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                                 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:

     * A wide-character version of the curses library. ncurses supports wide
       characters starting with version 5.3, if enabled at compile time.

     * Libxml2

     * OpenSSL 0.9.7 or higher.

     * aspell or pspell

     * Where available, FAM, the File Alteration Monitor

     * gcc 3.2, or higher

     * gmake (if not already installed)

     * The Courier Socks 5 proxy client API toolkit is required for Socks 5
       support. Other Socks 5 proxy client libraries may or may not work.
       Download the Courier Socks 5 proxy client library from
       http://www.courier-mta.org/download.php#sox and follow its
       installation instructions.

   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 (Red Hat 9, and earlier) for the               
         wide-character version of the ncurses 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 does not read the
   system mailbox file directly (usually /var/spool/something). All messages
   in the system mailbox are automatically moved to $HOME/Inbox, which is
   then accessed as if it was the system mailbox. Starting Cone for the first
   time on an mbox-based system automatically copies all existing mail from
   the system mailbox file to $HOME/Inbox.

   This is an intentional design choice. Normal user application cannot
   create new files in /var/spool; all they can do is read the mailbox file
   from /var/spool. Therefore, the only way to update the mailbox file is by
   rewriting it from scratch (more or less). While the mailbox file is in the
   process of being rewritten, if the Cone process is interrupted, or killed,
   the resulted in a corrupted system mailbox. There are way to minimize this
   vulnerability, but it cannot be eliminated completely. Some Linux kernels
   use an "OOM killer" that may terminate any process when the system memory
   is low. There is no way to completely prevent corrupted system mailbox
   files on those kernels.

   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.

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