A step by step guide on how to fix Squirrelmail Aspell Program Execution Failed on FreeBSD
Been running Squirrelmail for a few years but apparently never used the spell checker. So last night when I wanted to compare Squirrelmail and Roundcube’s Spell checker this error appeared: “System error: Aspell program execution failed”
(`aspell -a --lang=en_US --encoding=utf-8 -H --rem-sgml-check=alt < /path/aspell_data_wiAFJG 2>&1`)
So I had to fix this issue. The steps below solved the issue on my Squirrelmail installations.
Apparently I had installed the spell checker plugin for Squirrelmail and that part was running ok. But I never actually installed Aspell. Obviously the plugin which only needs activation does not install Aspell which is quite logical when you think about it. So basically we need to install Aspell and get this running which actually makes sense.
cd /usr/ports/textproc/aspell
make install clean
Unfortunately this doesn’t quite solve the error it seems to persist. And thats because we need to set the absolute path for Aspell in the configuration for html_mail. So let’s do that.
cd /Path To Squirrelmail/plugins/html_mail
vi config.php
Find the following line
$html_mail_aspell_path = ‘aspell’;
And replace “aspell” with the absolute path for aspell. On my installation aspell resides here /usr/local/bin
$html_mail_aspell_path = ‘/usr/local/bin/aspell’;