Rhapsody Developer Release Notes:
MailViewer

This file contains release notes for the MailViewer application. MailViewer provides a media-rich electronic mail client that supports both POP3 and the Berkeley mbox format. MailViewer is largely based on the Mail.app application that was a part of NeXT's NEXTSTEP andOPENSTEP releases.

Notes Specific to Developer Release

New Features

The following new features are available in MailViewer but were not available in the Mail application.

MIME

MailViewer has advanced MIME capabilities such as inline images and attachments, multiple font styles and colors, and support for rulers.

MIME supports multiple alternative representations of a sent message and lets the receiver pick the most appropriate one. MailViewer generate two alternatives, one plain text and the other an "enriched" format that contains things such as font attributes, inline attachments, and text colors. If you deselect the "Send MIME alternatives" option, MailViewer sends only one representation (either plain text or enriched text) depending on the selection made in the format pop-up list in the Compose window.

When MailViewer receives messages with RTF text attachments it tries to display the contents of the messages inline in the body of the message (unless this feature is disabled).

MailViewer also supports a custom extension to MIME that allows the application to embed information about the ruler in the body of a message. Currently the only information embedded are the tabstop positions. This information is embedded in such a way that that clients that don't support the extension simply ignore it and display text indented by fixed-space tabs.

Support for displaying MIME alternatives

If you have selected a message that supports texutal formats that are alternatives to MIME (for example, plain text, rich text, HTML, etc), the MIME menu in the Message menu becomes enabled. This menu lets you select between the "First Alternative" (which is typically a plain text representation) and the "Best Alternative" (which is the richest representation that the sender was capable of creating). Showing all alternatives simultaneously or selecting intermediate alternatives is not currently implemented.

Paste As Quotation and Automatic Quoting

The Paste As Quotation menu command in the Edit menu allows you to paste the contents of the pasteboard into a compose window as a quotation. You can set the presentation of the quoted text in the Quoting preference display (">" characters, textual color, and so on). If you enable the automatic quoting preference, when you choose Reply or Reply All from the Message menu, the body of the replied-to message appears in the compose window, quoted. If you select part of a message when you choose Reply or Reply All, only that part of the message is quoted.

POP3 Client Support With Background Fetching

MailViewer supports the POP3 client protocol for receiving mail. You can configure this option through the Receiving display in the Preferences panel. The configuration information you should supply is:

Hostname: Provided by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or your local system administrator.

Username: The user account that has been created on the POP server specified in the Hostname field. Note, the entry should not include any domain name information. For example, if your e-mail address is "jdoe@somewhere.com", then your user name is probably just "jdoe". You should check with your ISP or system administrator for specific information.

Password: This field (which does not display its contents) should contain the password for the account name specified in the Username field.

Spool Directory: The directory specified in this field is used during POP fetching as a "configuration" directory where various things such as temporary files and the list of previously seen messages (see below) are kept. If you are accessing your POP account from multiple machines, this directory should be a shared directory. If you are using a dialup connection (such as an analog modem), for best performance you should specify a directory that is local on your machine. The recommended default value is ~/Mailboxes/popspool.

POP Options: You can delete mail on a POP server after fetching it. If you don't delete mail on the server, you get the same messages each time you fetch mail unless you enable the "Only fetch unseen messages" option. If you delete mail on the server, this last option has no effect.
: For better performance, you can fetch POP mail in the background. A progress panel displays the number, size, and subject of messages while MailViewer is retrieving mail. You may disable the progress indicator if you wish, but you won't be able to cancel fetching (an option on the panel) if you do.

New Preferences Panel

Several preference options that weren't in the Mail application have been added to MailViewer. You should review each of the displays to verify your settings and set any new options to suit your needs. The new options are the following:

User Information: This display allows you to set your name and user name as it will appear in messages that you send. The default is to use the user name of the account you log in as, but you can change this to something else. The sample is only an approximation of how it will look to recipients of your mail because the receiving mail program controls the format. You can also specify a "reply-to" address that can be different than the account you are sending the mail from. This address is the one that most mail programs use when a user replies to messages; however, this behavior varies among clients.

Viewing: You use this display to customize various aspect of the mail viewer (the main window for each open mailbox). Here you can also set how often MailViewer should check for mail.

Sending: This display allows you to specify options used when you send mail. The most commonly supported delivery method is SMTP; your ISP or system administrator should provide the address of the SMTP host to use. You can disable warnings of messages over a certain size by either leaving the appropriate field blank or entering zero in it; even if you disable warnings, however, not all networks can deliver messages of any size. You should contact your ISP or system administrator if you experience problems with mail delivery that are due to the size of messages.

Receiving: You receive mail in two different ways: via a "spool directory" or via a POP server. If you are on a network and have a spool directory you can set the "Incoming spoolfile directory" in this display to point at that spool directory. MailViewer look in that directory for a file with the name of your user account and reads mail from it. The format of the spool file should be the standard Berkeley format. The second option for receiving mail is via a POP (Post Office Protocol) server. See the POP3 Client Support With Background Fetching for details.

Compose: With this display you can specify the default format that MailViewer should use when you compose new messages. The display also allows you to control how you reply to messages. If you want to archive all outgoing messages automatically to a mailbox, you can enter the mailbox name in the appropriate field; if the mailbox doesn't exist, MailViewer creates it when you send the next message. To disable archiving for individual messages, hold down the Alternate key when you click the Deliver button.

Quoting: If you want to quote the original text of messages automatically when you reply to or forward a message, you should check the appropriate checkbox in this display. You can also specify characteristics of the text included in the body of replied-to or forwarded messages for both plain text and rich text (MIME) messages. The format used is determined by the Format pop-up list in the Compose window when you click the Reply, Reply All, or Forward toolbar buttons or menu items.

MIME: In this display you can enable the option that allows you to receive messages with inline text attachments. You can also select the "Send MIME alternatives" option to have both plain text and enriched (MIME) text sent to recipients as alternative representations of your messages. If the ruler option is causing undesirable text in the body of messages sent by MailViewer, you can disable the option.

New Mailboxes Panel

The Mailboxes panel uses an outline view to display the contents of the ~/Mailboxes directory in a hierarchical manner. You can create nested mailbox directories by typing a path in the New Mailbox panel. For example, entering "Meetings/Notes" in the New Mailbox panel would create a directory called Meetings in ~/Mailboxes with a Notes.mbox inside of it. You can create a new mailbox in an existing ~/Mailboxes subdirectory by selecting that directory in the mailboxes panel, typing a name, and clicking the New button.

If a mailbox has unread messages, the Mailboxes panel displays the mailbox name in bold face and shows the number of unread messages in parentheses after the mailbox name.

Display of Senders Image

When MailViewer displays an message it tries to find a TIFF file corresponding to the sender's e-mail address. The directories that MailViewer looks in are, in order:

/Local/Library/Images/People
/System/Library/Images/People
~/Library/Images/People

When it searches for a user's image, MailViewer use the From header's value and appends ".tiff" to the string. If it finds a match in any of the above directories, it displays that image in the upper right corner of the message viewer. For example, if MailViewer is displaying a message with a From address of "steve@apple.com", it looks for a file called "steve@apple.com.tiff" in one of the directories listed above.

It is common to populate a central directory on an NFS server with the images of a site's users and then mount that directory as /Local/Library/Images/People.

Known Problems

These bugs are known to exist in the MailViewer application:

Reference	1679113
Problem	Garbled messages displayed
Description	Occasionally MailViewer displays messages incorrectly; it displays random characters or sometimes part of one message and part of another. This happens when the mailbox file and the table of contents file (table_of_contents) become out of sync.
Workaround	To fix the problem, close the mailbox window in MailViewer and rebuild the table of contents by deleting the table_of_contents file (located inside the ..mbox directory wrapper). The next time the mailbox is opened, MailViewer rebuilds the table of contents and synchronizes all messages. Rebuilding the table of contents has two side effects. The first is that all messages marked as deleted are undeleted (you can avoid this by compacting your mailbox first). The second is that all unread messages are marked as having been read.

Reference	2001455
Problem	Messages accidentally left on POP server.
Description	If you fetch mail via a POP server and have the "Only fetch unseen messages" checked, some messages might be left on the server even though they are unseen. MailViewer determines if it has seen messages by keeping track of the Message-ID header of messages. Message-ID headers are supposed to be unique, but sometimes (typically as a result of mailing lists), some messages can have the same Message-ID. When MailViewer fetches mail from a POP server, it scans backwards (from newest to oldest) looking for a Message-ID that it's already seen. As soon as it finds one it stops looking and starts fetching from that message forward. Thus, if two messages on the POP server have the same Message-ID, the message behind the fetched one is not fetched.
Workaround	Periodically uncheck the "Only fetch unseen messages" option and have MailViewer fetch all messages on the server. If you don't have the "Delete messages on server" checked, a large number of new messages might be fetched. The suggested configuration is to have "Delete messages on server" checked and "Only fetch unseen messages" unchecked. This configuration avoids the problem altogether.

Reference	1677229
Problem	Addresses with commas confuse MailViewer
Description	If an address is entered similar to the following: "Smith, John" <jsmith@corp.com> the commas inside the quotation marks confuses MailViewer, which treats the address as two different addresses: "Smith and John" <jsmith@corp.com>
Workaround	Remove the comma in the quotation marks, or remove the entire quoted string altogether.

Reference	2179438
Problem	Can't change filtered headers.
Description	The original Mail application had a preference for indicating which headers to filter when reading messages. This preference has not yet been added to MailViewer's Preferences displays.
Workaround	Although the filtered-headers preference is not settable in a Preferences display, you can set it as a user default from the command line (using the Terminal application). The default name is "MailFilter" and the value is a string containing colon separated header names. For example, `defaults write MailViewer MailFilter "CC:Date"` causes the the suppression of the CC and Date headers when a message is displayed. Setting a default such as this overrides the default filtered headers, which is: "Content-Length:Content-Transfer-Encoding:Content-Type:Errors-To:Mime-Version:Received:References". Therefore, you might want to include these values in your custom setting.

Reference	2210004
Problem	Can't specify "Other addresses for myself."
Description	The original Mail application had an option for specifying other email addresses for yourself. This option worked in conjunction with the "Remove myself from reply recipients" Compose preference. This has not yet been added to the MailViewer preferences panel.
Workaround	Although it is not settable in a Preferences display, this is a default which you can set at the command line, using Terminal. The default name is "Alternates" and the value is a string containing comma separated list of email addresses. For example, `defaults write MailViewer Alternates "rainbow@dontask.com,ellen@ellen.com"`

Rhapsody Developer Release Notes: MailViewer