Installation Of ICEMail

Requirements

ICEMail is a Java application. You should check the detailed requirements list to be sure that you are completely prepared to use the ICEMail application.

Installing ICEMail

After extracting the contents of the archive, the ICEMail directory will contain several subdirectories. The application directory contains the icemail.jar file, and the Windows DLL files. The source directory will contain another archive with the source code in it. The doc directory will contain these documentation pages.

ICEMail Parts

ICEMail is a Java application. This means that it will not run as an Applet. Therefore, you can not run ICEMail in your favorite web browser. You must have the java interpretter installed on your machine to run ICEMail. The interpretter must be release 1.1 or later.

The JAR file icemail.jar contains all of the ICEMail classes needed to get ICEMail running.

ICEMail no longer uses the static properties.txt file for configuration. ICEMail now automatically generates any and all configuration files it needs, and places them in your home directory, where it will find them when needed. All properties are now configured via dialog boxes in ICEMail, so you should never have to look at the properties file again!

If you do not know where your Home Directory is, just watch ICEMail's startup output as it displays the location. The startup info will also tell you your platform name, user name, and other relevant information. You can specify your home directory when you start java with the '-Duser.home=path' option, which will set the 'user.home' property.

The icemailcap.txt file contains the Mailcap file that ICEMail uses by default. This file is located in your home directory. The mailcap file tells ICEMail how to view attachments. If you click on an attachment, and are not happy with how it is presented to you for viewing, then you will want to consult the mailcap file. The mailcap file is based on RFC 1524. However, it should be obvious from its contents how it operates. Unix users will have plenty to add regarding viewing with external applications. I look forward to help in this area.

The icemime.txt file contains the MimeTypes file that ICEMail uses by default. The mimetypes file tells ICEMail how to attach files based on their extension, or suffix. If you are attaching files to your outgoing email, but the attachments are always attached as 'application/octet-stream', then you will need to consult this file, and add lines that describe your file via its extension.

ICEMail uses the Hot Java Browser been from Sun. This bean implements a full web browser, and is what ICEMail uses to let you browse the web from your email. Currently, the Hot Java Broswer classes are included in the icemail.jar file. Thus, you do not have to add the Hot Java JAR file to your classpath.

ICEMail uses several important new packages from Sun in order to get the JavaMail features in full. These packages are Java Activation and Java Mail. These packages are not included in the icemail.jar file! Thus, you must have these packages installed and in your CLASSPATH. The files are activation.jar and mail.jar. If you do not understand what this means, or if you do not have these packages, you should visit the ICEMail home page. There you will find links to the resources you need.

Windows Specific Installation

Yes, I know, Java applications should not have installation instructions that are specific to a given platform. Your check is in the mail. However, ICEMail has code in it to make it a very tightly integrated Win32 application. If you take the extra steps details here, you will be able to open MSWord attachments directly in Word, and you will be able to open ZIP archive attachments directly in WinZip.

To make sure that the Win32 specific features are enabled, you must make provisions for Windows to find the two DLL files that implement Win32 Native Interfaces that ICEMail uses. These files are named ICE_JNIDDE.dll, and ICE_JNIRegistry.dll. The latter implements code to access the Windows Registry Database, and the former implements code to utilize Windows DDE communications.

The simplest approach is to simply leave the two DLL files in the 'application' folder of the ICEMail distribution. If you start ICEMail with this folder as the current directory, then Windows should be able to find the DLL files. If this does not seem to work, then you will want to copy the two DLL files to the System folder. Under Windows95, this is typically in C:\Windows\System. Under Windows NT, this is typically in C:\WinNT\System32.

Regardless of your success or failure with respect to installing these DLL files, ICEMail will function just fine without them. So, you can come back to this step later if you wish. Otherwise, you may modify the mailcap file to point to a different viewer.

$Id: install.html,v 1.5 1998/05/07 18:05:22 time Exp $
Copyright (c) 1998 By Timothy Gerard Endres
ICEMail is licensed to you under the GNU General Public License.