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Security Notice
Phishing campain
Version 1.4.15
Security Upgrade

SquirrelSpell is a plugin designed to do spell-checking for SquirrelMail. It's included in the SquirrelMail distribution since 1.2.0.

From a user standpoint, SquirrelSpell is accessed while composing a message by the "Check Spelling" button which appears in the composition frame when the plugin is active and the user's browser supports it. Unlike most of the SquirrelMail system, SquirrelSpell does require the client to support JavaScript.

The plugin also adds a "Spell Checker Options" menu to the options page, which allows users to edit their personal dictionaries, enable international dictionary support, and (maybe, if supported on your system) encrypt their personal dictionary.

POSIX

On POSIX compatible systems, SquirrelSpell uses [Aspell] or [Ispell], so setting default or supplemental dictionaries will rather depend on what the system has installed or set up. Details can be found in the plugins/squirrelspell/sqspell_config.php file.

Windows

You'll need Windows binaries of Aspell and the Unix utility 'cat'. These can be obtained at: [Aspell for Win32] and [GNU Utilities for Win32]. It's recommended to install Aspell one level below root or at least to avoid long directory names.

The Unix utilities archive is like a Swiss army knife, but SquirrelSpell only need the cat.exe executable.

  1. Find cat.exe in unxutils.zip usr\local\wbin\.
  2. Copy it to somewhere in your path (winnt\system32 is a good place).
  3. Edit your sqspell_config.php (in /plugins/squirrelspell/) with the full path to Aspell(driveletter:/path/to/aspell.exe)

With SquirrelMail 1.4.0 and cat.exe in C:\WINNT, this line worked:\n

$SQSPELL_APP = array("English" => "C:\Aspell\bin\aspell.exe -d en_us -a");


On Windows, one will need to use double-back-slashes when specifying the path to the Aspell executable. If Aspell is installed in c:\usr\aspell, the path needs to be written as c:\\usr\\aspell\\bin\\aspell.exe -a for it to work.

This was with 1.2.12 from CVS, but may still be valid.


SquirrelSpell on Windows also requires access to cmd.exe which is a great security risk to open to IIS_anon. Copy cmd.exe to the PHP directory and let only a dedicated iis_anon account (like iis_webmail) have access to it and the IIS virtual server.


It should be noted that if you receive the error I tried to execute "ispell -a", but it returned... even though you have Ispell, make sure that Ispell is in the path of the user running the web server, and then restart the web server.

The shell command which ispell will give you the full path to Ispell. Make sure that the path in included in plugins/squirrelspell/sqspell_config.php.

Make sure the proc_open function is available. Atomic Secure Linux and Plesk can close this function by default. Symptom is spellchecker window opens, but the Error: "Cannot run ispell -a' will show with any path set to aspell.

© 1999-2016 by The SquirrelMail Project Team