FreePOPs

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FreePOPs

Author:	Caprari, Cocchiaro, Schwager, Tassi, and Vellei
Initial release:	30 April 2004
Latest release:	0.2.1 / 25 March 2007
OS:	Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, BeOS
Platform:	Cross-platform
Available language(s):	C, Lua
Use:	Email
License:	GNU GPL
Website:	FreePOPs.org

FreePOPs is an extensible mail proxy. Its primary use is to allow checking and downloading of e-mail from webmails from any conventional POP3 client program, avoiding the need to use a Web browser. It can also be used as an aggregator for RSS feeds and more.

1 FreePOPs
2 Operating systems
3 External links

[edit] FreePOPs

FreePOPs is a POP3 daemon with a LUA interpreter and some extra libraries for HTTP and HTML parsing. Its main purpose is translating local POP3 requests (from a local e-mail client for example) to remote HTTP actions on the supported webmails, but it is more flexible than that. For example, a plugin is available that allows receiving news from a website as if they were e-mail messages in a mailbox. FreePOPs can be extended on the fly: plugins can be added or existing ones can be modified by simply changing the relevant script file.

The software is supported by a very active user forum - see below.

FreePOPs is a very useful way of dealing with a webmail as though it were a regular POP3 mailbox. Most webmail providers require you to use a web browser to read and collect your mail. This process can be slow and any mail software client coupled with FreePOPs can do this in the background effectively; for this purpose, FreePOPs can be combined with programs such as PopTray, getmail or Mozilla Thunderbird, to allow scheduled checking of both POP3 mailboxes and webmails in the background.

FreePOPs is Free Software, being released under the GNU GPL License.

[edit] Operating systems

FreePOPs is available on most consumer operating systems, whether included in official software distributions (as is the case with Linux), or in the form of installer packages provided by developers or users:

[edit] Linux

Debian GNU/Linux : FreePOPs is part of Debian (sarge, etch and sid).
Ubuntu and Kubuntu: FreePOPs is part of Ubuntu (breezy, dapper, edgy, feisty).
SuSE, Fedora Core, Red Hat : if you have dependency problems, you may download the source rpm package and build the binary yourself. You must have libcurl, libopenssl and expat (and the relative development packages) installed.
Mandriva
Gentoo : FreePOPs is part of the official Gentoo packages.
Slackware
FreeBSD & OpenBSD : there are no pre-built binaries for FreeBSD or OpenBSD, but you should be able to compile the sources.

[edit] Windows

For Windows operating systems a standard Auto-installer package is available for download on the official FreePOPs website. This should work with all versions of Windows, from Windows 95 to Windows XP.
The default auto-installer is bundled with GnuTLS or OpenSSL (libraries for cryptography that are used mainly for secure http connections).

[edit] MAC OS X

For Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) or 10.4 (Tiger) an installer package is available; this will install, since version 0.2.0 of FreePOPs, the new native application (in .app format). Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) users must use the static installer package (undeveloped since 0.2.0) instead of the regular one.
Alternatively an unofficial front-end with a GUI is available, MacFreePOPs, that includes a pre-compiled executable for Mac OS X Jaguar, Panther and Tiger.