Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Kiltdown?

    Kiltdown is an open source E-Mail program that I wrote for various UNIX operating systems.  I have, thus far, tested it under Linux (RedHat and SuSE), FreeBSD 3.4 and 4.1, and Solaris 8/Intel.    It supports most features that you'd expect in a mail program, such as MIME attachments, address books, Reply All, etc.

2. Where do I get it?

    Go to the downloads page. I am hosting as much of the downloading as I can on SourceForge because my poor server doesn't have the bandwidth to deal with all of this on it's own. If the traffic/email for this web page gets to be too much, I will move it to a commercial server too.

3. Why did you write it?

    One day, I sat down and looked at why I still have Windows on one of my computers here at home.  The results were:

• Web Browser

• Games

• Productivity Software

• Mail Client

    Now, while the web browsers for UNIX are generally crap right now, there is a lot of hope with the arrival of Opera and Konqueror.  It also seems highly unlikely that I could write one of these by myself.  There's not much I can do about games, so I will just have one partition somewhere to play Alpha Centauri.  Productivity Software is actually quite available for Linux these days, with StarOffice, Applix, and KOffice all looking quite promising.

    That left mail clients.  I haven't actually seen a single one that I consider to be anywhere near as good as Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.  Thus, I decided that since I have some free time, I would write this program.

4. What is the license for Kiltdown?

    Kiltdown is written with Qt, which means that the code either has to fall under the QPL or the GPL, which is unfortunate.  I had originally planned to use a BSD-style license, but this is not possible now, so the GPL will do.

5. What GUI Toolkit are you using?

    Qt 2.2.  It's actually been very good to me thus far, and has had a good balance of features.

6. I've heard people say that Qt is Evil.  Why are you using it?

    There seems to be an awful lot of mud flying around the 'net with regards KDE vs. Gnome, and the unfortunate side-effect seems to be that few people are comparing GTK and Qt on their merits alone.  Kiltdown is being written to work with both KDE and Gnome, and I don't really care what end users work with.  Qt 2.x has a licensing scheme that is good for the open source community (GPL).

7. Where did the name Kiltdown come from? What does it mean?

    PIDOOMA  (Pulled it Directly Out Of My ....)
    It has no meaning as far as I'm aware.

8. Oh my goodness!! I've found a bug.  What do I do?

    Here are your choices:

1. Fix it and mail the patch to bugs@kiltdown.org

2. Submit a bug using SourceForge ( https://sourceforge.net/bugs/?func=addbug&group_id=16452)

3. Mail a full bug report (how you reproduced it, what operating system you're running, what version, what hardware, etc.) to bugs@kiltdown.org

7. How come you don't support feature XXX/YYY?

    Because I don't use it or don't have the time to code it up. The most obvious example of this would be the decision to support POP3 initially, instead of IMAP or mail spool support. I do all of my mail with POP3, and will work to improve that and add more security to it.

    If there is a feature you are simply dying to see, feel free to fire off a note to request@kiltdown.org

8. You rock!! Can I offer you a job?

     Sure, but I am looking to work from home most of the time (3-4 days a week). If your office is not in San Francisco, I am willing to come in when needed, but still would like to get as much done at home as possible. Contract work is preferred. If you're still interested, please feel free to contact me at mw@kiltdown.org