern email client to your favourite OS, please get in touch with us and join the effort!
- Donations
If you have any spare hardware (especially one capable of running Mac OS X, see above) or can contribute financially to the Mahogany development, your help would be welcome!Also note that if you are an ISP and wish to provide a nice and powerful email program to your customers we are open to a possibility of working with you.
- Link to us!
If you like Mahogany, why not put a link to it on your web pages? Here's an icon you could use:
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