Building Enigmail for Debian Etch AMD64

I like the Mozilla suite but missed having a working EnigMail. As I'm running Debian on an AMD64 and there's no working EnigMail for i386 I figured I had a snowball's chance in hell.

I tried working from the Debian packages for IceDove and from the packages from the previous release for Mozilla-EnigMail without success.

I then found a link to a page with info on how to achieve this, so I've reproduced it here along with downloadable configuration files and an installable .XPI for Debian Etch AMD64.

As stated before, I like SeaMonkey, but I like Debian more. Also, I like the IceApe artwork better than anything from Mozilla. However, there is not currently a working enigmail extension for IceApe.

The enigmail maintainer, Alexander Sack, was busy with all of his other packages, and did not have time to get it going. Also, the official enigmail extension does not work with IceApe, due to being compiled with a different version of GCC. Basically, if you try to use it, it crashes.

I find this unacceptable. Therefore, being an Open Source kind of guy, I will now compile enigmail with the Etch version of GCC, and release the resulting extension to the world.

Unfortunately, this is quite the lengthy process. To build an extension for Mozilla applications, you actually need to build a mozilla app. Fortunately, there are many guides, and I think I have figured this out.

Overall, there are just a few simple steps:

1. Compile Mozilla from source on Etch system
2. Compile enigmail from source on the same Etch system
3. Create the Enigmail XPI

I accomplished this in the following 17 steps: (italized text are commands)

1. sudo su (become root)
2. cd /usr/src (get to a nice, open directory)
3. aptitude build-dep iceape (will get all the libraries you should need to build mozilla)
4. wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/seamonkey/releases/1.0.8/seamonkey... (Download the source for SeaMonkey 1.0.8, the version equivalent to IceApe on Etch)
5. tar xjf seamonkey-1.0.8.source.tar.bz2 Un-tar your source.
6. cd mozilla
7. Once you've downloaded all of the sources, wget http://matthewpoer.freehostia.com/.mozconfig (Download .mozconfig file to the mozilla directory)
8. Still from the mozilla directory, run make -f client.mk build
9. Now wait a bit. Compiling Mozilla may take half an hour to half a day, depending on your system.
10. Done compiling? Compile some more. make -C xpinstall/packager
11. cd mailnews/extensions
12. wget http://www.mozilla-enigmail.org/downloads/src/enigmail-0.94.3.tar.gz
13. tar zxf enigmail-0.94.3.tar.gz
14. cd enigmail
15. ./makemake -r
16. make
17. make xpi

With all of that said and done, you can now download enigmail-0.94.3-iceape-1.0.8-i686.xpi, and install it (as root user) into your normal IceApe application suite.

I found these sources helpful in doing this:

• Mozilla’s page on how to get the newest sources for mozilla suite via CVS.
• Mozilla’s page on the “.mozconfig” file, and how to configure your build.
• Mozilla’s page on how to build your mozilla application.
• Enigmail’s guide on getting sources, and building them.