[vox] SquirrelMail on Linux with multi-Language support

[ME]

keywords: language, squirrelmail, locales, multibyte, character set, SM

Hello,

I use SM for my domain, and I speak English. However, some of my users are
from foreign countries. Kasakstahn, Taiwan, China, Japan, Bulgaria,
Denmark, Germany, etc. and their first languages were not English.

As a result of wanting to get Japanese and Chinese Characters working in
messages so the end users need not alter their web browsers' character
set, I found a method for enabling users to define their own languages to
be used with SM (SquirrelMail.)

Procedure:
1) Install all of he locales you plan to use or offer your users of
different languages. (I installed all of them just in case I get another
foreign user on my box.)

In Debian 3.0:
# dpkg-reconfigure -plow locales

2) Install your web server. If you use a packaged web server that uses
modules, then --with-apxs=/path/to/apxs as an arg for the php build is
useful.

3) Why build your own php? many prepackaged php doe not include multi-byte
character s-et support by default.

When you build your own php-4.3.2 from source, include the options:
--enable-mbstring --enable-mbregex --with-gettext
Along with any other options you use with your php install.
(Suggested also include this, but not necessary for ML support AFAIK)
--with-pear and if your apache install uses apxs with modules then:
--with-apxs=/path/to/apxs
)

4) Why build courier-imap by hand? Many pre-packaged courier-imap servers
do not come pre-build with full unicode support for all of the charsets
that courier-imap is capable of using.

When you configure your courier you will want to add:
--enable-unicode
to any other config options you choose to use to enable all supported
multi-byte unicode charsets that courier-imap knows about (in src).

5) After all are installed, use of SM 1.4.x or later can permit users to
select languages for default composition and display of email messages.
ALSO, many of the menu names/items (Compose Addresses Folders Options
Search Help Calendar Fetch Directory) and links available from within a SM
session are translated! Woot!

I can see these link names in Japanese, Bulgarian, Danish, German,
Russian, and English! (Of course, I can't read them, but my users can!)
(Also, many more languages are supported.)

This rocks!

**NOTE: I had to set my default locale to "none" for consistent work.
**NOTE: not all plugins and buttons have had their words translated, but
most (if not all) core options are translated.
**NOTE: I have just started doing this, but due to a lack of docs on how
to make this work, some sort of info on how to do this might be useful to
others out there.

Thanks to irc.freenode.net 's #squirrelmail channel user:
valcor!valcor@netdork.net for suggesting the piece that I was missing:
locales for the specific langs I wanted to use other than English.

-ME


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