Installation and Configuration

Installing
There are two ways to install Scribe, depending on which download you have. Either you have a .zip file or a .exe file.

When you run the program for the first time Scribe won't find any local storage for email and contacts, so it will prompt you to create them. If you don't have existing folders then you should click "Ok". If you do have an existing installation with mail folders select "Open an existing folder", then use "..." to browse to the location of the folders.

Now you should be able to see a folder tree on the left, a menu along the top and a toolbar beneath. At this point you'll want to start configuring your identity and accounts. To start this process click File -> Options. Enter your identity on the first tab and then move on to the accounts tab to configure your mail server settings.

Command Line Options
When you have installed the application there are some command line options you can use the start Scribe with. These are completely optional, and most users will not need to use any command line parameters. This is just for reference sake:

Configuration
Once Scribe is running you can at any time open a different set of folders using the File -> Open Folders menu. This closes the currently selected folder if any. You can create new folders with the File -> Create Folders menu.

Every couple of weeks, depending on usage you should backup the folders (by copying them in your file manager) and compact the folder using File -> Compact Folders to remove unused space. Otherwise your folders will just get bigger and bigger, even if you delete things.

Then once you have the folders setup you need to configure the accounts and options. Click File -> Options and begin filling out your identification details. The following is a description of the different options:

Uninstalling
How you uninstalling Scribe is dependent on which method you used to install it. If you used the zip file to install Scribe with then you can just delete the directory containing Scribe and you're done.

If you used the self contained install exe then go into Scribe's entry in the Start Menu and select "uninstall".

Only a few unavoidable settings are left in the registry and no dll's or other files are put into system directories. If you want to keep your folders and email then don't delete the folders.mail file in Scribe's directory.

The registry settings left behind are:

These are unavoidable for system intergration and don't impact system performance after you remove Scribe. HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto can be set to something else by changing Control Panel -> Internet Options -> Programs -> Email.

Plugins Window
To access the plugin window click File -> Plugins. This window allows you to load, unload and configure plug-ins for scribe. If you're a 3rd party developer looking to create a plugin for Scribe then I'm more than happy to help you. The architeture is fairly flexible. However I'm still adding the the functions that can be performed by a plugin. Currently plugins can handle directory services, content display and text processing.

Signature XML
Signature file's contents can contain commands that are executed when the signature is added to an email. Otherwise they are plain text, in utf-8 format. These commands are formatted in XML and are inserted amongst the text of the signature. The following commands are available:

lgi.conf options
Some advanced or obscure options aren't available in the UI but can be configured via a text file called lgi.conf which you create in the same folder as scribe.exe, it's in XML format, so start with: 
		<options>
		</options>
Then start filling new XML elements in between the start and end options tag. These are described below:

On shutdown options: 

<scribe on-close="option"/>
Where 'option' can be: Neither option will function when the OS is shutting down.

Download behaviour when running out of disk space:

When the disk space on the device that stores the mail folders starts to run out Scribe can be configured to discard attachments and then stop downloading mail at all. These limits are configured as sizes, either in absolute form (i.e. "3mb") or in relitive form (i.e. "1%"). The postfixes "kb", "mb" and "gb" are understood. 
<scribe-limits noattach="size" nodownload="size" lines="integer"/>
Where:

Adminisrator password: 

<scribe admin-psw="password-hash"/>
Where password-hash is generated by the password tool.

Folder permissions: 

<scribe-folder path="scribe-path" read="read-perms" write="write-perms"/>
Where:

Account settings access: 

<scribe-accounts read="read-perms" write="write-perms"/>
Where 'read' and 'write' can have the value:

Configure some of the colours used in Scribe: 

<colour.LC_MAIL_PREVIEW hex="xxxxxx"/>
		<colour.LC_UNREAD_COUNT hex="xxxxxx"/>
		<colour.LC_URL hex="xxxxxx"/>
		<colour.LC_REPLY_LVL_1 hex="xxxxxx"/>
		<colour.LC_REPLY_LVL_2 hex="xxxxxx"/>
		<colour.LC_REPLY_LVL_3 hex="xxxxxx"/>
		<colour.LC_REPLY_LVL_4 hex="xxxxxx"/>
		<colour.LC_REPLY_LVL_5 hex="xxxxxx"/>
		<colour.LC_REPLY_LVL_6 hex="xxxxxx"/>
		<colour.LC_REPLY_LVL_7 hex="xxxxxx"/>
		<colour.LC_REPLY_LVL_8 hex="xxxxxx"/>
Where the 'xxxxxx' is a html hex colour.

PopOverHttp
The POP over HTTP protocol allows you to access a POP mailbox from behind a HTTP proxy and no direct socket access. You do however need a web server on the outside of the firewall that can run PHP scripts. It doesn't have to be on the same machine as the POP server you want to access. However, it's a lot faster if it is on the same machine as the POP server.

You can either setup the PopOverHttp script on your own webserver or you can sign up at PopOverHttp.com for an account.

To configure a self-hosted PopOverHttp account, firstly download the script and edit it to contain your POP account's server, username and password. Then upload it to your webserver, preferably in a directory that is password protected. Setting up a webserver or password protecting a directory on a webserver is beyond the scope of this document, but there is plenty of websites describing how to do all that on the net.

Once your script is in place, configure an account in Scribe to use the PopOverHttp protocol. Enter the full http URL of the script in the server field. e.g.: 

http://www.host.com/~user/popoverhttp.php
If the directory requires a username/password to access then enter those credentials in the user/pass fields of the account. Otherwise leave them blank.

You can use a normal web browser to test that the script is working, just put the URL to the script into the browser and if you get a list of message ID's then it's working and the URL should work in Scribe as well. Remember that if you need a proxy to retrieve pages from the web you need to set that up in the connection tab in the main options window.

Now you should be able to connect to your POP account. As a nice side effect of bundling lots of requests and responses in batchs over HTTP it's actually substantially faster than raw POP if the webserver hosting the script is on the same machine as the POP server.

© 1999-2010 Matthew Allen