[edit] Bongo M3 (0.3.0) Release notes

Further updates: 0.3.1

This release has received a minor update, and you are advised to use that version instead of the original. These notes still apply, but the links to download have been updated.

[edit] 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.

[edit] What's In This Release?

This 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 represents a huge amount of work done over our M2 release, and 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.

[edit] What's New?

The headline features in this release are:

• localisation/internationalisation
• builds on a wider range of distributions
• configuration now based in Store, and not dependent on a custom LDAP setup
• proper syslog logging
• a powerful mail address aliasing/rewriting system
• support for multiple domains and hosted user accounts
• new, more performant, disk storage system
• initial support for CalDAV
• wider range of administrative tools for configuration, backup and restore

There are numerous under-the-bonnet changes which will interest developers listed above. We have simplified the system for loading configuration, and have completely reworked several structural parts of Bongo.

[edit] Download and installation

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

http://download.gna.org/bongo/release/bongo-0.3.1.tar.bz2

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

 tar -jxf bongo-0.3.1.tar.bz2
 cd bongo-0.3.1
 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/bongo
 make
 (as root from here)
 make install
 cd /usr/local/bongo
 ./sbin/bongo-config install

We have instructions for compilation in our source guide - you will need to fulfill various dependencies, but they are mostly pretty simple.

After you have compiled and installed, you can then set about configuring Bongo.

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

[edit] 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:

• (major) the Dragonfly web UI is unreliable and buggy for many users
• e-mails without a subject may be incorrectly grouped into a single conversation
• some mail headers are sometimes incorrectly parsed.
• 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
• running under Apache currently requires some work-arounds for file permission issues
• there are generic problems with bounce mail handling

Because of the large number of changes in this release, we expect that there may be several bugs which will bite people testing M3. We do intend to support tester/developers with this release, and will actively maintain this branch of the software, though.

[edit] Next Release

As a supported branch of Bongo, M3 will receive minor updates, and in due course we will make further releases for those people trying to use it in practice.

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

• new, more reliable, web UI for mail and calendar
• complete Hawkeye web UI for administration
• server-side rules support
• support for shared calendars/address books

There will also be numerous technical advances and bugfixes that may 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, and we think it will be mostly feature-complete. As such, there will be fewer new features in M4 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, but we are aiming for April.

For further information, see the Roadmap.