Setup

Adapted from the Jaromail manual source. Copyleft © 2010–2023 Denis Roio. GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 or later; full permission notice.

Install a Linux release

For the latest prebuilt package, use the quick installer. The original build instructions follow.

Build

Native helpers are built with CMake 3.20+, Python 3.9+, a C compiler, and Ninja or Make. The build does not install system packages or download dependencies. On Debian-like systems the build packages are:

gcc cmake ninja-build python3 libncurses-dev libreadline-dev

Install

To install the following programs need to be installed:

fetchmail msmtp neomutt direnv mblaze pinentry wipe notmuch alot

The full abook 0.6.2 source is bundled and built with Jaromail, using wide-character ncurses and GNU readline. Installed Jaromail selects its private share/jaromail/bin/abook, leaving any system abook untouched. Source provenance and customization instructions are in vendor/abook/README.md.

Build and install with:

cmake -S . -B out/build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build out/build --parallel
cmake --install out/build

The default prefix is $HOME/.local, with the command in ~/.local/bin/jaro and runtime in ~/.local/share/jaromail. Add ~/.local/bin to PATH if needed. make install uses this same user-only default without sudo.

For a system installation under /usr/local, run sudo make install-system or sudo cmake --build out/build --target install-system after building. The Make targets accept PREFIX from the command line or environment; the CMake system target accepts it from the environment. Both honor DESTDIR for packaging without root privileges:

make install-system PREFIX=/usr DESTDIR="$PWD/package-root"
# Or, after configuring and building with CMake:
PREFIX=/usr DESTDIR="$PWD/package-root" cmake --build out/build --target install-system

Normal CMake installs also accept --prefix /your/prefix, or configure with -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/your/prefix. Existing build directories retain their cached prefix until explicitly changed. Normal builds install the committed manpages without rewriting them. The CLI reports its assigned release version from installed metadata, derived from Git tags or the release workflow. Static Linux x86_64 and arm64 archives and automatic semantic releases are described in release automation.

Apple/OSX

Apple/OSX users that have no experience in building software can obtain a pre-built universal binary from our download zone on http://files.dyne.org/jaromail/binary

One can simply drag JaroMail into Applications. When started JaroMail opens a Terminal window preconfigured with its environment, to activate it for any terminal add this to `~/.profile`:

export PATH=/Applications/JaroMail.app/Contents/Resources/jaro/bin:$PATH

Use

Make a directory where all the emails and settings needs to be, change to the directory and init the environment:

mkdir $HOME/gmail-alternative

cd $HOME/gmail-alternative

jaro init

Every installation of Jaro Mail is fully reentrant, meaning the directory where it gets initialised contains all maildirs, configurations, filters, whitelist, addressbooks and other necessary files.

A single user can have multiple Jaro Mail folders on the same system to permit the complete separation of E-Mail identities.

If called from outside the installation directory, the jaro command will use the environmental variable $JAROMAILDIR to find out the active installation being in use. If one is using a different installation path then should first change that, i.e:

export JAROMAILDIR=$HOME/OtherIdentities/Luther/Mail