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The following content is adapted from the Dada Mail Manual. The Dada Mail Manual is available through the purchase of Pro Dada.
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Professional installation is available.
There's a few ways you may install Dada Mail and a whole lot of different configurations you can set.
We'll be talking about a Basic installation and an Advanced installation.
We suggest, if you're new to the program and you do not have that much experience manually installing CGI script, to try the Basic installation first.
We also suggest if you do see yourself using Dada Mail in the long run and want to easily upgrade Dada Mail in the future, that you use the Advanced Installation.
And just to be thourough, we'll list the Upgrade Instructions as well,
We'll be going very slowly through the basic installation, so you understand the concepts thoroughly. We'll be going at a more brisk pace with the advanced installation, with the idea that, You Know What You're Doing.
Below is a very brief overview of the essential concepts and tools you'll need. If the below concepts are completely foreign to you, you may have difficulty installing Dada Mail.
Dada Mail is essentially and simply a CGI script. CGI scripts
are installed by placing a copy of the script itself onto your
hosting account, usually in what's called the,
cgi-bin and changing the permissions of the script
to, 755. This allows someone to access the script
from a web browser and when a request for the script is made, the
web server will execute the program and show the results of
whatever it does in your webserver. That's the general way things
are done. Pretty simple.
At the very least, you'll need something to edit the configuration of Dada Mail with and a way to get the program to your hosting account.
When you download Dada Mail, you download a compressed file, that holds an archive of all the files/directories that makes up Dada Mail. You'll need a utility to decompress this archive.
Most modern Operating Systems have these built in and it just takes a double-click to uncompress the files.
The first thing you'll need is essentially a text editor. A text editor, well - edits text. There's many different types of text editors on the market, my personal favorite at the moment for the Mac is a program called TextMate (http://macromates.com/). This will be the text editor I'll be using for these examples.
A key difference between a text editor like Text Mate and a word processing program is that a text editor just edits text - it may have a bunch of bells and whistles to do so, but at the end of the day, we're just editing text. A word processor may look like it's editing text, but you're really editing a file in a specific format. If you take a file from Dada Mail and try to edit it in a word processor, you'll most likely corrupt the original file, so don't do that.
You'll also need something to put Dada Mail on your hosting account. Usually, this means an FTP program. An FTP program gives you a GUI view of the files/directories on your hosting account. It's pretty handy and there's not much you need to do with the FTP program and Dada Mail - mostly, PUTting the files that make up Dada Mail on your hosting account and changing the permissions (chmod) of some of the files.
My personal favorite FTP Client for the Mac right now is Transmit (http://panic.com/transmit). I will be using it for these examples.
Dada Mail is Free Software and is released under the Gnu
Public License.
Dada Mail is written in Perl because we love Perl.