hypermail-project / hypermail

Hypermail is a free (GPL) program to convert email from Unix mbox format to html.
http://www.hypermail-project.org/
GNU General Public License v2.0
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                         Hypermail

                      Version:  2.4.x

This is a release of the 2.4.x version of hypermail.

Hypermail is a program that takes a file of mail messages in UNIX mailbox format and generates a set of cross-referenced HTML documents.

SECURITY WARNING: Do not put hypermail's output anyplace where a web server might have server side includes (SSI) enabled unless you are sure you know what you are doing.

WARNING: There once existed a program call "mail" that came with hypermail. 'mail' utility has not installed by default for the last two years.
This program has been disabled because it was probably easy for spammers to use as an open relay. It also had problems with enabling malicious use of JavaScript and CRLF Injection. The 'mail' utility is a historic reclic and will not be supplied in future versions. Its functionality has been replaced with a warning that anyone using it should remove it immediately.

See the INSTALL file to get started. For a description of how to use it, see the hypermail.html, hmrc.html, and hypermail-faq.html files that come in the docs/ directory. Please refer to Changelog for the list of recent changes.

Hypermail is distributed under the GNU GPL license (see the file COPYING for details). Some programs that are distributed with it in the archive and contrib directories have different licenses - check the individual files for details.

Hypermail Background:

Hypermail was originally designed and developed by Tom Gruber for Enterprise Integration Technologies (EIT) using Common Lisp.

It was later rewritten in C by Kevin Hughes in 1994 while Kevin worked at EIT.

License Evolution:

In the spring of 1997, Kevin Hughes heavily pressed Hewlett-Packard (who was now the legal owner of Hypermail, since EIT was bought by VeriFone, which was bought by Hewlett-Packard) into placing a free software license onto his old EIT software. They officially put the GNU GPL license on all of Kevin's old EIT software, opening it up to more open methods of development and distribution. So now Hypermail is under GPL.

EIT's net.disappearance:

A very old and established government contractor company called Electronic Instrumentation and Technology Inc. made legal moves to obtain the eit.com domain. Since VeriFone/HP had no interest in keeping EIT, dissolved it completely. As this company had a trademark on EIT, the domain name was given to them. Elizabeth Batson of EIT/VeriFone/HP informed Kevin he could maintain all his old software himself wherever he wished to put it.

Kevin and ongoing Hypermail Development:

Kevin left Hewlett-Packard in 1997 and helped form a new company called Veo Systems (www.veosystems.com) with his old boss Marty Tenenbaum, who founded EIT. Kevin did not have the time to maintain any of his old software, so he was looking for different parties to help maintain it and take over different pieces. For instance, Getstats has been obsoleted by Analog (http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/analog/). SWISH has been taken over by the SWISH-E project (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/SWISH-E/) and many people have been doing good things with it. April 17, 1998 Kevin passed hypermail development to Kent Landfield (http://www.hypermail.org/). Kent had been supporting an enhanced version of hypermail he had been using for the last few years. It has gradually become a group effort, with Peter McCluskey pcm@rahul.net often acting as the leader during its heydays. Since a couple of years, it is stable and mostly unmaintained. W3C continues to contribute to this repository, although infrequently, sharing with the community enhancements and bug fixes originating from its use of hypermail.

General:

This version has been tested on the platforms listed below. If you would like to send portability patches or confirmation that it works on a certain platform, please do. There should not be toooo many changes that need to be made.

This version of hypermail has substantial support for attachments and for splitting archives into subdirectories. It also allows an administrator to customize the header and footers to match their local needs. This allows you to have hypermail facilities better integrated into your web site.

This version is an integration of patches that Kevin had received through the years, and new features through the individual efforts many people.
This has been run through lint, Insight and Purify and has been cleaned up accordingly.

Warning:

Take the time to read the KNOWN_BUGS file so that you are aware of things that might affect your use of hypermail.

GIT Repository:

Hypermail's code base has migrated from CVS to git and after a residence at sourceforge, now resides at github:

https://github.com/hypermail-project/hypermail/

CVS Server:

The hypermail CVS repository has been retired. Hypermail's code base now resides at github (see above).

Thanks to Ashley M. Kirchner ashley@pcraft.com for having hosted and keep alive the CVS repository during the years.

Getting Help:

There is no active dedicated mailing list for hypermail support or
development.

Please use hypermail's github repository issue tracker for all bug
reports, feature requests, patches, and other program-related
things. This project is under low-maintenance priority.

You can browse the old hypermail development mailing list archives
from the historical hypermail project homepage:

   http://hypermail-project.org/

Additionally:

You'll find the image "hypermail.gif" included with the source;
this icon is for your use in your Hypermail-related pages and links 
to them. If you are talented with graphics and would like to donate
new icons and images to the hypermail effort, please feel free.

Regular expression support is provided by the PCRE library package, which is open source software, written by Philip Hazel, and copyright by the University of Cambridge, England. See http://www.pcre.org/.