User's Manual

Introduction
License and Disclaimer
Obtaining the Latest Copy
From the Readme File
Requirements
Installation
Configuration
History of Changes

Introduction

This document has been provided to cover installation, configuration, and administration of the 6XMailer PHP POP3 Mail Reader. 6XMailer is a set of PHP 4 scripts, HTML documents, style sheets (Level 1) that provide a highly customizable web-based POP3 mail reader. It features themes, multilingual support, and built-in help system.

License and Disclaimer

6XMailer - A PHP POP3 mail reader.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

Obtaining the Latest Copy

To obtain the latest copy of 6XMailer, then visit 6XGate Systems' web site at: www.sixxgate.da.ru. There will also be archived copies of previous releases as well. The best way to support 6XMailer is to use it.

From the Readme File

These scripts in this zip file or tarball are only at the BETA stage of production and have not been fully tested in a production environment.

The documents and user's manual are located in the documents directory.

NOTE: You must check the configuration file to make sure that the mailer will work with your system, if not, problems may occur.

Please refer to the install.txt file for requirements, installation instructions, and configuration information. ALWAYS!!! Since this script is im BETA, these instructions will change.

If anyone would like to help me with coding, documentation, or any other aspect of this mailer such as themes or language packs, then goto www.sixxgate.da.ru and e-mail me at the e-mail address under the Contacting Us page.

Requirements

This mail reader was written with PHP 4.0.4PL1 running on the development server. I am not sure if all the commands used or limited to this version of PHP as of this time, if someone would please test it on earlier version and tell me the results.

These are the following requirements to use 6XMailer:

An operating system that supports and has TCP/IP installed
A web server that supports and has PHP 4 installed with the IMAP extensions installed enabled
A POP3 server and a SMTP server
A web browser with cookie and POST support
mySQL

Recommended setup:

OS: Linux 2, Windows 9x/Me, Windows NT/2000
WWW Server: Apache 1.3x, Personal Web Server 4.0, IIS 4.0 or better
PHP: The latest version PHP with the IMAP extensions.
Browser: Internet Explorer 4.0 or better, Netscape Communicator 6.0 or better, Mozilla 0.6 or better

Installation

Once you have obtained a copy of 6XMailer, you need to setup your web server the way you wish to host the mailer scripts and make sure these directories have the proper permissions. Later I will add separate section for each web server and how to configure them in any number of ways to host 6XMailer.

Once you have configured your web server and created the directory for the scripts, decompress the zip or tarball to that directory with the option to restore the directory structure. With that done, open the config.php and edit it to match your network's or server's configuration. For more information about the config.php file refer to the Configuration section. The SMTP configuration is controlled by the php.ini file.

You must also enabled the IMAP extensions in PHP to use this script. First make sure that the extensions are compiled acording to the PHP documents. Then, open you php.ini file and find a line (if you compiled the extensions as a seperate module) that reades ;extension=php_imap.dll, or what ever name the module compiled under, and remove the ";" from in front of the line. Then restart your web-server if necessary.

Once you are finished editing the settings file, run the file in the SQL directory with mySQL as follows, you may edit the database name in the sql files:

If you are installing 6XMailer for the first time run setup_new.sql.
If you upgrading from a previous version run the file update_from_(version).sql, replacing (version) with the version you are upgrading from. This will not delete existing data in the address books or user settings database.

Then go into your php.ini file and find a setting called register_globals and set it to Off. Then find the track_vars and set it to On. If you can't change this settings in php.ini because of other scripts running on your server, then simply go into the your Apache configuration file httpd.conf or in the .htaccess for the 6XMailer if you running Apache (which I recommend) and change these settings by adding these lines:

php_flag register_globals off
php_flag track_vars on

in the <Directory> or <VIRTUALHOST> sections that host 6XMailer, or in the .htaccess file that is in the directory that contains 6XMailer.

Configuration

Most of the configuration of 6XMailer is controller by the config.php script, the SMTP portion of the configuration is in the php.ini file.

POP3 Server

This section of the config.php file is information about your POP3 server and POP3 domain.

$POPHostname: This is the IP address or a fully qualified host name of your POP3 server.
$POPPort: This is the port that your POP3 server is listening on, this usually defaults to 110.
$POPDomain: This value is used to add the domain part of the e-mail address to the end of usernames. NOTE: Do not set this if your username is your e-mail address.

SMTP Server

These are settings in your php.ini that define the SMTP server information that the mailer will ues to send e-mail.

SMTP: This is the SMTP server to use to send e-mail, this setting is only for system that do not have a built-in or commonly defined SMTP server, daemon, or service.
sendmail_from: Do not modify or use this setting, it is the default e-mail address that all sent message are from, this is never used by 6XMailer as it sends an e-mail under the name of the logged on user.
sendmail_path: This is the path and command line of the sendmail binary on any system that uses or has sendmail installed. Typically this is not used on any Microsoft based machine.

Text Strings

This section of config.php contains several strings of text used by the mailer that you and safely customize.

$MailSystemTitle: This is the title of the mailer system, this can be the name of your company or some code name, it's up to you.
$QuoteInReply: This is the text that is placed between the original and the reply message when replying to an e-mail.

Other settings

These are other settings in the config.php file that will allow you to customize and configure the mailer.

$DemoMode: This setting will disable the functions for sending mail, creating per-user setting, and using the address book.
$Language: This is the language that the mailer will be in; this helps to define the labels, help documentation, and about page. Language files and scripts or stored in the lang directory. This defaults to English.
$Theme: This is the name of the theme that the mailer will use. It defines the look and feel of the mailer. A theme is a collection of style sheets, setting scripts, and image files. Themes are stored in the themes directory.
$RefreshList: This is the number of seconds that the browser will wait before automatically reloading the Mail List. It's default is 600 (10 minutes)
$AttachmentSize: This lets the administrator limit the size of the files that can be attached to mail. If this size ends in a "M", or "k" then the the size will be based on a Megabyte or kilobyte. If no ending exists then the size is in bytes. The ending is case insensitive. No setting or a setting of 0 with any ending means no limit.

mySQL settings

These are other settings in the config.php file that will allow you specify the settings to access a mySQL server with the databases beeded to run 6XMailer.

$QLPort: This is the port that your mySQL server is on. It defaults as "3306".
$QLHostname: This is the hostname of you mySQL server. It defaults as "localhost".
$QLSocket: This is the path to the socket. No default.
$QLUsername: The username needed to access your mySQL server.
$QLPassword: The password needed to access your mySQL server.
$QLDatabase: The name of the database to use for the per-user settings.

History of Changes

0.65.02 - Sunday, February 25, 2001 01:34:26 AM Central Standard Time

Added embedded image displaying.
Added Forward and View Sorce.
Changed a few comments in the configuration file.
Add help for the new features or course.

0.65.03 - Sunday, February 25, 2001 02:46:54 AM Central Standard Time

(UNRELEASED)

Made a correction in the about.php file.
Added the future.txt file.
Extended the embedded contect to APPLET, OBJECT, A, and LINK tags.
Correct some bugs in the message source viewing code.

0.70.00 - Sunday, February 25, 2001 5:24:56 AM Central Standard Time

(UNRELEASED)

Add attachment listing and downloading.
Removed the replaced "Message" with a return to message link on the source and attachmens page.
Corrected a few grammatical problems with the strings.php in the "English" pack.

0.75.00 - Sunday, February 25, 2001 7:57:02 AM Central Standard Time

(UNRELEASED)

Added the feature to send attachments with e-mails.

0.75.01 - Monday, February 26, 2001 6:08:25 AM Central Standard Time

Updated the help file.

0.80.00 - Wednesday, February 28, 2001 9:53:42 AM Central Standard Time

Added an address book.
Fixed a few bugs.

0.80.05 - Thursday, March 01, 2001 5:22:01 AM Central Standard Time

Fixed a few problems where people who's usernames was there e-mail addresses, will add the domain part at the end, if you don't set it in the config file. In version .80.00 I made the mailer fail without that but it will run normally now.
Made message headers and text pass through the session instead of logging on to the POP3 server for every page. This doesn't include source viewing page or attachments page. This should decrease the POP3 traffic down alot!.

0.80.10 - Friday, March 02, 2001 6:40:49 AM Central Standard Time

(UNRELEASED)

Fixed the address book to place address in the TO box on the send form. It will simple put an address in the box if the send forms already loaded. If the send form isn't it loads it with the address in the box.
Fixed some database bug. Make sure you read the installation instructions.