Written by Tom Wickline

Thursday, 02 October 2008 02:34

Foxmail description

Foxmail is a compact, yet very powerful email program with many useful features and a pleasant interface. Foxmail supports POP3 accounts as well as Hotmail accounts and offers support for HTML email, mailbox encryption, multiple accounts and more. Foxmail also comes with a WYSIWIG tool to compose nice looking HTML emails from templates or scratch. The program also offers filter options, allowing you to act upon incoming mail that meets certain criteria - you can delete messages, forward them, auto-respond to them and more based on keywords appearing in the subject, address, text etc.

The Express Send feature enables you to send mail directly to the recipient, using the built in SMTP server, thereby bypassing your ISP. Foxmail includes many other features, including a remote mail viewer to manage mail on the server, as well as a small scroll ticker that displays message subjects as they arrive in your inbox. It is probably one of the most capable email programs you can find and an excellent alternative to Outlook Express (can import Outlook messages).

By default the Foxmail interface is in Chinese. To use Foxmail in English just go into the installation directory and delete the Chinese.lgb file.

Wine version : 1.1.5
Platform tested on : FreeBSD 7
Windows version emulated : 2000
Bordeaux 1.6 beta 1 for BSD

FoxMail 6.5 Download location

The easy way to get FoxMail working on your Linux or BSD system is to get a copy of Bordeaux and install IE 6 once IE 6 is installed then install FoxMail 6 into that cellar. Here is a example of how this is done.

env WINEPREFIX="/home/tom/.bordeaux/ie6" wine /home/tom/foxmail6.exe

The installer will start in Chinese, all you have to do is select everything that's highlighted and proceed with the install once the install is complete setup your new account.

Once everything is setup you can test your settings.

On my system the installer created a desktop shortcut to start FoxMail but in case it didn't on your system here's a example of how to run the program from your terminal.

env WINEPREFIX="/home/tom/.bordeaux/ie6" wine "C:\\windows\\command\\start.exe" "C:\Program Files\Tencent\Foxmail\Foxmail.exe"

I have not used FoxMail other then to test it, but with that said everything Ive tested thus far works as it should. If you need a Microsoft Outlook replacement on your Linux or BSD box FoxMail might be what your looking for. Everything tested here should also work on Linux the same as it works on FreeBSD.