Lumail

Christian Külker

0.1.3

2024-06-18

Introduction

Lumail was recognized as a mail client for Linux up until 2020. Its last update appears to be in 2020, and as of 2022-07-19, its domain seems to have been acquired by a business looking to generate traffic. The most recent snapshot of Lumail can be accessed through the Wayback Machine at lumail.org. Both the source code for lumail and the website are available at github.com. The last release, lumail 3.1, was in 2017. Regrettably, this project appears to be dormant, or as the author expressed, “complete” (refer to #361).

Lumail’s primary functionality revolves around the Maildir format, and it supports IMAP and GPG.

Lumail 3

This section, penned on 2022-07-20, aims to guide users on building and installing lumail 3.1 from 2017 on Debian 11 Bullseye and Debian 10 Buster.

In Summary (TL;DR): Lumail require libgmime-2.6-dev and is incompatible with Debian 11 Bullseye, which uses libgmime-3.0-dev. On Debian 10 Buster, the compilation process completes successfully, and Lumail can be run from a cloned git repository after executing make.

Dependencies

aptitude install  build-essential make pkg-config liblua5.2-dev \
libgmime-3.0-dev libncursesw5-dev libpcre3-dev libmagic-dev

Build

As root

mkdir -p /srv/{src,build,lumail-3.1}
chown USER.USER /srv/{src,build,lumail-3.1}

As user

cd /srv/src
export URL=https://github.com/lumail/lumail/archive/refs/tags/release-3.1.tar.gz
wget -O lumail-release-3.1.tar.gz $URL
cd ../build
tar xvzf ../src/lumail-release-3.1.tar.gz

The README.md dropped the warning of eating mail. However a backup is still recommended.

Critique

Pros:

  • Seamless compilation from tar release.
  • Straightforward compilation from a git clone.

Cons:

  • The Makefile doesn’t utilize ./configure or any other methods for flexible compilation.
  • The Makefile inadvertently removes global files in /etc!!
  • Compilation anticipates a git repository and will produce errors (specifically, “fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git”). The implications of this error remain uncertain.

Recommendation:

  • Do NOT compile as root.
  • Do NOT use clean targets.
  • Do NOT use install targets (it will remove files in /etc/luma2).
  • Run from a cloned git repository.

Lumail 2.9

This section has been added for historical reasons. It is not recommended to use this version.

The old domain is not accessible directly, but indirectly via archive.org.

NOTE: lumail2 may well eat your email, corrupt your email, or otherwise cause data loss. If you have no current backups of your email you should NOT USE THIS PROJECT.

The latest lumail2 release 2.9 can be found under the [github] tag release-2.9

export URL=https://github.com/lumail/lumail/archive/refs/tags/release-2.9.tar.gz
mkdir -p /srv/src
wget -O /srv/src/lumail-release-2.9.tar.gz $URL
cd /srv/build
tar xvzf ../srv/src/lumail-release-2.9.tar.gz
cd lumail-release-2.9
aptitude install  build-essential make pkg-config liblua5.2-dev\
 libgmime-2.6-dev libncursesw5-dev libpcre3-dev libmagic-dev\
 libnet-imap-client-perl libjson-perl

Lumail 2.5

This section describes the build and install of lumail 2.5 on Debian in 2016 from the upstream tar release. The tar release can be obtained via the archive.org lumail.org link or via a release tag on github.com.

Download

    mkdir src
    cd src
    wget https://lumail.org/download/lumail-2.5.tar.gz
    cd ..

Core:

aptitude install  build-essential make pkg-config \
liblua5.2-dev libgmime-2.6-dev  \
libncursesw5-dev libpcre3-dev libmagic-dev

IMAP:

aptitude install libnet-imap-client-perl libjson-perl

Build

mkdir build
cd build
tar xvzf ../src/lumail-2.5.tar.gz
cd umail-2.5
make

Installation

The quick way is to

make install

# This will do

    cp lumail2 /usr/bin/
    mkdir -p /etc/lumail2/luarocks.d/  || true
    mkdir -p /etc/lumail2/perl.d/  || true
    cp luarocks.d/*.lua /etc/lumail2/luarocks.d/
    cp perl.d/* /etc/lumail2/perl.d/
    rm /etc/lumail2/perl.d/delete-message || true
    rm /etc/lumail2/perl.d/get-folders || true
    rm /etc/lumail2/perl.d/get-messages || true
    rm /etc/lumail2/perl.d/save-message || true
    rm /etc/lumail2/perl.d/set-flags || true
    if [ ! -e /etc/lumail2/lumail2.lua ] ; then
        cp ./lumail2.lua /etc/lumail2/lumail2.lua;
    fi

As it can be seen it makes the mistake not to copy the binary to /usr/local/bin

Configuration and Usage

After global files in /etc/luamail2 are created the local configuration should be created:

mkdir ~/.lumail2/
vim ~/.lumail2/lumail2.lua

(description about host specific configuration is omitted)

IMAP Configuration [DO NOT WORK FOR ME]

By using the documentation for mail-dir or IMAP to generate a configuration lumail2 was terminating always after some seconds displaying a message list with the work ‘abort’.

It has to be said that the folder I was using was large. 5.3 GB

However using a basically empty folder works.

Used configuration

Config:set( "global.logfile" , "/home/$USER/.lumail2/lumail.log" )
Log:append( os.date() .. " start lumail 2.5!" )
Config:set( "imap.cache", "/home/$USER/.lumail2/imap.cache" )
Config:set( "imap.proxy", "/etc/lumail2/perl.d/imap-proxy" )
Config:set( "index.sort", "none" )
Config:set( "index.fast", "1" )
Config:set( "imap.server",   "imaps://mail.example.com/" )
Config:set( "imap.username", "$IMAPUSER" )
Config:set( "imap.password", "$PASSWORD" )

Basic Configuration [NOT WELL TESTED - PARTLY WORKING]

mkdir -p /home/$USER/Mail/sent

vim ~/.lumail2/lumail2.lua

Config:set( "maildir.prefix",  "/home/$USER/Mail" );
Config:set( "global.sent-mail",  "/home/$USR/Mail/sent" )

-- Set your outgoing mail-handler, and email-address:
Config:set( "global.mailer", "/usr/lib/sendmail -t" )
Config:set( "global.sender", "Some User <test@example.com>" )

-- Set your editor
Config:set( "global.editor", "vim  +/^$ ++1 '+set tw=72'" )

Looking at mail do work and looks nice

Critique

Pros:

  • easy to compile
  • flexible (not tested)
  • Perl for IMAP (not tested)

Cons:

  • Was not able to use 5.3 GB IMAP server
  • Was not able to use 5.3 GB offlineimap folder
  • Either has no debug output or was not able to activate, even after specifying log file in configuration
  • crashed after using vim

History

Version Date Notes
0.1.3 2024-06-18 Readd info 2.5 and 2.9 from 2016 (Critique …)
0.1.2 2022-07-26 Fix layout, typos, style, release to quick guide
0.1.1 2022-07-19 Update lumail 3.1 and Debian 11 Bullseye
0.1.0 2016-06-22 Initial release
  • Lumail