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Bongo M1 (0.3.0) Release notes

Bongo is currently alpha-quality software. It is under active development and is not yet ready for production servers. However, we encourage you to try it out in a test environment and let us know what you think!

About Bongo

Bongo is a project to create fun and simple mail & calendaring software. As well as providing a well-featured but extensible set of server software, it also comes with a user-friendly web interface.

Although Bongo is a young project, the software itself has a long pedigree going back to commercial products many years old. The core code isn't new, but the ideas we have and the direction we're taking are: we aim to provide a compelling alternative to other systems out there, not to compete directly with them.

We have a roadmap laid out to our 1.0 release, which we hope will appeal primarily to people who are interested in features which make email and calendars more useful, rather than those interested in "groupware" or "enterprise communication platforms". We're particularly aiming 1.0 at power home users, small organisations/businesses, and people providing mail services for third parties.

What's In This Release?

The M3 release is the third release on the Bongo roadmap. As a source-only release, it is intended only for developers and advanced users who understand they will probably experience bugs and/or rough edges. Originally, we had planned this to be a release that end-users could effectively test: however, we've done an awful lot since M2. So, this release will be a developer only release, and the next will be a more formal alpha release.

M3 provides a working e-mail and calendaring system, the web user interface for e-mail and calendaring, and a web administration system. There are basic command line tools available to configure the system.

What's New?

The headline features in this release are:

TODO

There are numerous under-the-bonnet changes which will interest developers. We have simplified the system for loading configuration, and are in the process of removing the "MDB" LDAP-like system - we hope this will be complete by the next release.

Download and installation

You can download the M3 release from the GNA download page:

http://download.gna.org/bongo/release/bongo-0.3.0.tar.bz2

As a quick start, you once you've downloaded the release, you then:

tar -jxf bongo-0.3.0.tar.bz2
  cd bongo-0.3.0
  ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/bongo
  make
  (as root from here)
  make install
  cd /usr/local/bongo
  ./sbin/bongo-setup
  ./sbin/bongo-config install

We have instructions for compilation in our [[Installation/Source | source guide]] - you will need to fulfil various dependencies, but they are mostly pretty simple.

After you have compiled and installed, you can then set about [[Configuration/Bongo | configuring Bongo]].

Binary packages of Bongo are also being made available on an ongoing basis, but remember that this is a developer release.

Known Issues

You may want to review the project bugs page to see a complete list of those issues discovered. At the time of release, the following bugs are known:

e-mails without a subject may be incorrectly grouped into a single conversation
generating encryption data in bongo-setup is quite slow
systems with "low entropy" (small amount of hardware-generated randomness data available, usually server-type systems with no attached I/O) may take a ''very'' long time to generate the encryption data needed by Bongo during bongo-setup (related to the previous issue). Plugging in a keyboard and hitting keys helps. FIXED
some mail headers are sometimes incorrectly parsed.
we believe there may be a generic problem crashing our search subsystem (CLucene) on 64-bit platforms FIXED
the web administration system doesn't work under Apache FIXED
we recommend not installing to system locations (e.g., /usr), as our CLucene library will conflict with an installed version
the web interfaces expect to be on their own domain, and the URLs cannot be configured to be different places

Next Release

The next release will be M4. Coming in that release::

support for virtual domains
completion of the new web administration tool
simplified install process, without a dependency on an LDAP server
mail forwarding and address rewriting

There will also be technical advances that are not immediately visible to users.

This will be our first preview release: we will be asking non-developers to try this software for the first time. As such, there will be fewer new features in M3 compared to M3, but hopefully a lot more stability and reliability. M4 will only be released when we're happy it's useful for people to test.

For further information, see the Roadmap.