BlueMail_on_Linux.md

About BlueMail

BlueMail is a fairly good email client that I wanted to try out on my Linux machines as it includes most of the features of the Windows-only email client I own. However, while a poorly-constructed RPM for Fedora is available for download, Blix wants you to use their Snap for install under Linux. As this is an Ubuntu-centric package system I had no intention of using it under Fedora 37. Here is how I got around the pain of it's Ubuntu-centricisms and got it working properly.

Fedora

Download BlueMail RPM

Download the RPM from the website.

• As of the time of writing this is https://download.bluemail.me/BlueMail/rpm/BlueMail.rpm If the RPM were built properly we would normally just install it with

sudo dnf install Downloads/BlueMail.rpm

but to get past the previously mentioned "broken" RPM we need to do a few things first.

Preinstallation Steps

All of this RPMs pre- and postinstall scripts are written as if they were being installed on Ubuntu and, as such, are incorrect. We will run the preinstall commands ourselves in the correct format to ensure they are correctly done the first time to allow us to actually upgrade the app in-place and save ourselves a headache later.

sudo rpm --import https://packages.bluemail.me/keys/bluemail.asc
sudo sh -c 'echo -e "[bluemail]\nname=BlueMail\nbaseurl=https://packages.bluemail.me/repos/yum\nenabled=1\ngpgcheck=1\ngpgkey=https://packages.bluemail.me/keys/bluemail.asc" > /etc/yum.repos.d/bluemail.repo'

for the intial installation we will use the rpm command instead of dnf to skip the broken installation scripts as we have already done those steps.

cd Downloads
sudo rpm -ihv --noscripts BlueMail.rpm

Now we can make sure that the latest version is installed with

sudo dnf upgrade --nogpgcheck

Note: This will complain about the scripts but they aren't neccesary for the installation to succeed.

At this point, BlueMail is installed.

Post-Installation Gotchas

BlueMail will not show up in the menus at this stage and trying to run it in terminal will fail if a specific switch isn't used to turn off the default Electron sandboxing.

I've noticed many other electron applications have this issue requiring the --no-sandbox flag to be set on the command line to be run via terminal.

/opt/Bluemail/bluemail --no-sandbox  %U

Setting BlueMail to AutoStart at Login

I use XFCE as my window manager currently, but the concept below should be adapatable to other WMs/DEs. Navigate through the application menu to Applications>Settings>Sessions and Startup and use the command above as shown in the image below.

Just logout, log back in, and BlueMail should autostart for you.

Elementary OS 7 (Horus)

Download BlueMail DEB

Download the DEB from the website.

• As of the time of writing this is https://download.bluemail.me/BlueMail/deb/BlueMail.deb We're going to install it with gdebi; if this isn't installed already...

sudo apt install gdebi-core gdebi

Then, in the file manager, use the right click menu on the BlueMail.deb file and open with gdebi and click the install button