[Users] homebrew claws-mail on Apple Silicon Mac

[David Fletcher]

Hi George,

I was probably involved in those threads from 2023. I have Claws Mail
running on MacOS Sequoia version 15.3, on a M2 mac. It's using a
combination of Homebrew and packages I've compiled manually. The
libetpan has some fixes for use on Mac which may by now have made it
into the standard brew install, but having got libetpan installed
manually in 2023 I've left it alone since. I've not used the standard
brew install for Claws in several years.

Brew has handled the installation of gtk+3, enchant (spell checking),
libical (for calendar invites), and other basics needed. I think I did
this by installing Claws using brew so it pulling in all the
dependancies, but then removing Claws itself (and libetpan) so I could
manually install a development version.

libetpan is installed manually using:

/configure --with-gnutls=/opt/homebrew/lib/libgnutls.30.dylib

It has ended up in /usr/local/lib but I notice that I've also manually
copied libetpan.a over into /opt/homebrew/lib/libetpan.a. I don't
recall whether this is left over from trying things out or whether it
gets used.

The version of libetpan says "libetpan-1.9.4_TLS" - the 1.9.4 release
has been patched to fix issues with TLS on mac. I downloaded the version
I'm using on 12th Dec 2023. The master branch on the following link
includes the fixes but there's not been a new release since then.
https://github.com/dinhvh/libetpan

Claws is installed manually using:

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/homebrew/opt/icu4c/lib/pkgconfig:/opt/homebrew/opt/libarchive/lib/pkgconfig:"${PKG_CONFIG_PATH}"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH
export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/opt/libarchive/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/opt/libarchive/include"
/configure --disable-dillo-plugin --disable-notification-plugin
--prefix=/opt/homebrew

Clearly I was having issues with getting libarchive to work, but you
might not need that anyway.

Alongside the above I created a small application launcher (available
zipped from https://www.megapico.co.uk/Claws-Mail.zip) with an icon that
you can use to start Claws from the Dock on the Mac. You can open is
using Finder->Show Package Contents and see how this works using the
guide here which it's adapted from:
https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2021/11/applescript-launch-terminal/

Best regards, David.