By Nicolas Rougier
(c) 2000-2002
Released under the GNU general public license

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Documentation - Introduction

1. What is gbiff ?
gbiff is a mail notification program utility that checks periodically for new mail in your mailbox.
When new mails are found, gbiff can popup a window indicating sender, subject and date of those new mails.

2. Why another biff program ?
The original motivation for gbiff was to design a simple biff program able to handle ISO-8859 encoding in headers.
For example, using xpbiff, a displayed header can look like this : 
?iso-8859-1?B?dGVzdDEyINYuIMUgLuog9uT25SA=?=
using gbiff it will be displayed like this: 
test12 Ö. Å .ê öäöå
I guess this feature is not really important for people whose language does not use accents. But when your language does, it is pretty annoying to receive some weird headers not knowing what the subject is (and in some case the sender) and forcing you to read them through a regular mail reader only to discover it is only some kind of junk mail.

3. What can do gbiff ?
Here is a list of the main features of gbiff
  • Complete configuration using either GUI or command line options or both.
  • GNOME support through session management and panel docking
  • GTK support only that does not require GNOME at all
  • Support for major local mailbox protocols (maildir, mbox, mh) and network protocols (pop3, imap4)

4. What cannot do gbiff ?
A lot of things.
More specifically it is important to understand that gbiff is not a mail reader. It can display some basic mail information concerning new mail like sender/subject/date but that's all. Of course you can imagine adding features like displaying mail content or attachments and maybe some rudimentary tool to quickly answer... then you have a mail reader. This is far beyond the purpose of gbiff which is and will remain a simple biff program (I guess).