The Main Menu Bar
The File Menu
- License this software
- This option exists on the menu only if you
have not yet entered your license number into the application.
- Retrieve mail
- This option makes the program go to the server specified on
the Mail Servers page of the General
Settings, or to the PPO Inbox Directory if you have that
feature activated on the Personal Post Office page of the
Advanced Settings, to retrieve the mail. The new
mail is placed into the current account's INBOX folder,
except in cases where a Filter causes it to be
placed elsewhere. If your server is an IMAP4 server, this option will still
download the mail to the INBOX folder, just as if this were a POP3 server
account instead. Use the Preview IMAP4 Mail
function if you want to work interactively with your IMAP4 server and deal
with the mail files and folders on the server.
- Stop mail retrieval
- This option is enabled only while mail
retrieval is taking place.
- Send mail
- This option makes the program send the messages in the
current account's OUTBOX folder to the SMTP or POP3 server specified on
the Mail Servers page of the General
Settings, or to the PPO Outbox Directory if you have
that feature activated on the Personal Post Office page of
the Advanced Settings. After it has been sent, it
is moved from the OUTBOX folder to whatever folder you have specified
on the Sent Folder page of your default Persona, or whatever folder you specified in the
Sent folder field of that specific message while you were
creating it in the compose window, either by
selecting one manually, or by virtue of selecting a Persona which has a
specified Sent Folder, or by virtue of selecting an
address book entry which has a specified
Sent folder.
- Stop sending messages
- This option is enabled only while a send is
taking place.
- Preview mail on the server
- This option brings up the
Preview Mail feature.
- Message transaction log
- This option brings up the Message
Transaction Log window, which lets you view or print the log
of all messages sent and received by the current account (the
Transaction.Log file in the account subdirectory).
- Popper message retrieval center
- When you use the
Retrieve mail automatically every [ ] minutes
setting in an account without opening the Popper window, the automatic
retrieves happen only while that account is open. When you open the Popper
window, the old style of automatic retrieval which only works on the open
account is terminated, and will not be activated again until you close and
reopen that account, or close its
settings notebook. When you turn on the Popper window's Retrieval
Center is Active checkbox, automatic retrievals will be done not only
for the open account, but also for all of your accounts that are configured
for automatic retrieval. If the Popper window is open when you close the J
Street Mailer,
then it will automatically open the next time you open the program. After you've
connected to the internet, turn on the Retrieval Center is Active
checkbox, and the retrievals will begin.
First, the first account in the Popper window will do its retrieve, and each
of the others will wait until the previous one is done. (Not only to
spread the CPU usage out over time; but also in case you have two J Street
Mailer accounts which access the same POP3 account, because most POP3 servers
won't allow the same account to be accessed by two client processes at the
same time.) The Popper retrieves the mail into a holding directory for each
account (below the POPPER subdirectory of your Mailer directory), and then the new mail is
actually brought into the INBOX folder after
the Popper retrieve is done, only in the account that's open at the time. The
mail for the other accounts will be left in each account's holding directory,
and the count of messages in each holding directory is displayed in the Popper
window. When you open any account, the program looks to see whether there's
anything in its Popper holding directory and if so, it is immediately brought
into the INBOX folder of that account and the Popper window's holding
directory count is then updated for that account.
Turning on any account's Retrieve mail
automatically every [ ] minutes setting will add that account to the
Popper window if the Popper window is open at the time. Turning off that
setting in an account will remove that account from the Popper window, even if
that account is currently being retrieved in the Popper window (the retrieve
is halted gracefully first). Turning off the Retrieval Center is
Active checkbox in the Popper window gracefully halts any retrieval
that is currently taking place, and prevents any more retrievals from starting
until you turn the checkbox on again.
- Settings
- General
-
- Advanced
-
- Exit
- This option closes the program.
The Account Menu
There is no limit to the number of different accounts you can set up
under one J Street Mailer installation. You can use different accounts
for different users, or for different internet addresses for the same
user. Each account has its own settings, its own
folders (though accounts can be made to share folders by having "local"
folders under one account and "remote" folders under the other accounts
pointing to the first account's local folder directories), its own
Filters, etc.
- Create a new account
- This option lets you create a new account,
for another user or for another internet address. If you specify just
the account name, a directory by that name will be created under the
MailData subdirectory of your Mailer directory,
and the account files and folders will be created in that new directory.
The program refers to these as "local" accounts. If you specify a full
pathname, such as "D:\My New Account", then that directory will be
created if it does not exist, and the files and folders will be created
there. We refer to these as "remote" accounts. There are only two
differences between local accounts and remote ones: When you delete a
remote account, nothing actually gets deleted except the entry in the
Account.Index file and the account directory's Account.Settings file. The directory, its other
contents, and all of its folders and their contents will still exist;
the J Street Mailer just won't see them anymore unless you "create" the
same account again or manually add the entry back into the Account.Index
file. And the name of the account, as displayed within the program,
will include the pathname for remote accounts, but not for local ones.
- Delete the current account
- This option, when used while a "local"
account (the usual type) is open, deletes the account's directory, all
of its files, folders, subfolders and all their contents. The program
warns you twice before doing so, because there is no way to undo it
after it's been done. When used while the current account is a "remote"
one, this option has a less drastic effect; see above.
At the bottom of this menu is the list of accounts, as specified in
the Account.Index file in your Mailer directory.
Selecting an account from this menu closes your currently open account
and opens the one you selected.
The Folder Menu
- Create a folder
- This option lets you create a new mail folder, in
which to store and organize your messages. J Street Mailer folders are
nothing other than directories on your hard drive or other similar
storage medium. Other than those limitations imposed upon directory names
by your operating system or file system, you can name a J Street Mailer folder
anything you like, as long as it doesn't end with the string ".POP" or ".pop".
When you create a folder by specifying just its name,
the folder is created as a directory by that name, as a subdirectory of
your account directory. The program refers to these as "local" folders.
If you create a folder by specifying a pathname instead (such as "D:\New
Folder"), then that directory will be created if it does not already
exist, and it will be the location of the new folder. We refer to these
as "remote" folders, and their existence is known by the existence of an
entry in the account's Remote.Folder.Index file. There are only two
differences between local folders and remote ones: When you delete a remote
folder, the program asks you whether you really want to delete all of the
folder's contents or whether you just want to remove the folder from the
account's list of folders (the Remote.Folder.Index file). If you make the
latter choice, then the folder, its messages, and its subfolders will still
exist; the J Street Mailer just won't see them anymore unless you "create" the
same folder again or manually add the entry back into the Remote.Folder.Index
file. The second difference is that the display of the folder name will
include the pathname for remote folders, but not for local ones.
The support for remote folders means that you can have folders that
are accessible by all of your J Street Mailer accounts: Just create a
folder in one account as either local or remote; then create the same
folder in the other accounts, as a remote folder, using the original
folder's pathname. For example, let's say you have an account named
EMAIL which you allowed the program to create in the default location.
This means its pathname is probably something like
d:\jstreet\Mailer\MailData\email. If you create a local folder named
FOLDER in that account, then that folder's pathname is
d:\jstreet\Mailer\MailData\email\folder. So when you create the remote
folder in the other accounts, just specify
d:\jstreet\Mailer\MailData\email\folder as the folder to create.
Any subdirectory of a J Street Mailer folder will automatically be
seen by the program as that folder's subfolder. This applies to both
local and remote folders.
- Create a subfolder
- This option lets you create a subfolder under
the currently selected folder in the tree.
- Folder tree font
- This option lets you specify the font you want
to use for the tree.
- Delete
- This option deletes the currently selected folder, all of
its messages, and any subfolders and their messages. In the case of the
INBOX, OUTBOX, and TRASH folders, it only deletes the messages and
subfolders, not the folders themselves. And in the case of "remote" folders
(see Create a folder above), it will ask you whether you want it
to really delete the folder and all of its contents, or whether you want it to
just remove the folder's entry from the Remote.Folder.Index file so that the
program will no longer see the folder as being part of this
account.
- Expand all
- This option opens all folders which have children, to
display the subfolders, sub-subfolders, etc.
- Collapse all
- This option removes all the subfolders and
sub-subfolders, etc., from the tree view area, so that only the main
folders are showing.
The Message Menu
Some options on this menu, such as Delete and Copy
to a folder, can be applied to all of the selected messages in
the message list, at once. Other options, such as Sticky notes
and Reply, can only be applied to one message at a
time. If you use such an option while you have multiple messages
selected, the option will act upon the top selected message and ignore
the others.
Many of the options on this menu can be activated by keystroke
combinations, when focus is on the browser section of the window. The
default keystrokes are listed here, but you can change them to whatever
you like, via the customized keystrokes feature.
- Compose a new message
- This option opens the compose window so that you can create a new
OUTBOX message.
- Browser window style
- Also activated via Ctrl-X. This option lets you
select whether you want to view your messages in the ICE HTML browser window, the HotJava HTML browser
window, or the text browser window. The keystroke toggles among the
selections, and the menu lets you choose each one explicitly.
- Word wrap
- Also activated via Ctrl-W. This option, when on, turns
word wrap off; and when off, turns it on. When word wrap is on, which is
the default setting, lines of text which are longer than the browser
window is wide, will be wrapped down onto the next line. When word wrap
is off, this will not be done; furthermore, a non-proportional font is
used, so this is the correct setting to use when viewing a message which
contains, for example, columnar data that was formatted for display by
a character mode, rather than graphical, program.
- Decode attachments
- This option, when on, turns attachment
decoding off; and when off, turns it on. When attachment decoding is on,
which is the default setting, then when you open a message which
contains an attachment, the binary attachment file data will be removed
and decoded (if it was encoded before transmission) into a temporary
file (in the atchmnts subdirectory of your Mailer
directory), and the only part of the message which will show in the
browser window will be the body text portion and any attachments that
are recognized as plain text or HTML text; the binary attachments will
be available to you via the attachment toolbar below the
browser window. When attachment decoding is off,
and you open a message which contains an attachment, then the browser
window will show you the message just as it was sent to you, with the
(encoded) attachment file data still inside it, in case you need to see
it for diagnostic reasons.
- Print
- Also activated via Ctrl-P. This option prints the
message(s) currently selected in the message list. If there are multiple
selected messages, they will be printed together, for page numbering
purposes, but an Advanced Setting lets you
specify whether you want a page break between each one and the next, or
not. Whether or not the header lines of the message(s) will print, and
if so, how many of them will print, depends upon the current setting of
the Headers option (see below).
- Alter a composed message
- This option is available only in the
OUTBOX folder. Its purpose is to edit the selected message which you
have created, before sending it.
- Color code
- Also activated via Ctrl-C. This option lets you add a
color/shape code to the selected message(s) for identification and
classification purposes, or select None to remove the
existing color code(s) from the selected message(s). Each color/shape
code has a description which shows in the Specify a Message
Color Code dialog, to remind you of the purpose for which
you've decided to use that color code. To specify or change a color
code's descriptive text, select it in this dialog and press the
Change button. Filters can also add color codes to incoming
messages.
- Sticky notes
- Also activated via Ctrl-S, or the tiny icon at the
top right corner of the message in the HTML styles of browser window. This option lets you add a sticky
note to the selected message, as a reminder of anything you might want
to remind yourself of, in relation to that message. It is actually a
stream of text that is stored in the program's index
file entry for that message, so when you copy or move a message, its
sticky note will go with it. This option also lets you modify or delete
a message's existing sticky note.
- Add message addresses to address book
- This option presents you
with a list of all the internet addresses found in the currently
selected message, and lets you pick one to add to the current
address book. You can change the current address
book there, before doing so. Or you can choose one address to add to one
address book, and change the current address book and choose another
address to add to that address book, etc. Each time you click on the
Add button, the following dialog will let you specify
the nickname for the new address book entry, and choose whether or not
this new entry should be part of that address book's Short
List. When you've finished adding the desired ones of the
message's addresses to your address books, click on the Close
button to dismiss the dialog.
- Copy selected text to clipboard
- This option copies the selected text
from the browser to your clipboard, if
you're using an operating system which has a clipboard.
- Open browser using selected text
- This option opens a browser window
using the selected text (in the J Street Mailer main window's browser panel)
as the URL to be visited. See The Browser
Window for details.
- Reply
- Also activated via Ctrl-R. This option opens the
compose window, in reply mode, with the Reply-to
or From address of the selected message already entered into the
Addresses: field of your reply, and the
Subject: line matching that of the original message (with
"Re:" inserted at the beginning if it was not already there). If the
message to which you're replying has multiple addressees, or has a
Sender: line which probably indicates it's from a Majordomo or ListServ
type of mailing list, then the Select Address(es) for Reply
dialog will also come up, offering you all of the email
addresses found in the message. You can select as many as you want. Or
if you Cancel out of that dialog, then the message's
Reply-to address is the one to which your reply will be addressed.
- Forward
- Also activated via Ctrl-F. This option opens the
compose window, with the Subject:
line matching that of the original selected message (with "Fwd:"
inserted at the beginning if it was not already there), and the message
text (not including any encoded attachment data) copied into the text
area of the compose window so that you can send it along to someone
else.
This option is also used to resend a message you had previously sent.
If you want to resend a message without making any changes to it first,
you can just copy it to your OUTBOX folder.
- Bounce
- This option opens the compose
window, with the Subject: line matching that of the
original selected message, and the message text (including any encoded
attachment data) copied into the text area of the compose window so that
you can send it along to someone else. The From: and Reply-to: header
lines of the new message will be copied from the original message,
rather than being your own. Your signature, tagline, etc., will not be
used. The Sent folder: field will be blank, so the message
you're sending will not be retained unless you choose a folder here
yourself before closing the compose window. If the original message has
attachments, they will be sent as well (make sure your
Word wrap value is set wider than the block of
encoded data; and if the attachment was MIME encoded, anything you add
to the message before the first MIME boundary or after the last MIME
boundary will most likely never be seen by the recipient since any data
in those two locations is normally discarded by any MIME processing
software; though you shouldn't be adding anything to a bounced message
anyway, as the purpose of a bounce is to send the message along as if
from the sender, as if you'd never seen it). You cannot add your own
attachments to a bounced message.
- Route
- This option lets you forward one or more selected messages,
all to the same addressee(s), without taking the time to go through the
compose window. First it lets you specify the
addressees and optionally a short note. Then it creates one
OUTBOX message for each of the selected messages,
using the From and Reply-to names and addresses and the Sent
Folder of your default Persona, the
optional short note that you may have typed into the route dialog,
followed by a line which says "Routing message from" and your From name and
address and the date and time, and the text of the selected message.
The Subject: line of each new message will be the same as that of the
original from which it was created. Your signature, tagline, etc., will
not be used. If the selected message has attachments, they will be sent
as well. If the attachments are MIMEd, then the addressees will never
see the "Routing message from" line or the preceding short note, because
the receiving software routinely discards anything before the first MIME
boundary line, according to the MIME standard.
- Copy to a folder
- This option copies the selected message(s) to a
folder, after providing you with the Select a Folder
dialog. This dialog has a tree view area just like that on the
program's main window; Expand All and Collapse
All buttons just like the menu options on the Folder
menu of the main menu bar; and a New button
which lets you create a new folder or a new subfolder of the selected
folder. You can select an existing folder or create a new one and select
that, and click on the OK button to have the selected
message(s) copied to the specified folder.
- Move to a folder
- Also activated via Ctrl-M. This option is just
like Copy to a folder above, except that it moves the
selected message(s) rather than copying them.
- Save as
- This option copies the selected message (the *.POP file)
to whatever drive, directory, and filename you specify.
- Delete
- Also activated via Ctrl-D. This option moves the selected
message(s) to the TRASH folder, and opens the
message below it in the browser window. Unless
the current folder is the TRASH folder, in which case this option
deletes the message from the drive.
- Headers
- Also activated via Ctrl-H. This option lets you select
how many header lines you want to see for each message in the
browser window. (The keystroke lets you cycle
through the four choices in order; the menu lets you make a specific
choice.) The state of this setting also determines whether or not the
header lines will be printed when you print a message.
- None
- No header lines, just the message body text.
- Brief
- Just the From: and Date: headers on the first line, and the
Subject: header on the second line, and the message body text.
- Normal
- The Date:, From:, To:, Cc:, Bcc:, and Subject: headers,
each on its own line, and the message body text.
- All
- All of the header lines, and the message body text.
- Message list font
- This option lets you specify the font you want
to use for the message list.
- Browser window font size
- Also activated via Ctrl-T. This option
lets you specify the font size you want to use in the browser window.
(The keystroke lets you cycle through the four choices in order; the
menu lets you make a specific choice.)
- Utilities
- Mark opened
- This option marks the selected message(s) as opened,
so that they won't appear in a Virtual Folder of
unopened messages, even if you don't want to use the normal method to
open them.
- Mark unopened
- This option marks the selected message(s) as
unopened, so that they will appear in a Virtual
Folder of unopened messages, even if you've already opened them.
- Copy to another account
- This option copies the selected
message(s) to the INBOX folder of another of your
existing accounts, or even lets you create a new account as the target
of this operation.
- Move to another account
- Just like the above option, except that
it moves the message(s) rather than copying them.
- Store attachment(s)
- This option functions like the Store
button on the Attachment Processor dialog,
but automatically, on all the attachments in all of the selected
messages, all at once, after asking you for the name of the directory
where you want the files to be stored.
The Tools Menu
- Address books
-
- Mail filters
-
- Download an internet file
- This feature provides a quick way of
doing simple file retrievals from the internet via the FTP and HTTP
protocols. First, you specify the host and pathname/filename of the file
to retrieve. If you don't specify the filename under which to store the
file on your local system, the program will use whatever comes after
the last slash character in the host filename, and put it into the
directory from which the program was started. Or you can type the local
path and filename, or the Find button will give you a
file selection dialog to let you find the pathname and specify the
filename. Specify whether you want to retrieve the file via the FTP or
HTTP protocol. For FTP, you must specify your userid and password. The
program will remember the userid you used the last time you used this
dialog, and it will also remember the password if you turn on the
Remember Password checkbox. The Options
button will let you change the default parameters for the port
numbers; time to wait for a connection; and maximum idle time to allow
between packets received.
- Virtual Folders
-
The Windows Menu
- Toolbar
- This option turns the toolbar on
if it's off, or turns it off if it's on. The state of this setting also
controls whether or not the compose window's
toolbar will be present.
The Help Menu
- Contents
- This option brings up the online help window. The J
Street Mailer help files are ordinary HTML web pages, which means that
you can also use the online help window as a simple web browser; that's
the purpose of the URL field at the top right. The only
part of this window that isn't self-explanatory is the Toggle
Contents button on the toolbar; it toggles the window between
the normal display with the Contents and Index
on the left and the browser section on the right, and just the
browser section filling the whole window. (Note: This help system is
called InnoHelp, and can be purchased by Java
developers via InnoVal's home page,
http://www.innoval.com.)
- About
- This option shows you the version number of the J Street
Mailer installation you're running.