Building Cone

Cone is distributed in source code form, licensed under GPL. See COPYING for more information. The following prerequisites must be installed to build and run Cone:

Right now the primary development focus is on the Linux platform, gcc 3.2. Cone should build on other POSIX platforms; and any problems are likely to be minor, and trivial to resolve. A large portion of Cone's code base comes from Courier, which builds on many platforms.

NOTE:

Cone requires a wide-character-capable version of Curses. At this time not all Linux distribution provide a widechar-enabled Curses library. Cone will compile against a non-widechar Curses, but will not be able to display UTF-8, or other variable-length character sets.

Download Red Hat RPMs for the wide-character version of the curses library from http://www.courier-mta.org/beta/ncurses/.

Reading local mail with Cone

Cone reads local mail from either maildirs (the preferred format) or mailbox files (or "mboxes"). When mboxes are used Cone copies new mail from the system mailbox to $HOME/Inbox, which is then accessed instead of the mailbox file in the system spool directory. Starting Cone for the first time on an mbox-based system automatically copies existing mail from the system mailbox file (usually in /var/spool) to $HOME/Inbox.

This is because the system spool directory usually has restricted access rights, and system mailbox files can only be updated by directly overwriting them. An interrupted, or killed, update process usually resulted in a corrupted mailbox (which is one of the reasons why maildirs is the recommended mail format, which is not subject to this problem).

Cone uses an alternative way of updating mboxes. Cone updates mboxes by creating a new mbox file separately, then replacing the original mbox file with the new version. Unfortunately this cannot be done with the system mailbox file, because of the restricted access rights on the system spool directory. To solve this problem Cone automatically copies the system mailbox file to $HOME/Inbox, each time the system mailbox file is opened and whenever new mail is available.