last modified October 30th 2000 -
latest version usually available here
There are two documents shipped with the PowerMail application: a Read Me (this file) and a manual explaining PowerMail basics. In addition, our web site has a section with Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Table of contents
3.0.6 - October 30th 2000New features
- A public beta version for Mac OS X is now available from our download page. See release notes below
- Accelerated moving messages to trash, as well as moving from one open container window to another
- Added a "From or To" criteria in the "View only" floating window
- Holding the command and shift keys (or option - shift) upon startup now allows selection of a different database to be used than the one last used
- Mailboxes exported from Musashi in a non-orthodox variant of the Eudora format can now be imported into PowerMail
- If an attachment no longer exists in the Attachments folder, an alert is now displayed when attempting to open it.
- Added 2 AppleScripts to export and import the contents of settings as text or as Unicode text; this speed up the process of setting up a new configuration, and allows easy backup of settings in human-readable form.
- Clicking on "Send" with one or more waiting messages selected will now resend messages if the Mail Scheduling settings allow. This also applies messages whose sending failed (SMTP error) or was interrupted the first time.
Bug fixes
- When redirecting a message, if the recipient address was pasted in the recipient table (without clicking to start typing an adress), there where an error upon sending the message.
- Exporting in Eudora format could sometimes result in having imported mailboxes show up in a single message when imported into Outlook Express
- When using "View only "in the address book and selecting some addresses, dismissing the "View only" floating window could result in an incorrect selection
- Disabled an advanced "anti-flashing" redraw mechanism when switching back into PowerMail, in the hope that this would solve an occasional window-related crash
- If an account specified to move the reply insertion point BEFORE quoted text and a random signature was set, the signature was not added upon replying.
- When quitting with an unsaved message, "Cancel" in the "Save changes before quitting would result in a message that could not be sent afterwards
- Opening a new message window when one was already opened but collapsed would open the window at it's minimum size
- If full headers were displayed, attempting to modify a sent message (after clicking on Duplicate) would add the full headers to the body of the newly composed message
- Importing from version 2.4 was broken in 3.0.5 - fixed
- Attempting to import a PowerMail 2.4 database in absence of a 2.4 preference file, PowerMail 3 was under the impression that the imported database was already in use.
- After hiding the application using the application menu, the floating window had a tendency to be moved to the top left of the screen
- When the attachment folders could not be found, the name of the folder containing the current PowerMail application was sometimes erroneously displayed in a message's attachment pane
Mac OS X version release notes
Due to popular demand, this is the first external release of a PowerMail build usable natively under Mac OS X. As the operating system itself is much of a work in progress which cannot be considered as production-quality, no guarantees are made as to the actual suitability or performance of PowerMail when running under Mac OS X.The user interface spacing requirements for dialogs and other layouts have not been modified for Mac OS X, as this would imply a degradation of the user experience on Mac OS 9 (or maintenance of two sets of resources to be updated and translated at every change). The user-interface modifications will be phased in over time, depending on when the majority of our users shift operating systems.
- Importing from PowerMail 2.4 cannot be performed using the Mac OS X version, since the import code cannot be carbonized (relies on some PowerMail 2.4 code); if you need to do this, run the Classic version once instead.
- Clicking on the "Sherlock/Find File" button at the bottom of message windows does not know how to launch the native Sherlock, so it launches the Classic one.
- Features disabled in this version
- Tooltips
- Stuffit support (a new, Carbonized Stuffit SDK would be necessary)
- Keychain support (due to a crash on startup that appears to be in Apple's court)
- Usage of the notification manager (due to a crash on notification that appears to be in Apple's court)
- Finder information for attachments (due to a crash in Apple's code)
3.0.5 - September 5th 2000
New features
- Made major AppleScript enhancements:
- Added the ability to enumerate, modify, add and delete recipients
- Added the ability to enumerate and add attachments
- Implemented an AppleEvent to delete a message immediately without putting it in the mail trash
- Full scriptability of Mail Account settings and Mail Scheduling settings
- A script can now perform a filter on the messages selected in the mail browser (perform filter "filter name")
- Implemented "reply to", "forward" and "redirect" commands
- Added the command "open message container" to open a folder in it's own window
- Added the properties "parent", "unread count", "unread count in hierarchy" and "unsent count" to message container
- Added "user folder", "attachment folder" and "additions folder" AppleScript properties
- Added the properties "front-most" and "version" to application
- Added the property "displayed message" and "content" to window
- Nested commands now work in AppleScript (such as "get name of parent of storage of displayed message of window 1"); however, in order to get address of a recipient, one still would need to use a temporary variable i.e. "set addrVar to address of recipient" and then "get address of addrVar
- Added support for additional message properties:
- sender
- label
- storage (the folder containing the message)
- headers (the message full headers)
- source (the message re-encoded in MIME format, without attachments)
- Scripts can be stored in some subfolders of the Scripts folder; this allows the installation of a script's distribution inside of a folder which may also contain release notes or a Read Me file
- Full headers are now displayed in the font and size defined for roman script
- Balloons have been replaced by ToolTips in the toolbar
- The scripts menu now displays the scripts comments (as typed in the Finder) in balloons if there are such comments and if balloon help is enabled
- Added a new script named "Make new PowerMail script"; this will create a new script in the Scripts folder of your current "PowerMail files" folder, which will contain a skeleton of a script that applies to a selection of messages (the skeleton script is copied from the file named "Script Template" in "PowerMail Additions) and open it in Script editor
- When searching within a message container, read messages were ignored if the container status was "view unread" ; find by content in selected folder now ignores View All/ View Unread setting (2834)
- We now index without prompting when attempting to search with background indexing is on and the number of unindexed messages is smaller than 20 (2825)
- When attempting to display a message which might have failed to be decoded correctly, we now put up a warning dialog (2689)
- Moved the ability to edit Internet settings from the menu bar to a button in the Mail Accounts window; this button is enabled whenever an account is set to use Internet Settings
- Added a "File Extensions Mappings..." button in the Preferences dialog; this will open the proper pane of the Internet control panel
- If PowerMail is not set as in the Internet control panel as the default mail browser, it will offer to set it automatically upon first launch or - optionally - later
- If a there is only a single account configured, the Connect command connects to that account directly instead of displaying the account list dialog (1732)
Bug fixes
- The connection dialog no longer displays the last account in the list as a half-drawn checkbox that requires scrolling (1420)
- When launching PowerMail on a machine for the first time, the dialog "Please enter password for on" could be displayed (2763)
- Fixed a rare base64 bug: if the TCP buffer received just before an attachment contained a line with a single period, we would add a few extra characters at the end (2879)
- Another base64 encoding bug: if the size of an encoded file modulo 4095 was between 1 and 76, we would add a few extra lines at the end of the file
- When selecting "Find" with a text selection larger than 255 character in a message view, the Find window would cause a crash
- On exporting as Eudora format, the fields "Reply-to" and "Sender" were wrong
- When saving text as Unicode, we now add 2 bytes at the beginning to indicate endianness (2881)
- Conversely, opening Unicode file now support files with a byte order mark, either little endian or big endian
- We no longer change attachment encodings based on recipient preferences in the address book every time a message is opened
- Fixed Error 7 in 9 which would occur when a mail schedule was attempting to connect to an account that had been deleted
- Searching in current message can find roman (ASCII) text within a Japanese (or other script) message
- The "View Only" palette location is now correctly stored upon quitting
- Attempting to make a new message with waiting status using AppleScript did not work
- The From field of an outgoing message created using AppleScript was not being copied from the account
- In the subject field, copying a Roman word just before a Japanese word without any space in between would also copy the first Japanese character
- In the subject field, pasting a Japanese string in the midst of an existing string would delete one character from the former string
- Fixed a Japanese find-by-content bug
- Fixed various printing bugs
- The text auto-scroll speed is now machine-independent (users with G4's were complaining that it was too fast)
- We now always use a roman font when drawing the raw HTML portion of a message
3.0.4 - 9 July 2000
Bug fixes
- Fixed a memory leak which could cause a crash on quitting, especially if quitting was requested by other applications (i.e. when one selects Restart or Shutdown in the Finder).
- Filter conditions (is sender in group/folder, account) were sometimes changed to a wrong group/folder/account when opening the filter dialog
- Fixed bug when pasting text in subject field on when an OS had the Hebrew language kit installed
- When replying an English-language message on a system with Hebrew set as system script, a direction-change character was inserted, causing the message to be sent with Hebrew encoding instead of Roman encoding.
- The undo menu was enabled when creating a new message; using it would delete the signature
- Error -35 would appear when saving messages containing the illegal character ":" in their subject as text
- Fixed auto scroll bug when zoom factor is not 100%
- Fixed crash when typing up/down arrow in recipient field when forwarding a message (before typing an address)
- If a user clicks "continue" on the alert saying that navigation services are not available, the alert will not appear the next time
- When changing the status of a message resulting from a "View only" selection (notably when clicking on an unread message) it would get displayed with its old status after dismissing the "View only" floating windows, despite having correctly updated the status
- Upon closing the view-only palette, erasing the view-only field or selecting "View All" the selection was lost
- When View Only was enabled while displaying the In Tray, newly fetched messages would force "View All" automatically
New features
- Accelerated the launch time by about 27%
- By popular demand, implemented the tabulated text export format, including a sample FileMaker Pro 4 database illustrating the use of the field format that we use:
- - Date (MM/DD/YYYY), GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)
- - Time (HH:MM:SS), GMT
- - From
- - Subject
- - To (list separated by commas if multiple To/CC recipients)
- - Body (line breaks replaced by ASCII 11)
- - date-time-zone in RFC 822 format
- - full headers (line breaks replaced by ASCII 11)
3.0.3 - 14 June 2000
Bug fixes
- On opening messages in their own window (as opposed to viewing them in the mail browser) the scroll position would be at the bottom
- Fixed the ability for a filter to call an AppleScript which applies to the message being filtered
- In the x-mailer field, we were still marking messages as 3.0.1
- Fixed a menu-disabling bug in the French version
New features
- Added the ability to make accented searches diacritical-insensitive. In clear, this means that searching for "Jérôme", "Jérôme", "Jerôme" or "Jerome" will all work
- Added an example AppleScript for use within a filter which illustrates how to filter on words contained in the body of a message.
3.0.2 - 14 June 2000
Bug fixes
- Fixed a major indexing bug that was the source of much frustration for some users, as some messages were systematically not being found
- Fixed the indexing of words containing characters outside of the US ASCII table roman characters (i.e. accented characters)
- After deleting an account that was being referred to by the current Mail Scheduling, a DBError 7 would occur.
- "Perform now" in filters for incoming messages now applies to imported messages as well as to fetched messages
- Tab key inserts 4 spaces instead of 4 tabs
- Find now works if no browser is open
- Find or export selected folder also works using the folder list window
- Doing "Select all" no longer disables auto scrolling
- We no longer intercept the up/down arrow keys when editing a recipient
- Fixed a crash if attempting to print while no message was selected
- Command-right arrow on the last line no longer moves the cursor to n-1 characters
- Undo is no longer available when opening a message
- The Stop or Cancel button of a progress dialog now requires command and period to be pressed simultaneously to interrupt (instead of command OR period)
- If no script menu was available, there could be a crash upon quitting
- UTF7-encoded messages were needlessly encoded in base64
- Messages which had been imported (instead of fetched) could be left out when using the "Perform filter now" button in the filters dialog
- If a message's date did not contain a time or a time zone, its display might have been offset
- A forwarded message could have its To: and CC: incorrectly filled
- An address folder can no longer be dropped onto itself
- Some command-key variants did not work with non-US messages
New features
- Improved the database file format; make sure you perform a backup of your databases before using them with 3.0.2 because they will no longer be usable with previous versions
- Moving a selection of messages has been accelerated by over 250%
- Emptying trash has been accelerated
- When an SMTP server is too busy to deal with sending a message, we now report the server's error message instead of displaying a long nondescript error code
- Added option to empty mail trash upon quitting
- The Find dialog now opens with the last active pane selected
- URLs which start with www are now double-clickable and draw in blue, even if the sender incorrectly omitted the "http://" prefix
- Added a mechanism to enable double-clicking on URLs longer than 72 characters, even if subsequent lines may not draw in blue
- Attempted to enable Frontier Menu sharing, although we are not sure this works as advertised
- Reworked and simplified the PowerMail First Aid dialog (invoked by holding the option and command keys while launching the application); added an option to check for the actual consistency of each database record in addition to the previously implemented database verification
- Updated the manual with new keyboard shortcuts
- The Help menu now includes an item which will directly open the PowerMail web site
- Setting a label is now possible on the currently displayed message window
- Finished the French version of PowerMail 3.0.2 (la version française est désormais disponible sous http://www.ctmdev.com/download.shtml)
- AppleScript: Implemented a mechanism to modify the original date of messages, which is useful if they contained wrong dates. A sample script is included ("Fix incorrect dates") that fixes the date of selected messages either one by one or altogether if they are either older than 1990 or later than tomorrow; another script ("Set date to now") does the just sets messages to the current date without any user interaction, which makes it suitable for invoking from an AppleScript inside a filter (thus fixing dates "on the fly" as messages are being filtered)
- AppleScript: "Make new message" can now include attachments with encoding and compression options
- AppleScript: Added a "current messages" property to enable the possibility of acting a list of selected messages; this also applies to the message displayed in the current window, as well as to the message currently being filtered if a script is executed as part of a filter
- AppleScript: Added a "connection in progress" property to enable scripts to exert finer control over connections
- AppleScript: Added added properties "in tray", "out tray", "sent mail container" and "mail trash"
- AppleScript: Added a "current scheduling" property to determine which Mail Scheduling is currently active. A sample script is included "Toggle current schedule" which is useful if you have two schedulings, i.e. "Work" and "On the road" with different fetch periodicity and SMTP server settings; the script will toggle between the two and can be modified by more sophisticated users
Known bugs
- Redirecting a message whose body is HTML will create a text/plain part instead of and HTML. This only means that that recipient will need to save the message and open it in a browser instead of viewing it inline in another client.
- On rare systems, a "Navigation Services is missing" dialog is displayed because since 3.0.1 we had to test for the presence of Navigation Services (any version) due to the fact that Default Folder could have disabled it; we have not found what causes NavServices to claim that it is not installed on some systems though.
- The Apple Multi Media Update 1.0 (also installed using Software Update) can install version 2.5.1 of the "ATI resource Manager" which conflicts with PowerMail on some blue-and-white Macs (and other applications according to MacFixit.com)
3.0.1 - 12 may 2000
Bug fixes
- Accelerated fetching and sending mail back up to the performance level that we had in final candidate versions
- The expiration date for the demo period is now 30 days from first launch instead of 30 days from first posting
- When exporting an outgoing message containing an attachment whose parent folder no longer existed as PowerMail Exchange format, PowerMail 3.0 would hang
- Could not undo any operation in other editable text fields than the body
- The text of the Undo menu was often "Can't Edit/Can't Undo" even if when these operations actually may have functioned
- There was a bug in the POP code which could truncate a message whenever a line started by a period (oops)
- Error -5699 would show when attempting to Save as Text on Macs which didn't have SimpleText installed
- After disabling Stuffit compression, dragging a folder from the Finder to PowerMail in the background could, under certain circumstances, hang.
- Spell checking: When Excalibur sent spelling corrections back to PowerMail,the index of the correction was sometimes off by one. (2788)
- Fixed a startup incompatibility with CommSlot II Macs (such as Power Macintosh 5500/225)
- Couldn't search in current message when message was new and never saved
- When clicking "find" in "search in current message", we now change the search string that will be used when search again)
- When clicking on "find", we set the search string that will be used by "find again" (2800)
- Find in current msg was disabled when editing a new unsaved message
- We no longer collapse spring-loaded rows when auto scrolling (1756)
- Added an auto-scroll mechanism while spell-checking, especially for use with Antidote
- Clicking on a mailto URL and saving the resulting message without adding a subject would cause a Database error 7 (Record not found in DB) in 9 (DBGetRecord) (2774)
- Tabbing inside the Filters dialog moves the selection in the correct field order (1340)
- When sending a message, it would contain its saved date instead of the actual sent date (2777)
- "Does not contain" filter did not work in PM 3.0.0. All mail items appeared to match, which was quite a problem for building spam filters (move all items to a spam folder where "to" does not contain "xxx"). (2785)
- When changing a filter clause from one type to another (i.e. going from "CC" to "To) its text is no longer erased
- Fixed a crash which would occur if Default Folder was set to disable Navigation services; we now check to make sure NavServices are present before using them, since we rely on their presence.
- Worked around a "disappearing window" bug that has been in the source for a long time. Unfortunately, this is just a workaround as we cannot find the real key to this problem ! (2661)
- When we shift from wide to long browser layout, we no re-select the formerly selected message so as not to be able to continue reading it (1702)
- When a message without recipient was set from Draft to Waiting, there was a cosmetic database error dialog [MAS error 7 () in 4 ()] (2758)
- Fixed a bug when importing non-US text in a Eudora mailbox format (the character set was being ignored)
- Under rare circumstances, we could have a crash when replying
- Importing messages from PowerMail 2.4 which didn't have a time zone would produce interesting dates
New features
- When creating a filter, the attributes of the current message (i.e. From, Subject, Sender) and relevant actions are automatically entered into the filter's text fields (1400)
- New contextual menu item "Make new filter..." in message list to create a filter based on the attributes of a single, currently selected message
- Added the filter criterion "Sender" (as opposed to "From"), "Status" and "Date"
- Added a "Preferred language" popup menu in Preferences which is especially useful for conditioning which language to pick when the Text Encoding Converter is in doubt, for instance on systems who have both the Japanese and Chinese Language kits installed, especially causing problems in Traditional Chinese
- When a search in the current message yields no results, we display "Not found" and beep
- The alert "Index not up to date" is showed only once if user chooses to find anyway
- Added the number of unindexed messages in the "index not up to date" alert; most of the time there are only a few messages (those which were recently sent) not indexed yet
- Dragging a text file on top of he application will now create a new outgoing message destined for sending, whose subject is the same as the dragged file's name
- When attempting to search in an outdated index, added the number of unindexed messages to the alert message (1756)
- When dragging, we highlight receiving cell entirely instead of with a simple frame, even if the view is not the target
- Upon adding a filter clause, its text is now selected
- Added a checkbox to determine whether PowerMail should quote on reply or not, following feedback from several 3.0 users asking for this to be optional (2786)
- Forwarding a message adds a text "Header" prefix which displays the same fields as what has been set for display in the mail browser (2798)
- - - - - - - - -
Known bugs
- The Apple Multi Media Update 1.0 (also installed using Software Update) can install version 2.5.1 of the "ATI resource Manager" which conflicts with PowerMail on some blue-and-white G3 Macs (also affects other applications, according to MacFixit.com; Apple has not yet responded to this.)
- In a few cases,we have found that background indexing causes a random crash related to drawing of the progress indicator. The workaround it to disable the preference checkbox for background indexing and index either manually or just before searching.
- Redirecting a message whose body is HTML will create a text/plain part instead of and HTML. This only means that that recipient will need to save the message and open it in a browser instead of viewing it inline in another client.
- Non-US text is encoded differently in Eudora 4.3 than in Eudora 4.2; as a result, there may be character encoding issues when importing such mailboxes.
Status report on our IMAP
implementation
PowerMail 3 was a near-complete rewrite of the application. Following unexpected technical challenges with our new IMAP code-base, we had chosen to release PowerMail version 3.0 in the interest of a majority of users who wanted to start using PowerMail 3 in the short-term) and postpone re-inclusion of IMAP until version 3.1, which will be a free upgrade for licensed 3.0 users.We are pleased to report that our work on version 3.1, including IMAP, is progressing nicely in-house. Once we feel that we are ready to have an IMAP version of a quality level that can be tested widely, we will do so (but we are not quoting any dates just now).
Some of the other aspects we will also be working for or after 3.1 are: limiting POP attachment downloads to a given size, built-in HTML viewer in addition to the 3.0 single-click browser open and more intimate PGP integration, amongst other features.
The latest commercial version of PowerMail can be downloaded from:http://www.powermailtech.com/pm3.bin or
http://www.powermailtech.com/pm3.hqx
Slower backup download site:
http://www.dplanet.ch/users/ctmdev/pm3.bin