ebiff homepage

What is this?

ebiff is a mail notification agent, like biff or Xbiff, for the GNU/Linux operating system (and other posix operating systems). It is free software distributed under the GNU/GPL license.

What the e of ebiff stands for?

ebiff is an extensible mail notification agent, it is also an enhanced biff clone.

What is ebiff able to do?

ebiff is plugin based, so its capabilityes are only related to the plugins already written. There are two types of plugins: mailbox and notifier.

These are the mailbox plugins:

maildir

Allows ebiff to access mailboxes in maildir format

mbox

Allows ebiff to access mailboxes in mbox format

These are the notifier plugins:

gtk2

This plugin shows the mailbox status in one or more windows, like gbuffy, but is really more customizable.

xosd

This notifier prints an on-screen notice.

sox

You can associate a sound with a mailbox status change.

flite

Flite can synthesize a voice that says what you want when a mail arrives, like "you got new mail".

stdout

This is a simple and debugging purpose only plugin.

utmp

This plugin broadcast-prints a simple message on every terminal owned by the user, like xterms or consoles.

What does it look like?

Here you can see some screenshots (click on the images to enlarge):

Here you can see the gtk2 and the xosd plugins. The green on-screen text is made by the xosd plugin, while the top, left and right windows are the gtk2 notification windows. While top and left are top-level windows with fixed position the window on the right is managed by the windows manager. The window in the center is the preview window associated with the secfoc mailbox. The left window shows all the mailboxes, also the empty ones, while the other windows only the full. Read the documentation for more info about the gtk2 plugin.

Here you can see the utmp plugin printing the inbox mailbox state on an xterm.

What is ebiff development status?

ebiff is beta, not really tested, but works fine for me. Please submit bug reports and suggestions to the author.

Where can I download ebiff?

To download the sources go there.

If you use the debian operating system, you can add this repository (it is for unstable i386 only):

deb http://tassi.web.cs.unibo.it/debian/ebiff ./
deb-src http://tassi.web.cs.unibo.it/debian/ebiff ./

What can I do to contribute to this project?

Submit bugreports and patches. The plugin structure is not really complex, and the author will be happy to explain strange code and help in developing new plugins or impreve the already existing ones.

Where can I find some documentation about ebiff's configuration file?

Here you can find the manual, it is included in the binary distributions, an is generated automatically if you compile it from the sources.

Who created this piece of code?

The author is Enrico Tassi, contact him at this address: 

$Id: index.html,v 1.7 2004/03/07 15:24:43 gareuselesinge Exp $