Scribe Email Client

Scribe is a small portable email client with an intergrated contact database and calendar. It supports all the major internet mail protocols and uses international standards where possible. Scribe doesn't required installing or uninstalled and can be used from a removable drive without reconfiguration. It comes with a bayesian spam filter and translations to many different languages. Updates are published regularly to respond to problems and to add features. Because Scribe runs on Windows, Mac or Linux you can take your mail with you when you change operating system. And don't worry about viruses, Scribe protects you from the usual security holes in other email clients with it's own virus safe HTML control and executable attachment protection.

Feature	Scribe
Windows 10/11	Yes
MacOSX 10.15+	Yes
Linux x64	Yes
POP3/SMTP/IMAP	Yes
SSL Support	Yes
Spam Filter	Yes
Translations	Yes
Address Book	Yes
Calendar	Yes
On Demand Component Install	Yes
Receive Accounts	Unlimited
Email Identities	Unlimited
Email Filters	Unlimited
Basic MAPI Export	Windows

Windows Win10+ OSX 10.15+ Linux glibc 2.27 v3.x Beta 3.10 x64 6.7 MiB, 18/5/2024 3.9 x64 6.7 MiB, 3/2/2024 3.10 x64 18.8 MiB, 18/5/2024 3.8 x64 12.9 MiB, 3/1/2024 3.8 x64 11.4 MiB, 1/1/2024 3.7 x64 11.4 MiB, 8/12/2023 v2.4.x Stable 2.4.21 x64 6.4 MiB, 4/3/2022 2.4.20 x64 3.6 MiB, 20/11/2021 2.4.21 x64 10.6 MiB, 5/3/2022 2.4.19 x64 9.5 MiB, 12/7/2021 2.4.18 x64 5.5 MiB, 29/3/2021 2.4.13 x64 5.9 MiB, 12/4/2020 v2.3.x Stable 2.3.16 x64 3.5 MiB, 11/6/2019 2.3.14 x32 3.2 MiB, 3/5/2019 2.3.16 x32 5.3 MiB, 19/6/2019 2.3.16 x64 5.6 MiB, 19/6/2019

• Free Open Source Email Client
  Scribe is free for everyone to use. No time limits, no nagging shareware banners or number of trials. Use it to your hearts content.
• Spam Filter
  Scribe has a built in bayesian spam filter that learns what type of email you consider to be "junk". Once it has a hundred or so spam to train on it can start filtering incomming spam automatically. As your collection of spam increases so does the accuracy of the bayesian filter. Until it reaches a maximum of about 98.5%. All the while producing very few if any false positives (i.e. wrongly classified mail you actually want to see).
• Small
  Scribe is quite a small download compared to a lot of applications. And even when downloaded takes up very little of your hard disk or memory while running. You can easily use Scribe from a portable drive like a USB flash card.
• Fast
  Startup and shutdown are generally quick. Typically taking only a second or two. Mail sends and receives go as fast as your net connection allows. No needless waiting around for things to happen (like Outlook). Because Scribe uses a flexible file formats for mail storage you can move email with huge attachments around with no effort at all, unlike some email clients that have to copy the entire email, including attachment to another file on disk causing unnecessary waiting for the user.
• Easy
  Scribe comes totally self contained. You can either use the installer version or just unzip the distribution file. To uninstall either use the uninstaller in the Programs menu or delete the folder the email client was unzipped into. There's no dll's left lying around to worry about. All the data and settings for scribe are stored in it's directory. This also makes it easy to back your email up. (Windows: Some registry settings are used to allow you to use Scribe as your default email client, these are removed by the uninstaller but aren't harmful if you delete the application)
• Cross-platform
  Scribe runs in Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Allowing users to maintain all their email and contacts in one place. Run the version of scribe for the OS your running and access the email received in another OS.
• Up To Date
  I've been releasing updates since the start of 1999 in response to bug reports and feature requests. Where possible requested changes are incorperated into an update. Releases are tagged "stable" or "unstable" to help you to pick a version suitable for your purposes. The unstable builds are public beta's for experienced users to test.
• Multi-language
  Scribe can be translated into any language. Here is some information about translating the user interface text into another language. So far Scribe has been translated into [d/m/yyyy]:
  
  

  Language	Code	Last Update
  English	en	Native
  French	fr	Updated: v2.4.19, 27/4/2021
  German	de	Updated: v2.1.24, 22/10/2016
  Korean	ko	Added: v2.1.0, 24/4/2015
  Polish	pl	Updated: v2.0.20, 9/3/2010
  Russian	ru	Updated: v2.0.9, 18/2/2009
  Swedish	sv	Updated: v2.0.6, 14/10/2008
  Czech	cs	Updated: v1.89.22, 10/9/2007
  Turkish	tr	Updated: v1.89.22, 10/9/2006
  Lithuanian	lt	Updated: v1.89.21, 5/9/2007
  Hungarian	hu	Added: v1.89.13, 28/2/2007
  Portuguese	pt	Updated: v1.89.4, 15/6/2006
  Luganda	lg	Added: v1.89.1, 9/2/2006
  Brazilian Portuguese	pt_br	Updated: v1.89.1, 9/1/2006
  Spanish	es	Updated: v1.89.1, 21/12/2005
  Vietnamese	vi	Updated: v1.88.14, 11/11/2005
  Farsi	fa	Updated: v1.88.14, 25/10/2005
  Dutch	nl	Updated: v1.87, 21/12/2004
  Serbian	sr	Updated: v1.87, 21/12/2004
  Norwegian	no	Updated: v1.87, 2/8/2004
  Japanese	ja	Added: v1.87, 1/1/2004
  Chinese Traditional	zh_tw	Added: v1.87, 24/12/2003
  Russian	ru	Added: v1.86, 14/2/2003
  Italian	it

  
  Under windows the langauge will be read from the regional settings but if you want to override that then go into the appearence options and you can select a language there. You can also setup a LGI Config File to configure the user interface language for all Lgi apps globally. The translations will become less complete over time and new user interface components become available, which obviously won't have translations yet, so the version and date in the square brackets will give you some idea of how up to date the particular translation is. Also Scribe supports a wide array of character sets, especially when you install the iconv dll (see below). All the user interface allows unicode to be read and entered.
• Safe
  Scribe is not vunerable to email virus' because the HTML support is not provided by Internet Explorer but by a built in HTML control. The attachment list won't hide the real extension of a file either, which typically used by virus' to trick the user into openning an executable when the user thought it was a document. And if a virus does get in through by some other means, it won't be able to find your address book thus preventing it from mailing itself to all your contacts. Finally Scribe won't let you open a file from the attachment list when it has an executable image (PE or ELF) or has a standard scripting exetension (like .VBS on windows). This prevents users accidently opening virus' directly. If you have been sent a safe executable that you do need to run, then you can save it to disk and run it from there.
• Interoperable
  Scribe supports importing and exporting mail, contacts and calendar events to many open formats such as MBOX, .eml (single email), vCard, vCal/iCal and CSV (comma separated variables) contacts. Also support for proprietry formats and API's such as MAPI (only available only on windows), Outlook Express's MBX/DBX format and Eudora's address book is included. Scribe also has native support for converting winmail.dat attachments from Outlook user's into separate attachments that you can open or forward, which works even on Linux!

To get the source code and libraries:

hg clone https://phab.mallen.id.au/source/scribeopensrc/ build/code/scribe/trunk_os
cd build/code/scribe/trunk_os
./build.py

Windows Prerequisites: python3.x cmake mercurial Visual Studio 2019 NSIS NSIS plugins: todo...? To make the installer, right click on Installer-64bit.nsi and "Compile NSIS Script".

Linux Package prerequisites: mercurial cmake python311 libgtk3.0-dev libmagic-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev libappindicator3-dev libssh-dev To make the installer run the 'build/code/scribe/trunk_os/linux/make-installer' script. You'll need an appimage binary. make-installer will tell you where to put it... build/codelib I think.

Mac Prerequisites: Xcode macports: mercurial cmake python311 ssl ssh ...others? In Xcode build 'build/code/scribe/trunk_os/mac/Scribe.xcodeproj' for archiving. Then export the software from there. Zip the Scribe.app bundle.

Haiku pkgman prerequisites: mercurial (will install python3 too) cmake ninja