*** THIS IS AN AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED REPLY *** Thanks for your message to jitter-bugs@samba.anu.edu.au Your messages has been placed into our bug tracking system and will be looked at in due course by one of the developers. Note that this may take some time because the developers only work on JitterBug when they have spare time. You may follow the progress of this message by loading the following URL in a web browser: http://samba.anu.edu.au/jitterbug?findid=%PRNUM% Please remember to retain the PR# identifier on any further messages you send to us regarding this message. If you don't then you'll just waste our time and yours because we won't be able to properly track the message. Now to the main point of this autoreply! In our experience many people ask questions that have been asked before. So we include below the current FAQ for JitterBug. This has been automatically generated from the common replies we send from our bug tracking system. I hope it is useful for you! 1) 8 bit clean 2) DEBUG_COMMENTS 3) HELO vs EHLO 4) MIME Support 5) Solaris tcp 6) always guest 7) debugging mail problems 8) delete messages 9) edit jconfig.h 10) freeze on send 11) guest preferences 12) qmail and SIZE= 13) subdirectories 14) submit delay 15) timezones in date fields ---------------------------------------- 1) 8 bit clean By default JitterBug does not display accented characters. I did this because some browsers have troubles with these characters and display garbage. If you need accented characters then use the option "display binary = yes" ---------------------------------------- 2) DEBUG_COMMENTS If you use the DEBUG_COMENTS stuff to debug JitterBug then you are on your own. I don't use it myself and don't test it before new releases. Dan added it but hasn't been updating it for subsequent releases. ---------------------------------------- 3) HELO vs EHLO The internal JitterBug mailer assumes your smtp server known ESMTP, which uses the EHLO command instead of the HELO command. If your mailer doesn't know about EHLO then JitterBug will lock up when trying to send mail. (The internal mailer is very dumb) If this happens then upgrade your mailer or use the external mailer option in the jitterbug config file ---------------------------------------- 4) MIME Support The way I handle MIME for my JitterBug pages is by using emil to filter incoming mail, which allows me to decode base64 attachments and thus deal with MIME as plain text. I add this to the .procmailrc: :0 fhbw * ^MIME-Version: *1.0 | emil -T8 -H8 -FMIME | formail I may add proper MIME support in a future version. ---------------------------------------- 5) Solaris tcp several people have reported a problem with sending mail from JitterBug in Solaris. This is caused by the lack of the /dev/tcp device in the chrooted area. I didn't test JitterBug on Solaris so I didn't notice the problem and most other OSes don't need devices in order to open a socket. It can be fixed by creating the correct devices/files in the chrooted area or you can use the new 1.5 release which can run without chroot and thus won't have this problem. The new release can also use an external mailer (such as sendmail) instead of the internal mailer. ---------------------------------------- 6) always guest This is how JitterBug decides if you are a guest user or not: 1) if the AUTH_TYPE environment variable has not been set by your web server you are guest. Web servers set this environment variable when they have performed some sort of authentication for the current page. 2) if you have set the "auth user" option in the JitterBug config file then the REMOTE_USER environment variable must be set to the same string as the "auth user" option or JitterBug will set you as a guest user. Your web server should set this environment variable equal to the username that you chose while authenticating. If you find that you are always being logged in as guest then the most likely problem is that you have not correctly configured your web server to authenticate the JitterBug URL. You will need to refer to your web server documentation for help. ---------------------------------------- 7) debugging mail problems To debug mail problems where you think new_message is not working I suggest you do the following: 1) use "ls -lu" to determine if new_message is actually being executed. The u flag tells ls to show the last access date, by then sending a piece of mail to jitterbug you should know if new_message is being launched. 2) replace new_message with a script that does somehting like: #!/bin/sh cat > /tmp/new_message.$$ do you get a /tmp/new_message.XXXX file? 3) use the result fo step 2 to do this: new_message PACKAGE < /tmp/new_message.XXXX and see if that works. If it doesn't then either add debug lines to new_message or run it under you system trace utility (strace, truss, ktrace etc). If you still can't work it out then ask someone for help :) ---------------------------------------- 8) delete messages I decided not to have a delete button for JitterBug. In my own uses for JitterBug I wanted the system never to lose a message. You can go in and delete messages manually, but I don't think I'll be adding a delete option. - Tridge ---------------------------------------- 9) edit jconfig.h In the 1.4.* versions of JitterBug lots of people forget to edit the jconfig.h file before compiling JitterBug. This resulted in them submitting bug reports not to their own system but to jitter-bugs@samba.anu.edu.au instead! If this has happened to you then please upgrade to a newer version of JitterBug. The new versions have runtime configuration so it is much harder to make this mistake. ---------------------------------------- 10) freeze on send If JitterBug hangs when you try to send mail it is probably because the internal mailer in JitterBug is very fussy and won't talk to your SMTP server. In version 1.5 of JitterBug it is possible to instead use a external mailer (such as sendmail) if you strike this problem. Just use the "mailer" option in your /etc/jitterbug/ config file. I also plan on making the internal mailer less fussy. ---------------------------------------- 11) guest preferences JitterBug automatically shows the preferences pages if the connected user has not filed in the "full name" preference. This can be a problem if you have forgotten to copy the guest.prefs file to the base directory and guest users try to connect. In that case guest users will get the preference screen and won't be able to save any changes, leading to a frustrating loop. The fix is to copy the sample guest.prefs file to the base directory or to login as guest when authenticated and to set preferences from there. ---------------------------------------- 12) qmail and SIZE= QMail aparently doesn't like the SIZE= option in ESMTP. Unfortunately that option is needed by some other mailers to allow for large emails (large emails are other rejected) My only suggestions is to use the external mailer option with JitterBug if you are using qmail. The internal mailer in JitterBug is too dumb to handle such distinctions. Some day I'll rewrite the internal mailer. Not today :) ---------------------------------------- 13) subdirectories Several people have suggested adding subdirectories (or a directory tree) to JitterBug so you can classify messages in a better fashion. I might add this at some time in the future, but for now it is too big a change and would require quite a lot of coding. It is also not clear what the interface would be like, it might be hard to avoid lots of clicking to move messages about. ---------------------------------------- 14) submit delay Messages don't turn up immediately when you submit them because they go via your systems mailer, which may take a couple of minutes. I did it this way to ensure that all incoming messages are processed in the same way. Some people put custom processing stuff in procmail files. I agree that it is a bit disconcerting though :( - Tridge ---------------------------------------- 15) timezones in date fields JitterBug never deals with dates as dates, only as strings, so that field must be being inserted by your mail setup. There isn't anything that JitterBug can do about it.