Cone: COnsole Newsreader And Emailer
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# Cone: COnsole Newsreader And Emailer

### Sam Varshavchik

## Introduction

Cone is a text-based mail client. Cone seamlessly handles multiple POP3, IMAP accounts, and local mail folders. Cone is also a simple newsreader. Cone's interface is foolproof enough to be used by inexperienced users, but it also offers advanced features for power users.

### Overview

- An online tutorial provides a quick overview of Cone's main features.

- A built-in text editor for editing new messages, with search/replace and spell checking (requires aspell or pspell).

  Shortcuts - assign frequently used text to a function key, or to an abbreviation. Insert the text by pressing the function key or typing its abbreviation.

- Supports UTF-8 consoles (requires the wide-character version of the curses library).

- Displays HTML mail, with automatic de-moronization (“smart quotes”, and similar clutter, is replaced by plain garden-variety punctuation).

- Displays attached images, if invoked from an X terminal, by running Gnome's eog, or KDE's kview image viewer. Displays `PDF` attachments by running xpdf. Other, or alternative, helper applications will be added as time permits.

- After attachments are downloaded, they can be optionally removed from the message.

- Handles local mail folders, maildirs, IMAP and POP3 accounts, and Usenet newsgroups. All folders are shown in a hierarchical tree-like display.

- Supports access to servers through a Socks 5 proxy, using the Courier Socks 5 API toolkit.

- Sends mail using an external SMTP server (with/without authentication), or the local sendmail command.

- All network protocols support SSL/TLS and SASL (CRAM-MD5, CRAM-SHA1, and LOGIN).

- Optional authentication using client SSL certificates.

- Address books (which can be stored in an IMAP folder).

- Optional support for LDAP address books.

- Remote configuration (share a common configuration between different instances of Cone).

- An optional “single sign-on”. Use a single master password for multiple remote mail server accounts.

- PGP/GPG based encryption, and digital signatures. Sent messages are automatically signed. Different signing keys may be selected for different mail accounts, and the appropriate key is automatically selected when replying to a message from an account. Selecting a message for an encryption automatically looks up keys that match the recipients' E-mail addresses.

  Import, export, forward and receive PGP/GPG keys as MIME attachments.

  When a single sign-on master password is installed, the master password also handles access to passphrase-protected keys.

- Cone shares a lot of its code base with the Courier mail server, which is why they share the same web site together.

- Cone also serves as a platform for development of a new experimental network mail access protocol, SMAP, that offers additional functionality not available with IMAP or POP3. When Cone logs on to a SMAP-capable server, such as the current development version of Courier, additional features become available:

  1. Folder names may utilize the full UTF-8 character set, without any reserved folder hierarchy separator characters. The user does not need to be aware of the underlying mail folder implementation.

  2. Faster downloading of attachments.

  3. Faster mail sending. SMAP does not require the client to open a second SMTP connection, and send a second copy of the message via SMTP.

  4. Fast opening of large folders. Cone does not need to download the complete folder index every time the folder is opened, only what's changed to the folder since the last time it was open.

  5. Many other useful features that are waiting to be implemented.

- Cone owes its versatility in handling a large variety of mail protocols to the fact that it's based on LibMAIL , a generic C++ library that provides a high-level mail-handling API. Using the `--with-devel` configuration setting installs the LibMAIL toolkit, which allows for development of independent E-mail software.

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