ssoma - some sort of mail archiver
----------------------------------

ssoma is a git-based mail archiver and transport.  Email is injected via
ssoma-mda(1) (MDA: mail delivery agent) on a server and may be shared
(via git) and extracted to mbox, Maildir, or IMAP via ssoma(1).  It
exists primarily as the mechanism for public-inbox.org, but may easily
be used for other projects.

See http://public-inbox.org/ for more information on how ssoma is used.

Features
--------
* stores email in git, so readers have a full history of the mailing list
* mail user-agent (MUA) users may choose from IMAP, mbox(5), and Maildir
* uses only well-documented and easy-to-implement data formats

Requirements (MUA client)
-------------------------
* git
* Perl and several modules:
    - Email::LocalDelivery
    - Email::Simple
    - Net::IMAP::Simple
    - Digest::SHA
* any MUA capable of reading/importing IMAP, mbox(5) or Maildir archives

Requirements (server MDA)
-------------------------
* git
* MTA - postfix is recommended
* Perl and several modules:
    - Email::Simple
    - File::FcntlLock
    - Digest::SHA

Hacking
-------
Source code is available via git:

	git clone git://bogomips.org/ssoma

See below for contact info.

Contact
-------
We are happy to see feedback of all types via plain-text email.
Please email comments, user/developer discussion, patches, bug reports,
and pull requests to our public ssoma instance at:

    ssoma@public-inbox.org

Please Cc: all recipients when replying (this is not a requirement of
ssoma itself, but a good idea since we do not require subscription).
This also makes it easier to rope in folks of tangentially related
projects we depend on (e.g. git developers on git@vger.kernel.org).

You can subscribe via ssoma, LISTNAME is a name of your choosing:

    URL=git://public-inbox.org/ssoma
    LISTNAME=ssoma

    # to initialize a maildir (this may be a new or existing maildir,
    # ssoma will not touch existing messages)
    # If you prefer mbox, use mbox:/path/to/mbox as the last argument
    ssoma add $LISTNAME $URL maildir:/path/to/maildir

    # read with your favorite MUA (only using mutt as an example)
    mutt -f /path/to/maildir # (or /path/to/mbox)

    # to keep your mbox or maildir up-to-date, periodically run the following:
    ssoma sync $LISTNAME

    # your MUA may modify and delete messages from the maildir or mbox,
    # this does not affect ssoma functionality at all

    # to sync all your ssoma subscriptions
    ssoma sync

Mail repository format
----------------------
If you are uncomfortable running code in ssoma for any reason and
would rather read directly from the git repository, the following
document describes it:

    http://ssoma.public-inbox.org/ssoma_repository.txt

Copyright
---------
Copyright 2013, Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net> and all contributors.
License: AGPLv3 or later <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.txt>

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.