[aMail-announce] aMail 2.1 on the road (announce #3)

[Victor A. Rodriguez<vi...@bi...>]

Hi all, 



As you notice from the subject, aMail 2.1 has arrived !! 



There's news for everyone: users, developer, integrators ... 



This release is the first one to be developed under the SourceForge umbrella and, coincidently, some new things happened to aMail: 



- Broad audience intended: The multilingual support, added to this release, allows more people worldwide to use it, without rewriting the program in each new language to be deployed (just one module). 



- Modularization: As part of a broad audience intended, and looking inside aMail, each new feature added is carried out as a module. This permits that different functions are being carried out by different and individualized modules. In the near future each user would select the modules to use according to the intended specific use, allowing the use of each line of code in the program (no dead code to waste disk and memory space). 



Suppose you are a home user, then all e-mails, preferences, etc. will be stored in a group of files, but if you are a company offering mail hosting probably the storage of information and e-mail for hundreds of users is better accomplished by using a database: simply replace the files storage module with the proper for database use and voilá, you are using each piece of code. 



- Adaptability: Many times you want a new look or any customization to be carried out, but don't want to make any code change (simply you don't have the time to do it or don't know Perl). In this release the first step has been to implement a simple skin mechanism, that allows to change all icons. 



- Documentation: A User's Manual has been added. Basically the original aMail download page written by Alex Hart was reorganized, updated and accessed inside aMail (a new button supports this functionality). 



- Portability: More efforts are being devoted to testing on other platforms (mainly tested on Linux, OpenBSD and Windows NT), and a few bugs have been corrected to support them. 



Of course some bugs have been corrected, and the original version is being updated with bug fixes. For downloading aMail v2.1.0 take a look at aMail-stable package in http://sourceforge.net/projects/amail . 



Remember that the stable version is a fully functional, stabilized, and updated user documentation. The technical documentation (for developer, integrators, etc.) will be available as a different package. 



Stay tuned !! 

-- 

Victor A. Rodriguez (http://www.bit-man.com.ar) 

El bit Fantasma (Bit-man)