OS/2 Shareware BBS: 35 Internet/35-Internet.zip/postroad.zip/postroad.inf

OS/2 Help File | 1997-10-23 | 178KB | 4,860 lines

ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 1. Introduction ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The Post Road Mailer is a program that will enable you to send and receive
internet email under OS/2 Warp 3 or later via a TCP/IP connection. It has a
number of powerful features for writing notes, sending replies, and organizing
your mail in folders.

This guide is structured as follows:

o   Quick Start
o   Settings Notebook
o   Receiving Mail
o   Sending Mail
o   Inbasket
o   Outbasket
o   Saving and Organizing Mail
o   Address Books
o   Previewing Mail on the Server
o   Filters
o   Automating the Send/Receive Process
o   InnoVal Select A File Dialog
o   Personal Post Office
o   Skytel Paging
o   PRMSENDF.EXE
    o   Appendices

        -   Acknowledgements
    -   Addressing Mail
    -   Command Line Parameters
    -   Common Email Abbreviations
    -   Control Tags in Outbasket Notes
    -   Customized Icons
        -   Emoticons
    -   Frequently Asked Questions
    -   MIME Attachment Problems
    -   Moving the Program Installation
    -   Network Use
    -   New Features
    -   Product Support
    -   Program Files
    -   *.CMD REXX Utilities


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 2. Quick Start ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The first thing to do is create an inbasket for yourself. Select Create
inbasket from the File menu of the main inbasket window, and enter your
internet address. Then open the Settings notebook for the new inbasket, also
via the File menu or via the toolbar. The following settings are enough to get
you going. See the settings notebook topic for more detailed information about
these and many other configurable settings.

On the dialer page, if your internet provider is not IBM's Advantis (ibm.net)
or if you're using the latest version of its dialer software (which is
TCPDIAL.EXE rather than DIALER.EXE), you must specify another dialer; or no
dialer if you have a direct LAN connection to the internet or you never want
this program to start whatever dialer you use.

Supply your SMTP server's name, on the protocol page.

On the POP3 page, you must fill in your POP3 server name and your user id
(which is often the part of your internet address before the @ sign). You may
also want to fill in your POP3 password there.

On the compose page, you should enter your Reply-to id if it's going to be
different from your From address. (The From address is set via the compose
header window rather than the settings notebook.)

On the notes page, enter your time zone.

Then close the settings notebook, and away you go!


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3. Settings Notebook ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The settings notebook has been developed to allow both novice and sophisticated
users ease of use and control of significant user functions. Many users will be
well served by the defaults that have been set, but the more demanding user
will be able to easily control many aspects of the application. Each inbasket
that you create has its own settings notebook, which allows you complete
control of each one separately.

The only settings you have to set are the ones listed under the Quick Start
topic. But if you want more control over the program's actions, this is the
place to look. Just select Settings from the File menu of the main inbasket
window, or the Settings button on the toolbar, and configure the following
pages. (A few other settings are also stored via the compose header window.)

o   Dialer page
o   Protocol page
o   POP3 page
o   News page
o   Inbasket page
o   Compose page
o   Notes page
o   Printouts page
o   Lock page
o   User Exits page
o   PGP page
o   Acknowledgements page
o   Miscellaneous page


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.1. Dialer Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The first setting tells the Post Road Mailer what dialer to use, for
establishing an internet connection. The choices are:

o   Use DIALER.EXE
    If you use IBM's Advantis network, then the OS/2 Warp 3 Bonus Pak's
    Internet Access Kit dialer or the OS/2 Warp 4 dialer is probably the dialer
    you want to use, so select the Use DIALER.EXE radio button. If you want to
    pass any parameters to DIALER.EXE, put them into the Parameters field. And
    of course, in order for the Post Road Mailer to be able to tell DIALER.EXE
    to dial when a connection needs to be established, you need to have
    DIALER.EXE's Dial when loaded setting turned on.

o   Use the existing connection
    If you have a constant connection to the internet, or you want to start
    your dialer yourself instead of having the Post Road Mailer start and stop
    the dialer program for you, then select the Use the existing connection
    radio button.

o   Use this dialer
    If you use another dialer, or the latest version of the Advantis dialer
    which has a filename of TCPDIAL.EXE rather than DIALER.EXE, you can select
    the Use this dialer radio button, and fill in (or select via the Find
    button) the dialer's name, and Parameters if desired. If you specify a
    pathname along with the *.EXE or *.CMD filename there (as in
    c:\tcpip\bin\slippm.exe), the Post Road Mailer will make that directory the
    current directory of the session in which it starts your dialer. This way,
    your dialer program will be able to run even if it doesn't know how to find
    its companion files except when they're in the current directory.

If your dialer often takes more or less time than two minutes to establish an
internet connection, you may want to adjust the Wait time for connection
setting. You can set it anywhere from 0 to 5 minutes. If it's set to 0, the
Post Road Mailer will alert you any time it tries to do a Send or Refresh and
finds that the server doesn't respond immediately. If it's set to 5, the Post
Road Mailer won't alert you to a missing connection until 5 minutes after the
Send or Refresh attempt begins.

Select the Hang up after Refresh or Send checkbox if you want the Post Road
Mailer to close the dialer program after sending or refreshing. Of course, this
setting will have no effect when the Post Road Mailer is not the one who
started the dialer. It will only close the dialer when it had started the
dialer itself. You can use the Disable hangup after refresh/send option to
temporarily turn this setting off, and later turn it on again, without opening
the settings notebook.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.2. Protocol Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Select whether you want your outbound mail to go to a POP3 server, an SMTP
server, or a Personal Post Office directory.

    o   POP3

    Not all internet providers offer POP3 Send. (Some who used to do so, are
    now disabling it, in order to make life more difficult for companies who
    like to send junk email to hundreds of recipients at once.) If your
    provider does allow POP3 Send, using the XTND XMIT command, then you may
    select the POP3 radio button here, and fill in your POP3 server's name on
    the POP3 page of the settings notebook.

    o   SMTP

    If your company allows it (some may not, due to security reasons), you may
    prefer to select the SMTP radio button here, and fill in your SMTP Server's
    name. The Port number should be 25, unless your internet provider tells you
    otherwise. If you want notes you send to multiple recipients to be sent
    separately, so that no recipient sees the other addressees' names in the
    header lines, then select the Send SMTP notes individually checkbox. Just
    be aware that it means that each note will be sent multiple times to single
    recipients rather than being sent once to everyone, so sending a note to a
    large number of recipients will be much slower, using this setting.

    Older SMTP servers can only handle a limited amount of data at a time. So
    most mail programs log onto the server, send one note, log off the server,
    log back on, send the next note, etc. This is very slow, and most SMTP
    servers these days do not require it. The Post Road Mailer lets you decide
    whether, and if so, how often, to do this. You can select the Recycle
    connection checkbox, and decide on the Recycle interval, which means how
    many notes to send before logging off and logging back on.

o   Personal Post Office

    If you want to use the Post Road Mailer's Personal Post Office feature,
    just select this radio button, and type (or select, using the Find button)
    the name of the directory to which you want your outbound mail sent, in the
    Outbasket path field.

The Post Road Mailer will also send, to the outbound server, any files that
exist in your Alternate send queue directory, if you specify (or select, using
the Find button) one here. These files should be in the same format as incoming
*.POP files, or *.POP files after the Post Road Mailer has placed them into a
Personal Post Office directory; not the format of outbound *.POP files in your
outbasket or the folder to which they're filed after being sent.

At the bottom of this notebook page, you select the location from which the
Post Road Mailer should retrieve your incoming mail. The choices are:

    o   POP3

    To retrieve your mail from a POP3 server, select this radio button and fill
    in the POP3 server's name on the POP3 page of the settings notebook.

o   Personal Post Office

    To use the Personal Post Office feature, select this radio button and type
    (or select, using the Find button) the name of the directory in the
    Inbasket path field. Just remember that any files which exist in that
    directory, which don't have their Read-only attributes turned on, are going
    to be deleted from that directory if you have the setting Delete from host
    set to Yes. So you probably don't ever want to specify a non-empty
    directory as a PPO source!


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.3. POP3 Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

At the top of this page, you specify the name of your POP3 Server for mail
retrieval, your User Id (which is often the part of your internet address
before the @ sign), your Password (unless you want to leave it blank and have
the Post Road Mailer prompt you for it during each Refresh), and your POP3 Port
(which should be 110 unless your internet provider tells you otherwise).

If you use IBM's Advantis internet provider (ibm.net), you can find the above
information in your IBM Internet Customer Service folder.

If you use POP3 for sending also, and your outbound POP3 server's name is
different from the inbound one (this is pretty rare), then you specify the
outbound one's name at the bottom of this page, in the Outbound POP3 server (if
different) field.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.4. News Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

This page exists only in settings notebooks which belong to News As Mail
inbaskets. News As Mail is a quick and easy way of reading internet usenet
newsgroups without getting a dedicated news reader program, for people who only
want to browse a couple of small newsgroups. It is not meant to be a full
featured news reader.

Whenever you create an inbasket, the first dialog box asks you whether it
should be a normal POP/SMTP Mail inbasket or a News Reader inbasket. If you
choose the latter radio button, this is what you get. The second dialog box
lets you enter your new Inbasket name, Inbasket path (optional) (which means
the directory in which you want the inbasket created; most people will want to
leave it blank so that the new inbasket will be a subdirectory of the Post Road
Mailer directory), Internet userid, News server, and News categories.

The News page of the settings notebook contains the following fields:

News server is, of course, filled in by the initial dialog box described above,
but you can modify the entry here. You get the value which goes in this field,
from your internet service provider.

Port should almost always be 119. Your internet service provider will tell you
if yours should be set to some other value.

News category(s) is also filled in by the initial dialog box, but you can
change it here at any time. It is where you list the newsgroups to which you
want to subscribe.

Followup to is an optional field which you can fill in with your email address,
if you want readers to be able to send you private replies in response to your
newsgroup postings.

Organization is another optional field which, if filled in, will go into your
postings as a header line to identify you to other readers.

If you leave the Prompt when refreshing news checkbox turned on, then at
download time, you will be prompted with a series of choices which will allow
you to constrain the articles that will be downloaded. You may have your choice
of retrieving all the articles; just the new ones (newer than the date and time
you enter); just the headers (after which you can decide, by viewing the
headers, which of the notes to have the program download for you); or you can
view the last list of headers you had retrieved, if you've used that function
before. If you turn off this checkbox in the settings notebook, on the other
hand, then your only choice will be to retrieve all of the articles each time
you refresh this inbasket.

When you're viewing a News As Mail inbasket, the inbasket's Notes menu changes
to an Articles menu, and the Compose option on that menu and the Compose button
on the action pad change to Post instead. Everything else about a News As Mail
inbasket is just like a POP/SMTP Mail one. You read articles just as you read
notes, and forward them, reply to them, file them or shred them as if they were notes.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.5. Inbasket Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

If you want the Post Road Mailer to automatically go to the internet provider
and refresh your inbasket every few minutes, or every hour, etc., put a
non-zero number into the Automatic refresh interval (mins.) field. Be aware
that an automatic Refresh will refuse to occur when you're in the middle of
something which might get messed up by the Refresh. So if you happen to notice
that a Refresh should have occurred at 2:10 p.m. but didn't, and you had your
List of Folders window, Filters window, Address Books window, settings
notebook, etc., open at the time, that's why. The automatic Refresh interval is
also restarted whenever you close the settings notebook, in case you had
changed the value while you were in there.

Most people will want to set the next radio buttons to Retrieve notes: All and
Delete from host: Yes. But if you want to check your mail while at home, but
you don't want to take mail off the server that you'll need to be able to
retrieve while you're at work tomorrow, then you might set Retrieve notes: New
only and Delete from host: No. See Frequently Asked Questions for a warning
about how this setup can cause you to miss new mail, though.

Mail Mapping is a service which some internet service providers perform. You
get your own domain name, and any piece of mail sent to any address in that
domain goes into your POP3 mailbox as if it had been addressed there. For
example, mail sent to [e-mail] or [e-mail] or
[e-mail] actually gets delivered to our [e-mail]
mailbox. We could use filters to put incoming mail into various folders
depending on how it's addressed, but the problem with that method is that all
the mail ends up on one computer, and someone must deliver it to the various
addressees' offices in our company. So the Post Road Mailer's Mail Mapping
support feature was born. You create an inbasket for just one address in the
remapped domain and specify that address (or up to 200 characters of addresses,
separated by commas) in the Only retreive mail for address(es) field. The User
Id and Password fields should be filled in with the settings for the real
account, not the mapped account, since the mapped account is really a virtual
account and doesn't exist at all. So in our example, the User Id would be
innoval and the Only receive mail for address(es) field might say
[e-mail],[e-mail]. Then, whenever we do a Refresh in
this inbasket, the mail addressed to those addresses is retrieved, and all the
other mail in that POP3 account is left on the POP3 server for someone else to retrieve.

This feature can be just as useful even if you don't have Mail Mapping provided
by your internet service provider, if you want different pieces of mail to be
sorted into different inbaskets; especially if those inbaskets are on different
computers or in different offices. For example, you could have business
associates sending you mail at Company Name <[e-mail]>, while
friends send you mail at Your Name <[e-mail]>. Then have two
identical inbaskets, except that one's Only receive mail for address field
contains the one Name <address> combination, and the other inbasket's setting
contains the other combination.

When you do a Refresh from an inbasket that's configured to use the Mail
Mapping feature, the program will retrieve the header of each piece of mail,
and only retrieve the note if it finds the specified address in the To: header
line. The Delete from host: Yes/No setting works normally, only deleting the
notes that were retrieved, and the others are left there to be retrieved by
another inbasket or even another office. But the Retrieve notes: All/New
setting is ignored, and the program acts as if All were selected. Don't be
confused by what the status line says during a Refresh in a Mail Mapping
inbasket. When it says it's downloading 16 notes, that means it's downloading
16 headers to see which ones (if any) belong to the particular address(es) for
which the inbasket is configured. But if you ever have some reason to believe
that the program hasn't retrieved all of the mail it should have, you can use
the Preview Mail feature to look at all the notes on the server, regardless of
how they're addressed. Preview Mail will see them all, not just the ones in the
Only receive mail for address(es) field.

If you want the Post Road Mailer to always send any notes that might be in your
outbasket after you do a Refresh, then turn on the Send queued mail after
inbasket refresh checkbox.

If you want the Post Road Mailer to always do a Refresh after you send any
outgoing mail, then turn on the Refresh inbasket after sending queued mail
checkbox. If you use both this setting and the above one, don't worry, it won't
cause the program to go into an infinite loop.

If you want the Post Road Mailer to always send your outgoing mail as soon as
you put it into the outbasket, if you happen to have an active internet
connection at the time, then turn on the Send notes immediately, if connected checkbox.

If you do not want the Post Road Mailer to prompt you for confirmation each
time you attempt to exit the program, turn off the Prompt before exiting
program checkbox.

If you don't want the program to prompt you for confirmation each time you
attempt to leave an inbasket without sending any outgoing mail you have in that
inbasket's outbasket folder, turn off the Prompt when leaving unsent mail
behind checkbox.

Automatic refresh only when connected makes automatic Refreshes take place only
during times when you're connected to your internet provider. If this setting
is disabled, then the program will start your dialer (if configured to do so)
and do the Refresh, when scheduled, even if you're not connected to the
internet when a Refresh time arrives.

Many SMTP servers can't handle really large amounts of data all at once. This
fact probably affects you even if you use POP3 rather than SMTP for your
outgoing mail, because most POP3 servers connect to SMTP servers somewhere
between a note's sender and its recipient. So by default, when you send a large
attachment, the Post Road Mailer splits it into chunks 64 kilobytes in size,
and it goes out as a split attachment. You can adjust that chunk size using the
Attachment split size field, or even turn it off by deselecting the Split
outgoing attachments checkbox.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.6. Compose Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Internet notes can have both a From address and a Reply-to address, so that
your replies can reach you at your main address even if you happen to write to
someone from a different address, or so that you can have a correspondent reply
to someone else entirely. Most email programs will address a reply to the
Reply-to address, rather than the From address, of the note to which you're
replying, if it has a Reply-to address. (If it doesn't, the From address will
always be used.) So if you want your default Reply-to address to be different
from your From address, specify it here in the Reply-to id field. (You can
always change it, for any one note, on the compose window while you're writing
a note.) You can put your name here, as well as your internet address, by
enclosing the address in angle brackets after the name, as in Kari Jackson
<[e-mail]>. If you don't want your Reply-to address to be different from
your From address, then you don't need to use a Reply-to address at all.
However, no harm will be done if you do specify the same address here as the
From address you use in the compose window, if you want to have a Reply-to
header in your notes even though you don't want it to be different. (There is
no setting here, for the From address, because the default From address used
for each note you write is the From address you used in the last note you
wrote; that is, the compose window saves the From field as your new default
each time.)

Sometimes, you may want to use a text editor other than the built-in Post Road
Mailer one, to write or view notes or files from within the Post Road Mailer.
You specify (or select, using the Find button) the editor you want to use for
that purpose in the Alternate editor field. You type an asterisk (*) in the
position in which you want the filename to appear in your command (or if you
don't type an asterisk, the filename will be inserted between the command and
any other parameters), but other than that, you type the command just as you
would at the OS/2 command line. If the program's file or directory name is more
than one word long (on an HPFS drive), you must enclose it in double quotation
marks (as in "c:\long name\edit.exe"). If you specify a pathname along with the
*.EXE or *.CMD filename there, as in that example, then the Post Road Mailer
will make that program's own directory the current directory of the session in
which it starts the program. You can use an editor started by a batch file or
REXX program, but there is an important reason for not doing so: In order to
start a *.CMD file, the Post Road Mailer has to use a method which does not let
it know when the *.CMD program has finished. Therefore, the Post Road Mailer
cannot wait for it to finish and load the altered file back into whatever
window you were viewing it in before you edited it. In the note view window,
this is only a minor inconvenience, as it means you would have to close and
reopen the window in order to see the results of your editing. But in the
compose window, the inconvenience is greater. Because the only way to get your
text back into the compose window to send it, would be to find and import the
temporary file ($$data$$.pop in your inbasket subdirectory) which the Post Road
Mailer had opened for you when you started the alternate editor. So you can see
why we do not recommend using a batch file to start your alternate editor, even
though it will work if you do it.

The Default folder field's Find button is where you select (or create) a folder
(directory) in which the Post Road Mailer should store the notes you send out,
after it has sent them. You can also select not to have your sent notes stored
anywhere. And you can change this setting, for any one note, on the compose
window while you're writing that note. If you select the <Current Month>
option, either here or in the compose window, the notes you send in October of
1997 will be filed to a folder named 1997oct, the notes you send in February of
1999 will be filed to 1999feb, etc.

The Default word wrap radio buttons let you specify what kind of word wrapping
you want, by default, in your compose windows. You can also change it
temporarily, via the Format menu of the compose window while you're writing a
note. The point at which word wrapping occurs, when turned on, is determined by
the width of your compose text window.

If you want the Post Road Mailer to always reformat text which you quote while
writing a reply, turn on the Format quoted text checkbox. You can also turn it
on and off, temporarily, via the Format menu of the compose window while you're
writing a note. Please see Format text when quoted for details on how this
option works.

If you want the Post Road Mailer to always reformat text files which you import
via the Import text file option on the compose window's File menu, you can turn
on the Format imported text checkbox. You can also turn it on and off,
temporarily, via the Format menu of the compose window while you're writing a note.

If you want the compose window to act more like the one in the Post Road Mailer
version 1.0x, you can use glued mode by turning on the Default glued mode
checkbox. You can also turn it on and off, temporarily, via the Windows menu of
the compose window while you're writing a note.

If you want to be able to type invalid internet addresses in the To, Cc, and
From lines of your notes, without the Post Road Mailer asking you if you're
sure you want to do that each time, turn off the Check addresses for Internet
format checkbox.

When you send a note to more than one addressee, the Post Road Mailer will put
all their addresses at the top of the body of the note so that each recipient
can see who else received the note, even if his mailer doesn't show all the
header information. If the number of addressees is larger than the number
specified in the Maximum addresses allowed at top of note setting, then the
addresses will instead appear at the bottom of the note, in a distribution
list. If you don't want this distribution list to show at the bottom of your
outbound notes, you can turn on the Suppress distribution list in outgoing
notes checkbox. If you don't want the recipients of your notes to be able to
tell the names of the other recipients at all, then set Maximum addresses
allowed at top of note to 0, and turn on Suppress distribution list in outgoing
notes. And if you use an SMTP server for outgoing mail, be sure to use the Send
SMTP notes individually option as well, so that the addresses won't be visible
to people whose mail readers show all the note headers, either.

The Initial cursor position radio buttons let you specify whether you want your
cursor to start out at the Beginning of text or the End of text, when you
forward a note.

If you don't like a mailer to add the prefix Re: to the beginning of subject
lines that don't already have it there, when replying or forwarding a note,
just turn off the Add "Re:" to Reply subject line checkbox.

The Quoted text character field is where you specify the character you want the
Post Road Mailer to use at the beginning of each line of quoted text, when you
quote while writing a reply.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.7. Notes Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

If you don't want the Post Road Mailer to ask if you're sure each time you try
to delete a note, turn off the Confirm deletion of all notes checkbox. Then,
the only time it will confirm a note deletion is if you have more than 10 bytes
of text selected (so that it's obviously not an accidental selection) in the
note view window. The program will still make you confirm then, because it's
easy to forget that you're in the note view window rather than the compose
window, select text, and hit the DEL key when what you mean to do is delete the
selected text rather than the whole note.

If you want notes that you delete to be immediately moved from the inbasket or
folder to the shred queue, instead of remaining where they are with X icons
until you close or recycle the inbasket or folder, just turn on the Remove
notes immediately when deleted checkbox.

When you delete a note which had arrived with attachments, if the attachment(s)
are still there by this time, the program will ask you whether or not you want
the attachment(s) deleted along with the note. If you don't want to be asked
this question, turn off the Enable (prompt) deletion of attachments with notes
setting. You will then be responsible for the deletion of your own attachments.
If you leave this setting on and Remove notes immediately when deleted off,
your attachments will be deleted as soon as you affirmatively answer the
question; not when you close the inbasket or folder and the notes get deleted.

Normally, when you receive a note with a file attached, the Post Road Mailer
will separate the attachment from the note and store the former in the
Attachments window. If you want the Post Road Mailer to pretend that it doesn't
know anything about attachments, and leave them in the note as they arrived
from the mail server, then turn on the Do not resolve attachments checkbox.

If you want the Post Road Mailer to separate attachments into the Attachments
window as usual, but leave the attachment data in the body of the note as well,
the way it arrived, so that each attachment is available both ways, then turn
on the Preserve attachment data in notes checkbox. Obviously, you don't want to
have the Do not resolve attachments checkbox turned on along with this one.
Also, note that this setting will also preserve the "Your mail program does not
appear to support MIME messages" notice which some mailers put at the beginning
of a MIME message. Processing the message causes that notice to be discarded,
normally; but this setting will prevent that since this setting leaves the note
in the exact state it was in when it arrived. So the notice will be there even
though your mailer does support MIME messages. Finally, this setting will also
turn off the Post Road Mailer's ability to decode ISO Latin-1 and
quoted-printable encoded messages.

If you don't want to see mood icons that people might attach to notes they send
to you, turn off the Display mood icons when available checkbox.

When you delete a note using the Post Road Mailer, it usually doesn't really
get deleted. Instead, it gets moved to the shred queue. (Except when you delete
more than thirty at a time, in which case you're offered a choice about whether
to add them to the shred queue or just delete them.) You can open the shred
queue by clicking on the little button above the shredder icon on the main
inbasket window's action pad, or by selecting Shredded notes from the Windows
menu. Then you can move a note you didn't mean to delete, back to the inbasket
or to a folder, or anything else you might want to do with a note in the shred
queue folder. Only a limited number of notes are kept in the shred queue before
the oldest ones really do get deleted. By default, that number is 100, but you
can change it in the Maximum number of notes saved in the shred queue before
deleting field. The pruning of the oldest entries from the shred queue takes
place each time you open (or recycle) an inbasket, unless you set this setting
to 0. If you do that, the program will never automatically delete the old
notes; you can take care of it yourself instead. And if you want this feature
to be totally turned off, so that notes you delete will actually be deleted
instead of ever being moved to the shred queue, just deselect the Copy deleted
notes to the shred queue checkbox. In that case, the SHREDNTS directory will
never even be created. Some people want to avoid the shred queue for security
reasons; others for plain old speed, since it is a lot faster to delete a file
than it is to move it to another directory.

In the compose window, next to the field where you specify the addressee(s) of
a note, is an address book icon. The Address book format from compose window
radio buttons let you choose whether that icon brings up the address book in
List box format (which most people think is more convenient for the compose
window) or the normal Address tree format which you get in the Address Books window.

The Time zone entry field lets you specify what time zone you're in, so that
the people to whom you write will be able to figure out what time your note was
actually sent. If you don't specify your time zone here, then your notes might
go out saying "5:16" and a recipient to your west could receive it at 4:18 or
2:19, etc. But if your note says "5:16 EST" then it's more likely that the
recipient will understand why he got it at an earlier time than you sent it. If
you like, you can use the format -0500 (for hours east of GMT, Greenwich Mean
Time, where minus five would be five hours west, also known as Eastern Standard
Time, the east coast of the United States; or -0400 during Daylight Savings
Time) for your time zone specification.

Unless you tell it not to (by turning off the Log all network traffic
checkbox), the Post Road Mailer keeps a log of all notes sent and received, in
a NETWORK.LOG file. Every time an inbasket is opened (or recycled), the log
file is pruned, so that it never gets much longer than the number specified in
the Maximum number of network log records field. That field defaults to 500,
but you can set it to a number from 0 to 9999.

The Attachment UNZIP program field is where you specify (or select, using the
Find button) the program which the Post Road Mailer will use when you tell it
to unzip an attachment in the Attachments window.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.8. Printouts Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Turn off the Print header lines with all notes setting if you want only the
To:, From:, Date:, and Subject: lines of your notes to be printed. If you leave
it on, then the program will print all the header lines instead. You can still
override this setting for any particular printout at any time, unless you turn
off the Print Station dialog using the following setting.

Select the Print immediately, without options dialog checkbox if you want the
Post Road Mailer to print to whichever printer driver you have set as your
WorkPlace Shell default, with the default settings, without asking you for any
further input. If you leave this setting turned off, then each time you print
something from the Post Road Mailer, you'll get the Print Station dialog. This
dialog lets you select your printer from a list of all your installed printer
objects, specify how many copies you want to print, choose whether or not to
print all of the note's header lines, select a Font, and if desired, go into
the Setup dialog to change your printer driver's Job Properties for this print
job. Once you open that Setup dialog (even if you cancel out of it), the
program will unfortunately have been initialized with your printer driver's
original default settings. Not the settings you have selected as your system
defaults in your printer object, but the printer driver's original defaults. So
you will have to make all the same changes in this Job Properties setup dialog
that you have made in your printer object's settings notebook, as well as any
other changes you want to make for this particular printout. If you do not
enter the Setup dialog, on the other hand, then the system defaults you have
personally selected for your printer driver will be used automatically for this
print job.

Select the Reset page numbering after each note checkbox if you want a group of
notes you print together to receive separate page numbers (starting again at 1
for the beginning of each note).

Select the Page-break after each note checkbox if you want a group of notes you
print together to be printed on separate pages.

The Print banner field is where you can specify a line of text that you want to
appear at the top of your printouts.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.9. Lock Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

If you select the Lock this inbasket with a password checkbox, then you must
specify and Confirm your Password. Then no one will be able to open that
inbasket via the Post Road Mailer without knowing that password. But of course,
that will only prevent access to the inbasket by people who don't know how to
find your *.POP files in the inbasket directory of your hard drive.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.10. User Exits Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

A user exit is an *.EXE or *.CMD program (most often a REXX script) that a user
might want to run on each incoming note as soon as it is downloaded, or on each
outgoing note just before it gets sent. For example, you might write a REXX
program to replace every occurrence of "Widnows" with "Windows", to run against
every note you're about to send, if you have a hard time typing that word
correctly but don't like to use spell checkers. Or you could write a REXX
program to replace one of a friend's two internet addresses with the other of
his addresses, in the From line of his notes, so that all of them will fall
together in the inbasket when you sort by sender.

If you have a program you want to run against each of the notes you receive,
between the time it arrives and the time the next one begins arriving, specify
it (or select it, using the Find button) in the Receive message exit Path and
file name field. If you want to leave its name there but temporarily prevent
its use, just deselect the Exit is active checkbox. And you can choose whether
you want it to run in the Foreground, in the Background, or Minimized.

The Send message exit is just the same as the Receive message exit, except that
it runs on each note just before it is sent, just after the previous note was
sent, instead of on incoming notes. Since it runs after the outbasket note has
been copied to a temporary file in the final form in which it will actually be
sent, with header lines instead of control tags, a send exit can add header
lines that the Post Road Mailer has never even heard of. There is a rather
large drawback to that fact, though. It means that the send exit is taking
place rather late in the Send process. On Sends to a Personal Post Office
directory, it happens after the contents of the note have already been sent, so
it would be rather difficult to have the REXX exit modify the outbound note. On
SMTP Sends, it happens after the server has been given the RCPT TO: command, so
if the REXX exit modifies the addressee of the note, it will affect the header
lines of the note (therefore affecting the recipient's idea of who received the
note) but will not change who actually does receive it! On PPO, SMTP, and POP3
Sends, the note has already been filed to your Default folder by the time the
send exit starts, so whatever changes the exit makes to the outgoing note will
not be stored in the folder! That's the only one of these send exit problems
which affect POP3 Sends, though.

The send exit and the receive exit are both executed with a command line
parameter, which is the full path and filename of the temporary file in which
the note is being stored while it's in the process of being sent or received.
So a REXX exit program can use an ARG instruction to determine the name of the
file it's working on.

The Post Road Mailer also runs a completely different type of user exit. The
program did not end up using this feature for the purpose for which it was
designed, but since it's there, we'll document it in case anyone can get any
use out of it. Whenever a file exists in the main Post Road Mailer directory,
named PRMSEND.CMD, it will be executed during each Send from any inbasket,
before any of the notes in the outbasket are sent. When a PRMRECV.CMD file
exists in that directory, it will be executed during each Refresh from any
inbasket, after all the notes have been retrieved from the host, and after the
first type of user exit (if specified on this settings notebook page) has been
executed, before the filters have been run. (See below for more details about
the order of events during a Refresh.)

The PRMRECV.CMD user exit is executed with a parameter, which is the name of a
file (which happens to be $$NEW$$.@@@; the parameter is important not because
of that filename since it's always the same, but because it includes the full
pathname to that file so the exit can tell which inbasket is being refreshed).
This is the file the program uses to keep track of information about all the
*.POP files that have just come in. Each line of the file contains information
about one *.POP file, and the number of lines in the file will equal the number
of *.POP files received during the current Refresh (after attachment
processing; split attachments can alter the number of resulting *.POP files).
Your user exit can use the information in this file to determine the incoming
*.POP file names on which it should be working.

The file is Tab-delimited. The first field is the *.POP file's name, just the
eight characters before the .POP extension. The third field is the From name,
if present; fourth is the Subject line; fifth is the From address; sixth is the
To address; seventh is the Reply-to address; eighth is the Message-id; ninth is
the Date line. So you could use this feature to, among other things, take the
place of a filter if you need a filter that can do more things than what Post
Road Mailer filters can currently do. For example, this REXX code would let you
act upon a string at the beginning of the Subject line, rather than just
anywhere in the Subject line as a filter would:

/* PRMRECV.CMD */
arg filename
/* Need to know which inbasket directory */
inbasket=substr(filename,1,lastpos('\',filename)-1)
/* Now read list of all new *.POP files */
line.0=0
do i=1 while lines(filename)
 line.i=linein(filename)
 /* parse the first and fourth fields */
 parse var line.i pop '09'x . '09'x . '09'x subj '09'x .
 POPname.i=inbasket'\'pop'.POP'
 /* get first word of Subject line */
 SubjOne.i=word(subj,1)
end
line.0=i-1
if line.0<1 then exit /* there was no new mail */
/* Now do "whatever" to the files in question */
do i=1 to line.0
 if SubjOne.i="Re:" then do
 /* "whatever"; the filename is POPname.i */
 end
end
exit

The PRMSEND.CMD user exit is also executed with a parameter, but it is a
directory name: the outbasket subdirectory from which the Send is taking place.
So an ARG(1) function in this exit will return something like
C:\POSTROAD\[inbasket]\SNDNOTES, and the exit will want to act upon each *.POP
file in that directory, since they are the files which are about to be sent.

The PRMSEND.CMD and PRMRECV.CMD exits run in a type of session which cannot
take STDIN (standard input) and is unhappy about commands which produce output.
If you have a PULL instruction or SysGetKey() function in the exit, OS/2 will
produce an error message instead of running the exit. If you have a command or
instruction which sends STDOUT (standard output) to the session's virtual
screen, the exit will do its job but you'll hear a beep as if something had
gone wrong, once for each command which tries to send something to the screen
from the exit program.

If you ever need for a receive message exit, a filter exit, or a PRMRECV.CMD
exit to create new notes or split an incoming note into multiple notes, there
are just two things you have to do. The first is just to give the new note file
a .POP filename extension and put it into the inbasket subdirectory. Any *.POP
file added to the inbasket subdirectory will be seen as a note the next time
that inbasket is opened or recycled. However, the inbasket is not recycled at
the end of the Refresh process. At the end of the Refresh process, the only new
notes that the program displays in the inbasket window are the ones listed in
the $$NEW$$.@@@ file, which is the file where the program stores the names of
the files as it retrieves them from the POP3 server. You can't make an exit
program add entries to the $$NEW$$.@@@ file, because that file is locked open
while the exits are running. But if you create such entries in a file named
$EXTRA$.@@@ in the inbasket subdirectory instead, the program will add the
contents of that file to the end of the $$NEW$$.@@@ file (and delete
$EXTRA$.@@@) before it reads the $$NEW$$.@@@ entries and loads the specified
files into the inbasket window.

The only things you need, in each entry you create in the $EXTRA$.@@@ file, are
the 8-character filename (not including the .POP extension) of the *.POP file
the exit has created, a Tab character, one character which is a space if the
note does not have a MIME or UUencoded attachment or an 03 (hexadecimal)
character if it does, and another Tab character.

When writing REXX exits or configuring other programs to be used as exits, it's
helpful to know which parts of the Refresh processing have, and have not, been
done yet, at the time your exit is going to be running. So here is the order of
events in the Refresh process. First, the events which take place in a loop,
the loop being executed once for each piece of mail which comes from the POP3 server:

o   Ask the POP3 server for a note and store the result in a temporary file

o   PGP decryption

o   Receive message exit

o   Detach mood icon and store in the file's extended attributes

o   Assign the file its permanent *.POP filename

o   Detach and decode MIME and UUencoded attachments

o   Update inbasket window's status line

o   Update network log file

Then, the events which are executed once, for the whole group of newly arrived
notes, after they've all been retrieved:

o   PRMRECV.CMD

o   Filters

o   Append $EXTRA$.@@@ file's contents to $$NEW$$.@@@ and delete $EXTRA$.@@@

o   Read $$NEW$$.@@@ to get the list of newly received notes

o   Read each *.POP file for the header information and store it in the file's
    extended attributes

o   Look in MIME$$ subdirectory for sets of Content-type: message/partial notes
    which have all arrived and need to be assembled and processed

o   Create acknowledgements

o   Display the newly arrived notes in the inbasket window

o   Update the number displayed in the Notes button on the action pad

o   Send acknowledgements


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.11. PGP Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

If you want the Post Road Mailer to be able to sign and encrypt notes with the
Pretty Good Privacy program, or do signature verification or decryption of
incoming PGP notes, you'll need to fill out the settings on this page. And of
course you'll need to make sure your PGP for OS/2 program is properly installed
and configured, with the public and private keys in working order.

The Default PGP key (id) field is where you specify the id that will be passed
to PGP, when signing outbound notes, and when decrypting inbound notes if you
have the Decode PGP notes on receipt checkbox selected. This is the internet
address only, as opposed to something like Name <address> as in most places in
the Post Road Mailer.

The PGP pass phrase and Confirm pass phrase fields are where you specify the
pass phrase that will be passed to PGP, when signing outbound notes, and when
decrypting inbound notes if you have the Decode PGP notes on receipt checkbox
selected. If you type an entry here, it will be encrypted before it's stored in
the inbasket's POSTROAD.INI file.

If you leave this field blank, the Post Road Mailer will prompt you for your
pass phrase each time it attempts to send a note for which you had turned on
the PGP Sign checkbox in the Header window. In the unlikely event that you
don't want to fill in your pass phrase here but you still want incoming notes
to be decrypted on receipt, then the program will also prompt you for your pass
phrase every time you do a Refresh.

The PGP program path & filename field must be filled in, if you want the Post
Road Mailer to use PGP at all. Type (or select, via the Find button) the
location and name of your PGP program file.

The PGP program run state radio buttons let you select the mode in which PGP
should be run. If you run it in Foreground mode, the OS/2 window in which PGP
runs will come to the foreground so that you can see what it's doing. This
could be very irritating if you send a lot of PGP signed notes, since a new
window will be opened, then closed, for each note that gets sent. If you run it
in Background mode, it will not get in your way, but you won't know when PGP is
waiting for some information, either. For example, an alternate public key ring
filename if you're sending an encrypted note to someone whose public key isn't
in your default key ring. You'll have to find the PGP window in your OS/2
Window List and bring it to the foreground and take care of it, before the Post
Road Mailer will be able to finish sending the notes in your outbasket. The
third alternative is Debug mode. Since PGP's return code is always 0, the Post
Road Mailer has no way of informing the user of any PGP errors. So if your PGP
setup isn't working properly, you'll need to watch PGP execute in order to
figure out what's causing the problem. Debug mode is the same as Foreground
mode except that the window does not close by itself. It is left open so that
you can read what it has to say. You have to close the window yourself before
the Post Road Mailer can continue. Also, in Debug mode, the program shows you
the exact PGP command it's about to pass to the operating system for execution,
before it does so. This command will include your pass phrase, so make sure you
don't use Debug mode when someone's looking over your shoulder!

Turn on the Decode PGP notes on receipt checkbox if you want the Post Road
Mailer to automatically pass PGP signed and PGP encrypted notes to the PGP
program on their way into your inbasket. Notes which come back from PGP, after
having been signature verified and/or decrypted, are placed into the inbasket
as if they'd been sent "in the clear", with no indication that they had been
PGP signed or encrypted. Notes which cannot be properly decoded, due to some
error in the execution of PGP, will be placed into your inbasket in encrypted
form. Notes which suffer from an unsuccessful signature verification will
nevertheless be placed into your inbasket as usual, since the PGP program's
return code is always 0, regardless of whether it ran into a problem or not.

If you do not turn on this checkbox, then PGP signed and/or encrypted notes
will still be in encoded form when they reach your inbasket, and you'll have to
use your PGP program to decode them manually. To do this, the Save as or
Execute a command against the note file option may be helpful, or you may want
to use the filter feature to put all your incoming PGP notes into a specific
folder or directory so that you'll already have them where you want to de-PGP
them, whenever you get ready to do that.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.12. Acknowledgements Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

You can select when you want the Post Road Mailer to respond to people's
requests for Acknowledgement of incoming notes. You can have the Post Road
Mailer acknowledge every piece of mail you receive (Always, which you should
never use in an inbasket which is subscribed to a computer-operated mailing
list), none at all (Never), or every piece of mail for which the sender had
requested an acknowledgement via an Acknowledge-To header tag in his note (When requested).

If you want the Post Road Mailer to go ahead and send the acknowledgements
without asking you each time, just deselect the Prompt before sending
acknowledgements checkbox.

In the Acknowledgement text entry field, you can specify the body text of the
acknowledgement that the Post Road Mailer will send. If you leave this field
blank, the note will be blank, but the subject line will still tell the
recipient that the note is an acknowledgement of the note he had sent you.

You can use this feature to reply to every note you receive, while you're on
vacation, telling the sender that you're away, and what date you'll be back.
You can also use filters to send automatic replies, if you have a situation for
which the acknowledgement feature is unsuitable (for example, for longer pieces
of acknowledgement text).


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.13. Miscellaneous Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

When you doubleclick on a URL (WorldWide Web document name) in a note (or
select the URL and choose View a marked URL from the note view window's File
menu), the Post Road Mailer will start your web browser (if it's not already
running) and take you directly to that WWW document. Your browser is also used
to view incoming Content-type: text/html notes, to view attachments via a
DEFAULT_BROWSER association, and for the Compose a note to Web page address(es)
and Search for URLs features. The Web browser setting lets you tell the Post
Road Mailer whether your browser is Netscape's Navigator or IBM's WebExplorer.

If the browser is already running at the time you activate it via the Post Road
Mailer, the Post Road Mailer will use that copy of the browser instead of
starting up a separate one, if your browser's name shows up in OS/2's window
list as IBM WebExplorer or Netscape, or if you specify the correct search
string in the Web browser window list search string field. (In order for the
Post Road Mailer to be able to interact with the Netscape Navigator, that
program's Show location option must be turned on so that the URL entry field is
visible, since that is the mailer's only way of communicating with the browser.)

If you want to run a copy of the browser from an *.EXE file that isn't named
EXPLORE.EXE or NETSCAPE.EXE, or that isn't on the PATH, then believe it or not,
you want to specify the name of that *.EXE file in the Web browser startup
parameters field. For example, EXPLORE2.EXE -Q -T 8. If the Post Road Mailer
finds an *.EXE or *.CMD file's name there, it will just execute the Web browser
startup parameters field's contents as the entire command line, instead of
treating the contents as parameters to EXPLORE.EXE or NETSCAPE.EXE. If the
program's file or directory name is more than one word long (on an HPFS drive),
you must enclose it in double quotation marks (as in "c:\long
name\browser.exe"). If you specify a pathname along with the *.EXE or *.CMD
filename there, as in that example, then the Post Road Mailer will make that
program's own directory the current directory of the session in which it starts
the program.

You can also use this feature to execute a *.CMD file which does some sort of
setup chores and then runs EXPLORE.EXE or NETSCAPE.EXE itself. In that case,
you will need for the *.CMD file to insert the string "http://" at the
beginning of the URL that's being passed to the web browser. The Post Road
Mailer doesn't send that part of the string itself, when the program name is a
*.CMD file, since REXX programs cannot handle "//" as part of a parameter. So a
REXX *.CMD file might use parse arg url to retrieve the URL and then start the
browser with "http://"url as its parameter. A plain batch *.CMD file could
start the browser with http://%1 as its parameter.

If you want to pass any parameters to the browser program after the name of the
URL, such as -Q -T 8 (commonly used for the WebExplorer), put them into the Web
browser startup parameters field whether you include the browser's executable
filename there or not. If you have specified the browser's executable filename
in this field as described above, and you need for the Post Road Mailer to pass
any parameters before the URL instead of after it, then you can insert an
asterisk into your command in the point at which you want the URL to appear.
For example, if you type NETSCAPE.EXE -3, the Post Road Mailer will execute
NETSCAPE.EXE [URL] -3, but if you type NETSCAPE.EXE -3 *, then the program will
execute NETSCAPE.EXE -3 [URL].

On the main inbasket window's action pad is a button which will bring your OS/2
(or Object Desktop) LaunchPad or Toolbar to the foreground. If your default
LaunchPad/Toolbar does not have the string "LaunchPad" in its name, if you were
running OS/2 Warp 3 when you created your inbasket, or "Toolbar" if you were
running OS/2 Warp 4 (a.k.a. Merlin), then that button won't work unless you
specify a search string that will bring up your LaunchPad/Toolbar, in the
LaunchPad window list search string entry field.

In order for the Post Road Mailer to integrate with FaxWorks Pro 3.0, you must
specify (or select, using the Find button) the directory where your FaxWorks
Pro 3.0 program is installed, in the FaxWorks path field so that the Post Road
Mailer can send your incoming faxes there. Also, select the Make the current
inbasket the default FAX inbasket checkbox one time, in order to cause the
current inbasket to become FaxWorks's default inbasket from then on (until you
change it by selecting that checkbox once in some other inbasket). If you never
check this checkbox in any of your inbaskets, then the inbasket FaxWorks will
use will be whichever one is listed first in your INBASKET.NIX file at the time
you tell FaxWorks to send a fax to an internet address.

Once you have FaxWorks Pro 3.0 and the Post Road Mailer set up to interact with
each other, you can send a fax to someone's internet address, instead of to his
fax number, and FaxWorks will put it, UUencoded, into the Post Road Mailer
outbasket instead of sending it the normal way. If the recipient has the Post
Road Mailer or another compatible mail program, and FaxWorks Pro 3.0, it will
go right into his FaxWorks received log when his mail program retrieves it from
his POP3 server. If not, it will arrive in his mail program the same way any
other UUencoded file would, and he'll have to put it into FaxWorks himself, or
view it with any other program which views faxed *.TIF files.

You can also set FaxWorks Pro 3.0 to forward all your incoming faxes and voice
mail messages to your own internet address so that you can retrieve them from
anywhere! FaxWorks will put them into the Post Road Mailer outbasket as soon as
they arrive, if you configure it to do so. You just need to configure the Post
Road Mailer to automatically send mail (via the Send queued mail after inbasket
refresh option combined with Automatic refresh and Delete from host: No, or
better yet, by using Cron or some such alarm utility to run a batch file every
half hour, or whenever a file exists in the outbasket, to run the Post Road
Mailer with its /S and /Q switches). See also Automating the Send/Receive Process.

The Count folder contents checkbox lets you turn off the program's counting of
folder notes each time you open the List of Folders window. You can still use
the Count notes option on that window's File menu, whenever you do want to know
how many items there are in a particular folder.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4. Receiving Mail ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

As soon as you have a working TCP/IP setup for your internet provider, and an
inbasket created and settings completed as described under Quick Start, you can
check for new mail.

Mail that is sent to you is held for you by your internet provider in a mailbox
on an electronic post office called a POP3 server. You retrieve mail from the
provider by refreshing your Post Road Mailer inbasket. Once retrieved, your
mail is placed into your inbasket. It remains there until you take some action
to remove it, either by filing it to a folder or by shredding (deleting) it.
All mail in your inbasket is unopened until you open it, as indicated by a
closed envelope icon and an opened sheet of paper icon.

At the top of the main Post Road Mailer inbasket window is the toolbar. There
is also another optional toolbar called the action pad, which, when enabled, is
at the bottom of the window. You can enable or disable either or both of these
toolbars via the Windows menu. They don't provide access to any options which
aren't also available to you via items on the Windows, File, Notes, and
Features menus; they are just alternate methods of accessing the same functions.

Pressing the Refresh button on the action pad and the Refresh Notes button on
the toolbar are the easiest ways to refresh your inbasket. The Post Road Mailer
will start the dialer if you still have it configured to do so, and it will log
onto your POP3 server and retrieve the mail that's waiting there for you, and
display it in your inbasket.

To view one of the notes you've received, just doubleclick somewhere toward the
left end of its entry in the inbasket, or select a note using your cursor keys
and then press Enter. The note view window opens and displays the contents of
the note.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4.1. Note View Window ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

You can use the scroll bars, or the arrow keys, PageDown key, etc., to scroll
through the note and read it. The ESC key closes the window (as it does for all
Post Road Mailer windows except the main inbasket window, so that
doubleclicking the system menu icon [the top left corner of a window], which
many people find inconvenient, isn't the only way to close them).

After doubleclicking or pressing Enter on one note to view it, you can view
another note in the same way you opened the first one, or you can view a
different note in the same note view window by choosing Previous note or Next
note from the Windows menu, by using the Ctrl-PageUp or Ctrl-PageDown keystroke
combination, or by using the tiny mouse buttons at the bottom right corner of
the note view window. The curved up arrow means previous note, the curved down
arrow means next note, and the red X is used to delete the currently viewed
note and advance to the next note all in one step. The DEL key does the same
thing as the red X button, and Ctrl-D will delete the note you're viewing and
return you to the inbasket view instead of taking you to the next note the way
the red X button does.

If you doubleclick on an email address in a note view window, that will open
the compose window with that address in the To: field, so that you can write a
note to that person.

Many of the options on the File menu of the note view window (as well as Find,
which is on the Edit menu) are also available on the note view window's right
mouse button popup menu, for those users who find RMB menus more convenient.

The File Menu

Copy note to a folder
     When you select this option, the Select a Folder dialog will come up,
     listing all the folders you have, and you can select one from there or use
     that window's File menu to create a new one, and then select your newly
     created one. Then the note will be copied to that folder.

Move note to a folder
     See Copy note to a folder, above.

Copy note to most recent folder
     If you've already copied a note to a folder from this inbasket or folder
     window since the last time you opened it, you can use this option to avoid
     the need to select the same folder from the Select a Folder dialog again.
     Each inbasket and folder has its own memory of the most recent folder you
     used from it, since the last time you opened it. This option is disabled,
     whenever you have not copied anything to another folder from this window
     since you opened it.

Move note to most recent folder
     See Copy note to most recent folder, above.

     Reply
     Opens a compose window, with the addressee and subject line already filled
     in. If you select some text in the note view window before selecting this
     option (using Mark all in the Edit menu, or using your mouse, or using the
     normal OS/2 Shift-arrow key selection method), that text will
     automatically be placed into the text portion of the compose window, with
     the quoted text character and a space inserted at the beginning of each line.

     Forward
     Opens a compose window, with the subject line already filled in, and the
     entire note body is copied into the text portion of the compose window, so
     that you can send it to someone else.

     Redirect
     This is just like Forward, above, except that the From and Reply-to
     addresses will be those of the author of the note, rather than yours. Your
     signature and tagline will not be used. In fact, the receiving party will
     have no idea that the note had been sent to him by you rather than by the author!

     Route
     This is like Forward, above, except that the resulting note goes straight
     into the outbasket without going through the compose window first. See
     Sending Mail.

Save as
     Lets you put a copy of the *.POP file which contains the note you're
     viewing, into whatever drive/directory you want, using whatever filename
     you want.

Sticky notes
     Lets you attach a reminder for yourself, or whatever kind of information
     you want, to the note. You can also select the Followup checkbox and set a
     date for following up on the note, and later use the Followup option on
     the Features menu to find all the notes which have sticky notes that need
     to be followed up on, for a particular date or earlier. (For those who
     care about technical details, the sticky note and follow-up date are
     stored in the *.POP file's extended attributes named stickeytext,
     stickeydate [in mm/dd/yy format], and stickeyfollowup [which is 1 when the
     Followup checkbox is on, or 0 or null when it's not], and we're sorry for
     the misspelling in "stickey".) A note which has a sticky note attached to
     it has a tiny pushpin icon sticking out of it, in the inbasket or folder window.

     Delete
     Moves the note to the shred queue, or deletes it entirely if you've turned
     off the shred queue.

View headers
     This option has a checkmark next to it in the menu when it is turned on.
     When turned on or turned off, it remains on or off for all subsequent
     notes until turned back off or back on. When it's on, the entire *.POP
     file (that is, the note, as downloaded from the POP3 server) is displayed
     in the note view window. When this option is off, the body of the note is
     displayed, of course, but most of the header (the boring parts like the
     Received lines, Message-Id and X-Mailer lines, etc.) is hidden from you.

Add to address book
     Brings up a window from which you can create a new address book or select
     an existing one, and then it creates an address book entry for the author
     of the note you're viewing.

     Print
     Prints the note you're viewing.

Queue for printing
     Adds the note to the print queue so that you can print it at your convenience.

     Wordwrap
     Splits lines that are wider than 80 characters, and overwrites the
     existing *.POP file (the note you're viewing) with the new copy that has
     no long lines in it.

Rotate 13
     Subtracts 13 from each alphabet character in the selected block of text.
     For example, if you select the word "guvf" and rotate it, it will change
     to "this". Obviously, this option is useless except on notes which were
     Rotate-13'd before they were sent to you. This is a very primitive
     encoding mechanism which is, nevertheless, rather popular for keeping mail
     away from prying eyes. You can Rotate-13 your own outbound notes via the
     compose window's Edit menu.

Download an internet file
     If someone writes a note to tell you about a file you should retrieve from
     the internet, you can just select its name (such as
     ftp://www.tiac.net/innoval/release.txt) in the note and choose this
     option. You can either download it right then, or add it to a queue of
     files to download later, if you're not connected to your internet provider
     at the moment or if you simply don't want to do the download right now.
     You can also use this function by doubleclicking on the filename in the
     note, rather than by selecting it and choosing this menu option, if you
     like. This function uses the Post Road Mailer's own FTP capability, so no
     other FTP utility is needed in order for it to work.

View a marked URL
     If someone writes a note to tell you about a web site you should check
     out, you can just select the URL (such as http://www.innoval.com) in the
     note, and choose this option. The Post Road Mailer will start your web
     browser (if it's not already running) and take you to the site. You can
     also use this function by simply doubleclicking on the URL in the note,
     rather than by selecting it and choosing this menu option, if you like.

The Edit Menu

Mark all
     Selects all the text in the note view window.

     Copy
     Copies the selected text to the OS/2 clipboard.

Change font
     Brings up an OS/2 font selection dialog box, with which you can change the
     font the note view window uses. You can also drag a font to the note view
     window from the OS/2 font palette. You should use a non-proportional font
     (that is, a font which uses the same amount of space for an i as for an m,
     such as Courier or System Monospace), so that you can see the note the
     same way the author most likely wrote it. Most people use non-proportional
     fonts for writing email so that tables will show up correctly spaced, etc.

     Editor
     Edits the *.POP file (the note you're viewing) with the alternate editor
     you've selected on the compose page of the settings notebook, or OS/2's
     E.EXE editor if you haven't selected one yourself.

Execute a command against the note file
     Any command that can run from the OS/2 command line and takes a
     fully-qualified filename as a parameter, can be run from this menu item
     with the current *.POP (note) filename and anything else you specify, as
     parameters. UUDECODE.EXE, a hex editor, a virus scanner, a BinHex decoder,
     PGP (if you don't have the Post Road Mailer configured to automatically
     decrypt your notes upon receipt); anything you want! When you select this
     menu item, up comes a dialog box which displays the filename of your
     current note, and an entry field. The entry field remembers the command
     you used the last time you used this option. You type an asterisk (*) in
     the position in which you want the *.POP filename to appear in your
     command (or if you don't type an asterisk, the filename will be inserted
     between the command and any parameters), but other than that, you type the
     command just as you would at the OS/2 command line. If the program's file
     or directory name is more than one word long (on an HPFS drive), you must
     enclose it in double quotation marks (as in "c:\long name\hexedit.exe").
     If you specify a pathname along with the *.EXE or *.CMD filename there, as
     in that example, then the Post Road Mailer will make that program's own
     directory the current directory of the session in which it starts the program.

     Find
     Lets you search the current note for a string of text.

The Windows Menu

Previous note
     Replaces the note in the note view window with the previous one in the inbasket.

Next note
     Replaces the note in the note view window with the next one in the inbasket.

     Tile
     Tiles the open note view windows.

     Cascade
     Cascades the open note view windows.

Close all notes
     Closes the open note view windows.

The Attachments Menu

If the note you're viewing was not sent with any attached file(s), this menu
option will be disabled. Otherwise, it will bring up the Attachments window,
with the attachment(s) that belong to this note highlighted. You can also bring
up the Attachments window at any time, via the menu bar of the main inbasket
window, regardless of whether you currently have any inbasket notes that have attachments.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4.1.1. Attachments Window ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

When someone sends you a note with a file attached, if the file was encoded
using either the popular UUencode or MIME protocol, the attachment will be
placed into your Attachments window (the TRANFILE subdirectory of your inbasket
directory, for those of you who like the technical details), from which you can
perform many functions on it.

In order to avoid one file being overwritten by another file that has the same
name, files in the Attachments window are stored with fake filenames on your
hard drive. An attachment's fake filename will be something like 72KB0F03
(using the same algorithm the program uses to create *.POP filenames), but its
extension will be the same as the attached file's original filename, if the
attachment was properly encoded with its real filename intact and it had an
extension to begin with. The filename that the Post Road Mailer has assigned to
the attachment is listed in the Attachment Filename column of this window, and
the attachment's original filename, if known, is in the Filename column. If the
real filename wasn't specified in the incoming message, or if the encoded data
was just text, and not a file at all, then the Filename column of the
Attachments window is blank. The Type column tells whether the attachment was
sent in MIME or UUencode format. The Attachments window also has From, Subject,
and Date columns. And at the right hand end is the Pop Filename column. This is
the filename of the note file in which the attachment originally arrived. If
you (or a filter) have moved the note to a folder, it no longer has the
original *.POP filename, so this column's data is no longer valid.

As with the Associations window, any time you open this window while no
PMLASSOC.BIN file exists, the Post Road Mailer will automatically create two
associations for you, so that you can view text and graphics files by
doubleclicking on them or using the Start menu option.

Many of the options listed in the menus of the Attachments window are also
available via each attachment's right mouse button popup menu, for users who
find RMB menus more convenient.

The File Menu

     Start
     Selecting an attachment and choosing this menu item is one way of
     executing an association. Doubleclicking on the attachment in this window
     is another.

     Associations
     This is one place from which you can create and modify your Post Road
     Mailer associations.

     Print
     Prints the selected attachment. If it's not a text file, the results could
     be amusing.

Save as
     Copies the attachment file to whatever filename or location you specify.
     You can also simply drag it out to the OS/2 Desktop if you like; the
     filename used will be the one in the Filename column of the Attachments window.

     Delete
     Deletes the attachment and removes its entry from the TRANFILE.IND index file.

     Edit
     Edits the selected attachment using OS/2's E.EXE or the alternate editor
     you have specified on the compose page of the settings notebook.

     Unzip
     Unzips the selected attachment (hopefully a *.ZIP file) using the unzip
     program you have specified on the notes page of the settings notebook.

The Virus Scan Menu

     Options
     This menu item is where you can specify a virus scan program to use for
     scanning the attachments for viruses. For some reason, McAfee's OS/2
     anti-virus program (OS2SCAN.EXE) won't work from here unless you run it
     from a batch file rather than directly. Just make a batch file which
     executes OS2SCAN %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9 and enter that batch file's
     name here, rather than the OS2SCAN.EXE program itself.

Scan current item
     If you've specified a virus scan program, you can use this option to scan
     the selected attachment. If your scanner is one which can take a directory
     name rather than a filename as its parameter, and if you specify %d rather
     than %f as the parameter in the Options dialog, then this option will scan
     all of your attachments at once.

Scan all items
     If you've specified a virus scan program, you can use this option to scan
     all of your attachments, one by one. If your scanner is one which can take
     a directory name rather than a filename as its parameter, you're better
     off to use the Scan current item option instead, with %d rather than %f as
     the parameter in the Options dialog.

The View Menu

     Detail
     Lets you change your Attachments window back to the normal Detail view
     style, with the columns described above.

     Flowed
     Lets you change your Attachments window to a view that is more like the
     WorkPlace Shell's Flowed view, with columns of icons rather than lines of information.

Split Attachments

Many SMTP servers can't handle really large amounts of data all at once, so
many mailers split large attachments into pieces before sending them. Both MIME
and UUencoded attachments, if properly split, can be put back together upon
receipt by the Post Road Mailer. Pieces of split attachments are stored in the
MIME$$ subdirectory until all the pieces have arrived, at which time the
program puts them together, decodes them, and puts them into the Attachments
window. If you ever see a window named Pended Attachments, that means you've
tried to get to a note's attachment before all pieces of it have arrived. The
Post Road Mailer has a limitation in relation to split attachments: Multiple
UUencoded attachments cannot be resolved from an incoming split attachment;
only from one-piece ones. So only the first attached UUencoded file in a split
attachment will be kept; any others will be lost.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4.1.1.1. Associations ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Post Road Mailer associations let you execute various external programs to view
or work with the files you receive as attachments to your incoming email. For
example, if people often send you *.DOC files in Word Perfect format, you might
want to associate *.DOC to your Word Perfect program, so that you can view
those files from within the Post Road Mailer as soon as you receive them.

To create or modify a Post Road Mailer association, you can use the
Associations option on the File menu of the Attachments window; the
Associations option on the Features menu of the main inbasket window; or the
Modify associations option on the Notes menu of any folder window. All of these
options open the Associations window.

Doubleclicking on the Create a new association item in the Associations window,
as well as the Create options on its File menu and the right mouse button popup
menu of each association, will open the window which lets you specify the
settings for the association you want to create.

Selecting an association and using the Delete option on the Association
window's File menu or on the association's right mouse button popup menu, or
the DEL key, will delete the association.

Doubleclicking on an association will open the window which lets you change its
settings. Or you can use the Change options on the File menu and the right
mouse button popup menu of each association.

When you create or modify an association, the things you need to specify are as follows:

File Extension
     For our Word Perfect example, what you would type here would be .DOC or
     just DOC. This is the extension belonging to the majority of the filenames
     from which you would like to start the associated program. You can also
     assign multiple extensions to an association, by separating them with
     commas. For example, you might type GIF,JPG,BMP.

     Description
     Type whatever you want here, such as Word Perfect or a phrase which will
     remind you of the type of file which belongs to this association.

     Program
     Type, or select using the Find button, the name of the program you want
     this association to execute. If the program's file or directory name is
     more than one word long (on an HPFS drive), you must enclose it in double
     quotation marks (as in "c:\long name\hexedit.exe"). If you specify a
     pathname along with the *.EXE or *.CMD filename there, as in that example,
     then the Post Road Mailer will make that program's own directory the
     current directory of the session in which it starts the program.

     Arguments
     If your program wants any parameters other than the name of the file that
     it should work with, put them here. The Post Road Mailer will
     automatically insert the filename between the command and any other
     parameters, but if you want the filename to end up in some other part of
     the field instead, you can put an asterisk (*) in, to represent the
     filename. In which case the Post Road Mailer will put the filename there,
     rather than putting it before the other parameters.

When you close the Associations window (but not until then), your changes are
saved to the PMLASSOC.BIN file in your main Post Road Mailer directory, and the
associations will then be available to your current inbasket as well as any
other inbaskets you have.

Any time you open this window without a PMLASSOC.BIN file in your Post Road
Mailer directory, the program will automatically create two associations for
you. One has TXT as its extension and DEFAULT_EDITOR as its program. This makes
it execute whatever program is specified as your alternate editor at the time
you execute it. The other automatic association has JPG,GIF,BMP as its
extension, and DEFAULT_BROWSER as its program. This means that each time you
use the association, it runs whatever web browser you currently have the Post
Road Mailer configured to use. You can use the key words DEFAULT_EDITOR and
DEFAULT_BROWSER as the program for any association; they're not only for the
automatically-generated associations. The Arguments line of these DEFAULT_*
associations is ignored; the parameters you have specified in the alternate
editor and web browser settings are used instead.

There are several ways to execute an association. Since you can put files other
than notes into your folders if you want to, there is a Start item on the
folder window's Notes menu. You can also drag an item from a folder window and
drop it onto an association in the Associations window.

Doubleclicking on an attachment in the Attachments window, or using the Start
option on the File menu with an attachment selected, will execute the
association with the selected attachment's filename as the parameter. (That is,
the filename which the file has in the Attachments directory; not the filename
it had when the sender sent it to you.)

If you doubleclick on an attachment in the Attachments window, which does not
have a filename extension for which you have an association, the Post Road
Mailer will provide you with a list of all the associations you have, from
which you can select which one you'd like to execute. (Try not to execute a
program that expects plain ASCII text with a *.BMP file, or a spreadsheet
program with a *.HLP file, though, or anything like that. The results of such
an action may not be pretty.)

Or you can drag an attachment from the Attachments window and drop it on an
association in the Associations window.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 5. Sending Mail ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

As soon as you have a working TCP/IP setup for your internet provider, and an
inbasket created and settings completed as described under Quick Start, you can
begin sending mail.

At the top of the main Post Road Mailer inbasket window is the toolbar. There
is also another optional toolbar called the action pad, which, when enabled, is
at the bottom of the window. You can enable or disable either or both of these
toolbars via the Windows menu. They don't provide access to any options which
aren't also available to you via items on the Windows, File, Notes, and
Features menus; they are just alternate methods of accessing the same functions.

Pressing the Send button on the action pad and the Send Notes button on the
toolbar are the easiest ways to send the notes in your outbasket. The Post Road
Mailer will start the dialer if you still have it configured to do so, and it
will log onto your POP3 or SMTP server, send your outbound mail, and move it to
the folder you had selected (if you've selected one) to file your sent notes to.

But before you have anything to send, you must create a note. This is done from
the compose window.

You can use the compose window to write new notes, reply to notes you've
received, or forward or redirect a received note to someone else.

In order to write a new note, you can open a compose window by selecting
Compose a new note from the Notes menu, or by clicking on the Compose button on
the action pad or the Compose New Note button on the toolbar. If you already
have a compose window open, you will be given the choice of returning to (one
of) the open one(s), or opening a new one (unless you already have five of them
open, since five is the limit to the number of compose windows you can have
open at once from the inbasket). Or you can open a compose window with the
addressee already filled in, by doubleclicking on an internet address in a note
view window, regardless of whether it's in the note's header lines or in the
body text.

There are many ways to reply to a note. The Reply button on the action pad and
the Reply to Selected Note button on the toolbar each open a reply to whatever
note is selected in your main inbasket window. (Or, if you already have a
compose window open, it gives you the choice of opening a new one or returning
to an open one.) The Reply option on the Notes dropdown menu of the inbasket or
a folder will reply to the selected note in that inbasket or folder. The Reply
option on the right mouse button menu of a note in the inbasket or a folder
will reply to that note. So will the Reply options on the dropdown menu and the
right mouse button menu of any note view window, and the Ctrl-R keystroke
combination from any note view window, or from an inbasket view or folder view
with a note selected.

Exception: You can't write a reply to, nor forward nor redirect, a note in your
outbasket nor a note you've previously sent. The menus for these outbound or
formerly-outbound notes have Reply, Forward, and Redirect disabled, and
instead, they have a menu item which is named Edit in compose window in the
outbasket or Resend in other folders.

There are just as many ways to forward, redirect, or route a note as there are
ways to reply to one (see above), except that Redirect and Route don't have a
keystroke combination nor an action pad or toolbar button. The keystroke
combination for Forward is Ctrl-F.

Replying and forwarding are self-explanatory terms, but redirecting and routing
need definition. Redirecting a note is very much like forwarding it, but the
From and Reply-to addresses will be those of the author of the note, rather
than yours. Your signature and tagline will not be used. In fact, the receiving
party will have no idea that the note had been sent to him by you rather than
by the author!

Routing is like forwarding, except that the resulting note goes straight into
the outbasket without going through the compose window first. So you use this
option when you want to quickly forward notes without making any changes to
them. The Route option in the note view window applies only to the note being
viewed; but for the other Route options, you may select one note or multiple
notes at a time. They may be notes you've received, notes you've sent, or, in a
folder which happens to contain both types, they may be a mixture of the two.

When you select the Route option, the Route the Selected Note(s) dialog comes
up. It contains an address area which is almost identical to the one in the
compose window, so that you can specify who is to receive the routed notes. And
it contains a small text field, where you can type a message which will be
inserted before the forwarded text, in the outbound notes. When you click on
the OK button, the outbound notes will be created, one for each of the notes
you had selected before invoking the Route function. Each note will contain the
address(es) you specified in the dialog, the last From name that was saved from
your compose window, the Subject line from the note being routed, the text you
typed in the dialog, if any, a line which says Routing note from: and the
contents of the From and Date fields of the note being routed, and finally, the
body text of that note.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 5.1. Compose Window ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The compose window is comprised of two other windows: the Header window and the
Text window. The Text window is where you write your note, and the Header
window is where you address it and enter all of the options for how it is to be sent.

If you don't like the new separate window style, try glued mode! Generally,
people like one mode and hate the other. Use whichever one is better for you.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 5.1.1. Glued Mode ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The default Post Road Mailer 2.0 and later compose window is actually two
separate windows. One window holds the addressee, subject line, tagline,
signature, From address, Reply-to id, attached file specifications, etc. This
is called the Header window. The other window, named the Text window, is
nothing but the text which makes up the body of the note you're writing. The
two windows move independently, and both contain nearly identical menu bars and
identical rows of buttons at the bottom.

If you want the compose window to act more like the one in the Post Road Mailer
version 1.0x, you can enable glued mode. In glued mode, the text portion of the
compose window is glued to the bottom of the header portion, the header portion
loses its row of buttons, and the text portion loses its title bar (though you
can use its top line as a title bar in order to move the window if you need to)
and menu bar. When you move the header portion, the text portion moves with it.
Widening the text portion, though, still does not make the header portion
wider, since that would only obscure some more of your Desktop for no reason.

You can turn glued mode off and on temporarily via the Windows menu of the
compose window, or turn it off or on as your default via the compose page of
the settings notebook.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 5.1.2. Header Window ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

In the top left corner of the Header portion of the compose window, you enter
the internet address(es) of the person(s) to whom you want to write a note.
Make sure the To: radio button is selected when you enter your To addresses,
and the cc: radio button is selected if you want to enter any carbon copy
recipients. You can also enter bcc: recipients, who will receive the note but
whose addresses will not be listed in the other people's copies of the note, so
the other recipients won't know that the "blind" recipients are receiving the note.

If you hit the Enter key or the curved down arrow button to the right of the
address field (or say "address enter" with VoiceType), the address you've
entered will be placed into the list box just below the entry field, so that
you can enter another address into the entry field, if desired. Or you can type
multiple addresses into the field at once, separated by commas, and they'll be
split, at the commas (not counting commas inside quotation marks) at the time
you either put them into the list box or leave the compose window.

You can select an address from the list box and click on the X button to the
right of the address field (or select Delete from the address list box's right
mouse button menu or say "address delete" with VoiceType) to delete it from the
list. You can select an address and click on the curved up arrow button to the
right of the address field (or doubleclick on the address, or select Edit from
the address list box's right mouse button menu, or say "address edit" with
VoiceType) to send it back up to the entry field where you can edit it, or
change it from a To: to a cc:, etc.

You can click on the little address book button at the bottom left corner of
the address area to open an address book and select a name, several names, or
an address group that you have defined. Or you can click your right mouse
button on that button or on the entry field portion of the address area, to
select from a list of the last 15 addresses you've written to from that inbasket.

Instead of entering an internet address in the entry field, you can type a
nickname, and hit your Enter key. If what you typed has been defined as the
nickname for an address book entry, it will be replaced by the real internet
address when you hit the Enter key, as it's being pushed down into the list box
below the entry field.

In the top right corner of the Header window is the From field. If it's never
been filled in, it will contain whatever the Reply-to id is on the compose page
of the settings notebook. Or you can make it say whatever you want it to say.
Whatever you type here will be remembered and used again in the next compose
window you open. The most common way to fill in the From field is with both
your name and your internet address. If you do that, you want to put the
address in angle brackets after the name, as in Your Name <[e-mail]>, or
you can put your name in parentheses after the address, as in [e-mail]
(Your Name). Only one or the other of those methods will work, though; a
mixture of the two (such as [e-mail] <Your Name>, for example) will not.

The Reply-to address is the one that most mail programs use when writing
replies to a note which contains both a Reply-to line and a From line. Most
people's Reply-to address is the same as their From address, in which case
there's not even a need to fill in the Reply-to field. If you do want to fill
it in, it can be written in the same formats as the From field. The Reply-to
field's default value is stored on the compose page of the settings notebook,
rather than being saved from one compose window to the next the way the From
field is.

You can change the Priority field from normal, to low or high. A mail program
which pays attention to the Priority line in a note's header will draw the
recipient's attention to a high priority note by placing it at the top of his
inbasket, or by assigning it a special icon, for example. And the recipient of
a low priority note may be grateful to know, without even reading the note,
that it's something he doesn't need to take care of right away. You can make a
filter which assigns a special icon of your choice to every incoming note that
says Priority: high in its header, if you like.

Below the Priority field is a field next to a floppy disk button. This is where
you select any files you'd like to send as attachments to the note. Your
addressee(s) must have a program which can decode MIME or UUencode formats
(most internet email programs can), in order to be able to deal with these
attachments. (MIME and UUencode are two ways of encoding 8-bit files into a
7-bit format. The internet can handle text but not un-encoded attached files,
because the internet is still mostly set up for 7-bit traffic, text is 7-bit,
and files are 8-bit.) Click on the floppy disk button, select a file, repeat to
select another file if desired, etc. Or you can drag a file from the OS/2
Desktop or Drives object and drop it on the floppy disk button or the entry
field next to it. If you want to remove a file from the list of files to be
sent, select it in the dropdown field next to the floppy disk button, then hit
your DEL key; or click on the floppy disk button with your right mouse button
and then click on Delete.

When you're done composing the note and you click on OK to Send, the program
will ask you whether you want the attachment MIMEd or UUencoded, if you have
selected only one attachment. If you've selected more than one, they will be
MIMEd, since the Post Road Mailer doesn't support multiple UUencoded
attachments in an outgoing note. Also, if you have the Quoted-printable
checkbox turned on, the program won't ask that question then either, since that
checkbox means you're sending a MIME message and the Post Road Mailer does not
support sending UUencoded attachments in a MIME message.

The "attached" file does not get physically attached to the note in your
outbasket in any way. You must leave the file in the location it was in when
you "attached" it to the note, until the note is sent, or else it will not be
sent along with the note because the program will have no way of finding it at
Send time if it's not still there.

The file folder button next to the File note to field is where you select the
folder you want your note to be placed into after it's been sent. The default
is taken from the compose page of the settings notebook, but you can change it
for one note at any time (or change it more permanently in the settings
notebook). You can also select the "folder" named <Do not file> if you want to,
or <Current Month>, or create a new folder via the File menu of the Select a
Folder dialog when it comes up, and select that newly created folder. Or
instead of selecting an entry from the Select a Folder dialog, you can drag a
folder onto this field or button from the List of Folders window if you already
have it open.

The Subject line is where you type the subject you want your note to have. If
you don't type a subject, the program will ask you when you click on OK to Send
whether you're sure you didn't want to specify a subject, and if you are, it
will insert the words No Subject into the line. If you really want your note to
not have any subject line, and you're sure the lack won't cause a problem for
the mail program used by the note's addressee, you can put a single space
character into the subject line. That will cause the Post Road Mailer to not
put No Subject there.

Under the Subject field is a blank space which will turn into a Tag checkbox
and a tagline selection box, if you use the Edit menu to Specify a tagline
file. A short file of taglines, POSTROAD.TAG, is supplied with the Post Road
Mailer. The format of the file is simple: Plain ASCII text, one tagline per
line. Whenever a compose window is opened, if you've specified a tagline file,
a tagline will be selected at random, and you can use that one or select your
own. If the checkbox is turned on, the tagline will be appended to the note
after your signature. If not, then it won't.

The Quoted-printable checkbox, when selected, means that you want your text
translated with the quoted-printable encoding method, and the dropdown field
next to it lets you specify whether the character set used should be ISO
Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) or US-ASCII. One or the other of these is needed any time
you want to send extended ASCII characters (those above 127, such as the ones
used for characters that are in many European alphabets but not in English)
over the internet, unless you know for sure that none of the servers your note
will travel through on its way to the destination will be the old 7-bit ones.
The state of the Quoted-printable checkbox is saved, so that once you turn it
on, you don't have to remember to turn it on again for each note you send, if
you use these extended ASCII characters all the time. The Post Road Mailer's
ISO Latin-1 support works only with code page 850.

The Sig button near the lower left lets you create, delete, modify, and select
saved signature blocks, or choose one to be used as the default signature for
most notes.  Your default saved signature block, if any, or the one you've
selected or typed for a particular note, will be displayed in the multiline
entry field next to the Sig button. If you have no default saved signature
block, then whatever you type here will be saved from one compose window to the
next, and used as your default signature.

If you want your signature to contain the current date and time of creation of
each note you write, here's how: Add {datemdy} (for mm/dd/yy format), {datedmy}
(for dd/mm/yy format), or {dateymd} (for yy/mm/dd format), and {time} (for
12-hour format) or {time24} (for 24-hour format) to the signature block or the
multiline entry field, wherever you want the date and time to be inserted.

These French-curly-bracket-enclosed code words are translated into the current
date and time at the instant you save a note to the outbasket by clicking on OK
to Send. This is the reason why changes you make to the signature line of notes
you edit in your outbasket, and notes you resend from the folder they were
filed to after you sent them the first time, are not saved as your default, the
way they are on newly-created notes (if you do not have a default saved
signature block). You wouldn't want a signature that said 07/13/96 6:28 pm to
become your default signature, right?

If you select the Request acknowledgement checkbox, you may receive a note to
let you know when the addressee has received your note, if the addressee uses a
mailer program which responds to the Acknowledge-To header tag. Of course, any
addressee who uses the Post Road Mailer can turn off acknowledgements just as
you can, via the acknowledgements page of his settings notebook, so we cannot
guarantee that you'll receive an acknowledgement that you've requested, even
from someone who uses a mail program which supports the feature via that same
header tag.

The PGP Encrypt and PGP Sign checkboxes allow PGP users to encrypt and/or sign
their notes.

To the right of those checkboxes is the Mood Icon button, which you can use to
select a mood icon to attach to a note. If you want to remove the mood icon
from a note before sending it, without replacing it with another one, just
click on the Mood Icon button with your right mouse button and then click on Delete.

The Button Bar

In glued mode, the compose window has only one button bar, since the two
windows are joined. In the default mode, the Header window and Text window have
identical button bars containing the following buttons:

OK to Send
     This is the button you press when you've done everything you want to do to
     both the Header and Text windows, and you're ready to put the note into
     your outbasket. If you've selected a file to send as an attachment, you'll
     be asked whether to MIME it or UUencode it. If you've left your Subject
     line or your Text window blank, you'll be asked whether you're sure you
     meant to do that. If you have an empty From field, you'll be forced to put
     something into it. If you have the Check addresses for Internet format
     checkbox turned on, and you've specified an address that doesn't look like
     a proper internet address, you'll be asked whether you want to leave it
     like that or not. Then your note will go into the outbasket, and if you
     have the action pad turned on, the big black and red outbasket counter in
     the lower left corner of the main inbasket window will be incremented.

     Text
     This button takes you to the Text portion of the compose window.

     Preview
     This button lets you see what your note is going to look like to the
     addressee (provided your addressee uses a mail program which displays mail
     in a similar format). You can also print the note, via the File menu of
     the Compose Preview window.

     Jump
     This button is enabled whenever the content of your compose window was
     started as a reply to a note in an open note view window. It brings the
     open note view window to the foreground so that you can re-read it or
     select part of it for quoting.

     Quote
     This button is enabled whenever the contents of your compose window is a
     reply. It brings the entire contents of the note into the Text window at
     the cursor position, if nothing in the note view window is selected. Or if
     there is selected text in the note view window, then it brings only the
     selected text into the Text window. (Note: Because it is so easy to select
     a couple of space characters without noticing it, when clicking on the
     note view window with the mouse to bring it to the foreground, the program
     ignores the selected text when it is only five characters or fewer, and
     acts as if no text were selected.) The quoted text character is inserted,
     followed by a space, at the beginning of each line of the quoted material.
     If you'd rather, you can select the text in the note view window before
     you start the reply. In this case, the selected text will be brought into
     the Text window with the quoting character, as soon as the Text window
     opens, without your use of the Quote button.

     Cancel
     Select this button to cancel the note you were composing. Settings you've
     changed in your compose window, such as the From field, and the signature
     field if you don't have a default saved signature block, and the state of
     the Tag checkbox, will still be saved.

The File Menu

OK to send
     Same as the OK to Send button on the button bar. See above.

Cancel compose
     Same as the Cancel button on the button bar. See above.

     Preview
     Same as the Preview button on the button bar. See above.

Open address book
     Same as the address book button near the address input field. See above.

Signature blocks
     Same as the Sig button near the lower left corner. See above.

     New
     Lets you discard the current contents of the compose window and start over.

Open draft
     Lets you open a first draft of a note you'd previously saved using the
     Save draft option.

Save draft
     Lets you save your note as a first draft, so that you can leave the
     compose window and come back to finish the note later. These drafts can
     also be used as templates, if you send a similar letter to someone each
     month, for example.

Save as
     Lets you re-save an opened draft under a filename different from the one
     it already has.

Attach a file
     Same as the floppy disk button for attaching files. See above.

Attach a mood icon
     Same as the Mood Icon button. See above.

Import text file
     Lets you import the contents of a text file into the Text window at the
     current cursor position. You can also drag a file from the OS/2 Drives
     object and drop it on the Text window's multiline entry field.
     Alternatively, you can put the code string .im followed by the full
     pathname of the file, at the beginning of a line in your Text window at
     the point in the note where you'd like to import the file, and the Post
     Road Mailer will send the file to the SMTP or POP3 server as part of your
     note, without ever actually putting the "imported" file into the note's
     *.POP file. Of course, for this to work, the file must still exist in the
     specified location by the time you send that note!

Import address list
     Lets you import the contents of a text file into the To: field. The format
     of the file should be plain ASCII text ; one address per line; or several
     addresses, separated by commas, per line.

Quote original message
     Same as the Quote button on the button bar. See above.

Jump to original message
     Same as the Jump button on the button bar. See above.

Multiple addresses
     When you reply to a note that has multiple To lines, or a To and a Cc or a
     Sender line in its header or its body, a Multiple Addresses window will
     come up, offering you every email address (except your own) that is found
     on To, Cc, From, Reply-to, and Sender lines in the entire note. You can
     select one or more, or all, or none (by clicking on Cancel) of these
     additional addresses to add to the To: field of your reply, in addition to
     the Reply-to id of the person to whom you're replying. If you need to get
     that selection box back again to select more addresses from it before you
     finish your reply, this menu option will give it to you.

     Print
     Prints the note you're composing.

The Edit Menu

     Copy
     Puts a copy of the selected text into OS/2's clipboard.

     Cut
     Moves the selected text to OS/2's clipboard.

     Paste
     Puts the contents of OS/2's clipboard into the current cursor location.

     Editor
     Copies the current contents of the Text window to a temporary file and
     opens that temp file with E.EXE or the alternate editor you've specified
     on the compose page of the settings notebook. When you save the file and
     exit your editor, the contents of the file are copied back into the Text
     window so that you can finish the note and click on OK to Send.

Rotate 13
     Adds 13 to each alphabet character of the selected text, just as the
     Rotate 13 option on the note view window subtracts 13 from each character.
     This is a very primitive method of data encryption.

Change font
     Opens an OS/2 font selection dialog box. Be aware that the font you select
     for your compose window will have no effect on the font in which your
     addressee will see your note. But you should use a non-proportional font
     (that is, a font which uses the same amount of space for an i as for an m,
     such as Courier or System Monospace) so that you can have an idea as to
     what your note is going to look like to other people, since the vast
     majority of people use non-proportional fonts for reading email so that
     tables will show up correctly spaced, etc. By the way, you should not use
     Tab characters in the body of your note, either, since many mail programs
     can't handle them properly.

Specify a tagline file
     See the explanation of the Tag checkbox above.

Edit your tagline file
     This opens your tagline file using E.EXE or the alternate editor you've
     specified on the compose page of the settings notebook.

Specify a SpellGuard directory
     If you have the Post Road version of SpellGuard, specify its directory here.

Check spelling
     If you have the Post Road version of SpellGuard, use this option to
     spell-check your notes. On the Check spelling dialog, next to the Current
     word field is a ... button which, when pressed, will present you with a
     menu containing two items: Add this word to your dictionary, and Search
     for more approximations.

Spell check options
     If you have the Post Road version of SpellGuard, configure its behavior here.

The Format Menu

The default for the top three word wrap settings is specified on the compose
page of the settings notebook. You can switch from one to another, temporarily,
here, as well. When set to either Advanced or Normal, the cursor will move to
the next line when you reach the right margin of the window. Adjust your line
length by adjusting the width of your Text window. These two styles of word
wrap each have their own strengths and weaknesses, so you may want to use them
both at different times for different kinds of work.

Word wrap (advanced)
     One advantage of the Post Road Mailer's custom word wrap is that you can
     have different widths for different paragraphs within one note by changing
     the width of your Text window between typing one paragraph and the next.
     The program will not automatically alter the formatting of the text you've
     already typed every time you change the window's width.

Word wrap (normal)
     Two advantages of the OS/2 MLE's built-in word wrap are that text pasted
     from the clipboard gets wrapped without intervention, and that every
     existing paragraph in the entire note automatically gets rewrapped each
     time you change the window width. Note that the same feature can be seen
     as an advantage in some circumstances, even though it's a disadvantage in
     others, depending on your currrent goal.

Word wrap off
     When word wrap is off, you have to hit the Enter key each time you want
     the cursor to move to the next line.

Format text when imported
     The default for this setting is selected on the compose page of the
     settings notebook. You can turn if on and off, temporarily, here, as well.
     When it's off, text which you import via the Import text file option on
     the File menu will be imported as is. When it's on, imported text will be
     reformatted to fit the current width of your Text window at the time you
     do the import.

Format text when quoted
     The default for this setting is selected on the compose page of the
     settings notebook. You can turn it on and off, temporarily, here, as well.
     When it's off, text which you quote from the note view window will be
     imported into the Text window as it is in the note view window (with the
     quoted text characters inserted, of course). When it's on, and no text is
     selected in the note view window, then the quoted text will be reformatted
     to fit the current width of your Text window at the time you use the Quote
     button. That is, paragraphs which weren't already quoted in the note to
     which you're replying. Paragraphs which were, will remain in their
     original format. When there is text selected in the note view window, on
     the other hand, this routine will stop the first time it finds a quoting
     character at the beginning of a line. So it only works when the selected
     text does not contain quotes from a previous message. The only way you can
     quote a quote with this setting turned on is to quote the entire note (by
     using the Quote button while no text is selected in the note view window)
     and then delete the parts you don't want in your reply.

Format selected paragraph
     Reformats the selected paragraph to fit the current width of your Text window.

Format a quoted paragraph
     Reformats the selected paragraph to fit the current width of your Text
     window, first stripping off the quoted text characters if they're there,
     and inserting them at the beginning of each line as it puts the paragraph
     back into the window. So this option works for text that was already
     quoted, or text which you've pasted in from elsewhere which you want to
     show as having been quoted. Selecting more than one paragraph at a time
     will work only if they all have the same level of quoting. When the
     program sees a change, for example, from two levels of quoting in one
     paragraph to one level in the next, it stops formatting at that point.

 Format entire note
     Reformats the entire note to fit the current width of your Text window.
     Use with caution. Don't use at all, if there is quoted text in the note!

The Windows Menu

Note text window
     Same as the Text button on the button bar. See above.

Inbasket window
     Brings the Post Road Mailer's main inbasket window to the foreground.

Address books
     Opens the window which lets you create and delete address books, add or
     modify entries, print, etc. Same as the option on the Features menu of the
     main inbasket window.

Glued mode
     The default setting for glued mode is selected on the compose page of the
     settings notebook. You can turn it on and off, temporarily, here, as well.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 5.1.2.1. Mood Icons ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

At the lower righthand corner of the Header portion of the compose window is
the Mood Icon button. This button will bring up a file selection dialog which
will let you select an *.ICO file to attach to the note you're writing.
(There's also an Attach a mood icon option on the File menu, for those who
don't use a mouse.) When you send a note with one of these mood icons, the
*.ICO file is sent as a UUencoded attachment. If the recipient is using the
Post Road Mailer version 2.0 or later, or another mailer which supports our
mood icon format, then that UUencoded icon will be displayed in his inbasket,
in place of the normal closed envelope icon for that note, instead of being
treated as an attachment. The first time the note is opened, it will stop using
the mood icon and revert to the normal opened sheet of paper icon. If you don't
want to see mood icons that people might attach to notes they send to you, you
can turn this feature off via the notes page of the settings notebook.

Another, very useful, type of mood icon is available via the filters feature.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 5.1.3. Text Window ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The first line (under the menu bar) of the Text portion of the compose window
tells you the approximate width of your text entry field. Depending on the font
you're using, OS/2's imprecise font metrics may make it impossible for the
program to predict exactly how many characters are going to fit on a line, so
that's why it's called the Approximate word wrap number.

Of course, if you use a proportional font in your Text window, the word wrap
will occur at an unexpected location and will have nothing to do with this
number, since nothing could possibly estimate how many characters are going to
fit since that would depend on whether you're going to type a lot of i's or
l's, or a lot of m's, w's, and uppercase letters.

Adjust the width of your Text window to change the word wrap column number to
what you want it to be.

The second line of the menu bar shows the Subject line of your note, if you've
typed one.

If you click with your right mouse button on the MultiLine Entry field (the
part of the Text window where you type your note), while you do not have any
third-party utility such as Xit running which intercepts right mouse button
clicks on MLE fields, then the Post Road Mailer will show you a list of all the
files in the QUICK subdirectory of the current inbasket directory, and clicking
on one will import it into the Text window at the current cursor location. So
if you have text files you need to import into your notes often, keep them in
that subdirectory.

In previous versions of the Post Road Mailer, there was an undocumented comment
feature. You could insert any text following the string <!, in a note you
composed, and the program would not send that text out when it sent the note.
Now that it's so common for people to try to send <! strings to each other
(since that string is also used as a comment in HTML files), we had to remove
this feature from the mailer. Don't try to use it anymore, because text
following that string from now on will be sent out, just like any other text!

The Button Bar

The Text window's button bar is identical to that of the Header window, except
that it has the Header button, to take you to the Header window, in place of
the Header window's Text button.

The Menu Bar

The options on the Text window's menus are identical to the matching options on
the Header window's menus, but the Windows menu has Header window in place of
Note text window for obvious reasons.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 6. Inbasket ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The inbasket window is the main window of the Post Road Mailer application. It
is the one which displays your newly received mail until you do something to
cause that mail to go elsewhere.

The inbasket window displays several pieces of information about each note.
Even the icon itself tells a lot about a note. If it's not a mood icon from the
sender, or from a filter, then it starts out as an unopened envelope. Once the
note has been viewed, it has the opened sheet of paper icon instead. A note
that's been handled (replied to, forwarded, or redirected) gets a red checkmark
over its opened envelope, and a note that's been marked for the shred queue
gets a red X if you do not use the Remove notes immediately when deleted
setting. A note that has an attachment has a paperclip on its envelope. Notes
that arrived during the most recent Refresh have a little NEW symbol next to
them, unless the inbasket is in Alternate display mode (see below).

Next to the icons, each note displays its author's From name, if present, From
address, and Subject line. The author's name and address change to a red (think
"read") color once you've opened the note since the last time you recycled the
inbasket. (The opened sheet of paper icon is there permanently. The color
change only remains during the current session. So you can distinguish notes
you've opened since the last time you opened the inbasket, from notes you
opened long ago.)

Toward the right are the date, time, and time zone from which the note was
sent. And, when the inbasket is not in Alternate display mode, then all the way
to the right are the words Deleted for notes that have been marked for the
shred queue, Printed for notes that have been printed during the current
session, and Print Q for notes that have been placed into the print queue for
later printing, during the current session.

A note's right mouse button popup menu contains most of the options from the
inbasket window's Notes menu, plus one extra: Un-delete (when you do not have
Remove notes immediately when deleted turned on, that is). You can use this
option to remove the X icon (and the extended attribute which means "I am
marked for the shred queue") from a note you've marked for deletion that hasn't
been deleted yet. Then it won't get sent to the shred queue after all. You can
only use the Un-delete option between the time you mark a note for deletion and
the time you close the inbasket or folder, since that is the only time a note
ever has the "marked for deletion" attribute. After you've closed the inbasket
(by closing the program, selecting another inbasket from the File menu, or
recycling the inbasket) or folder which contains the note, you can find the
note in the shred queue unless you have that feature turned off.

The title bar of the inbasket window tells the date and time of the most recent
Refresh of the current inbasket, and the name of the account covered by that
inbasket. By default, this account "name" is the internet address you specified
when you created the inbasket, but you can change it to anything you want, by
editing the INBASKET.NIX file after reading the warning about how to do that.

At the bottom of the inbasket window is the status line. Sometimes it just
shows the InnoVal copyright notice. At other times, it shows important
information about what the program is doing. And upon returning from a Refresh,
it tells how many new notes it just added to your inbasket. If it downloaded
more items than it added to your inbasket, then it also tells you how many it
downloaded. Incoming pieces of split attachments, and notes you've filtered to
folders or deleted via filters, are some reasons for there to be a difference
between the number of items downloaded and the number added to the inbasket.

You can use the Tab key to travel from the inbasket container (where the notes
are listed) to the action pad, if you have it enabled, to all of the items on
the action pad, and back up to the inbasket container again. The Home key will
take you to the inbasket container from anywhere on the inbasket window, and
End will take you to the last item on the action pad, which is the Refresh button.

The File Menu

License the software
     This option is available only when the Post Road Mailer thinks it is an
     unlicensed demo version. If you order the product from InnoVal, you will
     receive a serial number. Once you have that, select this option and plug
     the number into the dialog box, and the software will no longer act as a
     demo version. This option will then be removed from the menu since you
     won't need it again.

     Refresh
     Same as the Refresh button on the action pad and the Refresh Notes button
     on the toolbar. See Receiving Mail.

Preview mail
     Activates the Preview Mail window.

     Send
     Same as the Send button on the action pad and the Send Notes button on the
     toolbar. See Sending Mail.

     Break
     Cancels a Send or Refresh in progress.

Disable hangup after refresh/send
     When your Hangup after Refresh or Send setting is enabled, you can use
     this menu option to temporarily turn it off (even after you've initiated a
     Send or a Refresh). It will remain in that state until you select this
     menu item again or close the program.

     Settings
     Same as the Settings button on the toolbar, opens the settings notebook.

Save the list of notes to a file
     Exports the displayed information (Subject, From name and address, Date
     and time, etc.) about the notes in the inbasket, in the current sort
     order, to an ASCII text file. You can then print the file, or manipulate
     it in whatever way you like, using any program that reads ASCII text files.

     Print
     Prints the selected note(s), all notes in the inbasket, or the notes in
     the print queue, whichever you choose from the resulting submenu.

Queue for printing
     Adds the selected note(s), or all notes in the inbasket (whichever you
     choose from the resulting submenu), to the print queue for later printing.

Delete current inbasket
     Deletes the current inbasket and all of its contents, folders, folder
     notes, subfolders, subfolder notes, and everything, after making you
     confirm twice that you are sure you want to do that.

Migrate old inbasket(s)
     Brings the contents and configuration of an inbasket from an old version
     of the Post Road Mailer (1.03a through 1.05f only) in another directory,
     into a new inbasket in the new directory, and converts it to the new
     format, without altering or damaging the old existing inbasket in the old
     directory. If you delete the PRMIGRAT.DLL file from your main Post Road
     Mailer directory, this option will not appear on the menu anymore but the
     program will work fine in all other respects.

Create inbasket
     This option is used to create a new inbasket for a different
     configuration, a different user, or a different internet address. You can
     specify the name of the directory where the new inbasket should be
     located, if you want to put it on a specific drive or in a specific
     location. But normally, there's no need to do that. If you don't specify
     the directory, the new inbasket will be created as a subdirectory of the
     Post Road Mailer's main directory, using a directory name derived from the
     internet address to which the new inbasket belongs. This new inbasket will
     be completely separate from the current one, with its own settings and
     configuration, its own outbasket, folders, and subdirectory structure. You
     switch back and forth among your inbaskets by selecting an inbasket name
     from the bottom of this File menu.

Open a public inbasket
     This menu option exists only if the main Post Road Mailer directory
     contains a file named PUBLIC.INB.  (Its contents are irrelevant; a
     zero-byte file would work fine.) This selection will present you with a
     dialog box where you can enter the full pathname of an inbasket which you
     want to access without leaving it as a permanent entry at the bottom of
     this menu (or in your INBASKET.NIX file). So you can use this feature for
     temporary inbaskets or inbaskets on removable disk media, on network
     drives, etc. However, it only works properly when the drive letter which
     belongs to the drive that contains the inbasket, is the same drive letter
     that belonged to the drive on which the inbasket was created.

[names of existing inbaskets]
     The bottom of the menu contains the names of all the existing inbaskets
     (with a checkmark or diamond [depending on your OS/2 version] next to the
     active one). This is where you select the inbasket you want to work with.
     Your current inbasket is closed, and the one you switch to is opened. If
     the one you select is the one that's already open, this closing and
     reopening of it is called recycling it. When an inbasket is recycled,
     notes that had been marked for deletion are moved to the shred queue,
     notes which have arrived in the inbasket subdirectory in some way other
     than during a Refresh will be displayed in the inbasket window, and the
     shred queue, network log file, and prunable folders get pruned.

The Sort Menu lets you choose the order in which your notes should be displayed
in the inbasket. The choices are:

By date (descending)
By date (ascending)
By sending id
By subject
By unopened/opened

If you want to sort by two criteria, you select the second sort order first,
then the first one second. For example, if you want the notes to be in order by
Subject line, and by Date within groups whose Subject lines match, then sort by
date first, and then sort by subject. The last sort order you choose, however,
is the only one which will be remembered the next time you open the inbasket.

The Features Menu

Address books
     Opens the window which lets you create and delete address books, add or
     modify entries, print, etc. Same as the option on the Windows menu of the
     Header window.

     Threads
     Lets you view all the author names/addresses or subjects, and select just
     one author or subject and view just the notes which are from that author
     or subject. To return to the view of all the notes, select View all notes
     from this menu option's submenu.

Search for notes
     Searches all notes in your current inbasket and all of its folders
     (including the shred queue folder [SHREDNTS], or just in the folders you
     tell it to search) for a string of text and shows you a special, "virtual"
     folder containing all the notes which contain that string. From this
     Search Results folder, you can view, reply, move, delete, print, or do
     anything you can do to any other note in a folder window, because the
     window which displays the search results is just like a folder window,
     with just a few exceptions. The most important of which is that it also
     has a column which tells you what folder the note actually resides in. The
     notes in the Search Results folder aren't really in that folder at all.
     They're still in the folders in which they were found. So the Search
     Results folder is sort of like a folder full of OS/2 shadow objects,
     except that in this case, deleting a "shadow" actually deletes the
     original, moving a "shadow" moves the original, etc. Also, there's a
     Search window option on the Windows menu of the Search Results window.
     This option closes the current Search Results window and returns you to
     the dialog box so you can specify a different string for which to search,
     or different folders in which to search, etc.

Search for URLs
     Much like the Search for notes option above, but it automatically searches
     for all occurrences of http: and www., and the Search Results folder
     window you get this time has an extra option on its menu. This View a URL
     option is the default action when you doubleclick on one of the entries in
     this window, and it starts your web browser and tells it to take you to
     that URL.

     Followup
     Lets you search for notes which have sticky notes with follow-up dates of
     the one you specify or earlier.

     Filters
     Lets you create and maintain filters.

     Associations
     This is one place from which you can create and modify your Post Road
     Mailer associations.

Signature blocks
     This is one place from which you can access your Signature Blocks window.

Review network log
     Opens a window in which you can see the log of all the notes you've sent
     and received, unless you have the Log all network traffic setting turned off.

Drive info
     Gives you a window of useful information about the drives on your system,
     such as the amount of free disk space, etc.

Download an internet file
     This is another way to access this dialog box described in the note view
     window topic.

View internet file queue
     Lets you view, change, or download the list of files that you have queued
     up for later download via the above dialog box.

The Notes Menu

Compose a new note
     Same as the Compose button on the action pad and the Compose New Note
     button on the toolbar. See Sending Mail.

Compose a pager note
     Opens a compose window for a Skytel paging note.

Compose a note to Web page address(es)
     Downloads the web page that's currently being displayed in your web
     browser, and opens a compose window and a list box from which you can
     select any or all of the internet addresses on that web page, whether in
     mailto tags or found anywhere else on the page.

     Forward
     Same as the Forward button on the action pad and the Forward Selected Note
     button on the toolbar. See Sending Mail.

Reply to
     Same as the Reply button on the action pad and the Reply to Selected Note
     button on the toolbar. See Sending Mail.

     Redirect
     See Sending Mail.

     Route
     See Sending Mail.

Sticky notes
     Same as the Sticky notes option on the note view window.

Save as
     Same as the Save as option on the note view window.

Copy note to a folder
     Same as the option on the note view window, except this one lets you do it
     to multiple selected notes at once.

Move note to a folder
     Same as the option on the note view window, except this one lets you do it
     to multiple selected notes at once.

Copy note to most recent folder
     Same as the option on the note view window, except this one lets you do it
     to multiple selected notes at once.

Move note to most recent folder
     Same as the option on the note view window, except this one lets you do it
     to multiple selected notes at once.

     Delete
     Same as the option on the note view window, except this one lets you do it
     to multiple selected notes at once.

Prune starting at selected note
     Deletes all the notes in the inbasket, from the selected one to the bottom.

Add to an address book
     Same as the option on the note view window.

Change the subject
     Lets you change the selected note's Subject line. Not in the *.POP file
     itself, but in its extended attributes, so that the new Subject line will
     show in the inbasket view or folder window.

     Print
     Same as the option on the note view window, except this one lets you do it
     to multiple selected notes at once.

Queue for printing
     Same as the option on the note view window, except this one lets you do it
     to multiple selected notes at once.

Print queued notes
     Prints the notes in the print queue.

     Find
     Lets you search for specified text in the inbasket window, below the
     selected note.

The Attachments Menu brings up the Attachments window.

The Windows Menu

Tile next notes
     Opens the selected note and all the ones below it in the inbasket, tiled.

Cascade next notes
     Opens the selected note and all the ones below it in the inbasket, cascaded.

Close all notes
     Closes all open note view windows.

Outgoing notes
     Opens the outbasket folder window.

Printer queue
     Opens the folder of notes that have been queued for later printing. From
     it, you can print and optionally delete them from the print queue folder,
     delete them without printing, or anything else you can do from a normal
     folder window. The notes in this folder are actually copies of the
     originals, so nothing you do to the notes here affects the original copies
     that may still be in your inbasket or in folders, and deleting the
     originals does not remove the copies from the print queue folder. After
     you print the print queue using the Print all folder notes option on the
     File menu of the print queue folder, or any of the other Post Road Mailer
     print queue printing options, the program will ask whether or not you want
     to delete the contents of the print queue. You shouldn't say yes to that
     question until you're sure that your printer isn't going to have a paper
     jam before it's done with the print job.

Shredded notes
     Opens the shred queue folder, where "deleted" notes stay until their time
     in the shred queue has expired and they're deleted for real. From it, you
     can move a note back to any other folder or drag a copy back to the
     inbasket, if you no longer want it to be deleted, or anything else you can
     do from a folder window. You can even delete it from the shred queue, if
     you want it to be removed from your hard drive immediately instead of
     being left there until its time in the queue runs out.

     Folders
     Opens the List of Folders window, from which you can create new folders,
     delete existing ones, change folder titles, and open all your folder
     windows. Or if the window is already open, this menu option closes it.
     Same as the file cabinet drawer icon on the action pad and the Open
     Folders button on the toolbar.

Launch pad
     Brings your LaunchPad to the foreground, if you have the miscellaneous
     page of the settings notebook properly configured for it. Same as the
     Launch Pad button on the action pad. Of course, if you're running OS/2
     Warp 4 (a.k.a. Merlin), you have the Toolbar instead of the LaunchPad, but
     the button and menu item will still serve the same purpose.

Window list
     Brings up the OS/2 window list. Same as the Window List button on the
     action pad.

     Toolbar
     Displays the Post Road Mailer toolbar if it's hidden, or hides it if it's
     showing. The toolbar has bubble help, so if you place your mouse pointer
     over a button and leave it there for a second, it will tell you what that
     button does.

Action pad
     Displays the action pad if it's hidden, or hides it if it's showing.

Alternate display
     Switches back and forth between Alternate display and the normal inbasket
     view. Alternate display is the view used in folder windows. Each time you
     exit the program, it remembers which view you're using so it can return to
     that view when you restart the program. And if you're in Alternate display
     when you exit, the position of the divider bar is also saved at that time.

The Help Menu

Along with the normal online help options in any OS/2 application's Help menu,
is one other:

Release information
     Lets you download the RELEASE.TXT file from the InnoVal web site, so you
     can get the news on the latest version of the Post Road Mailer.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 6.1. Action Pad ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The action pad, when enabled, is a strip of buttons and icons right above the
bottom scroll bar on the main inbasket window. All of its options are also
available via the menus on the main menu bar, but it is just a more convenient
way to access them. The same is true of the toolbar, which is displayed at the
top of the inbasket window. You can use either of these toolbar objects, or
both, or neither, as you prefer. Their presence is controlled by options near
the bottom of the inbasket window's Windows menu. The toolbar has bubble help,
so if you place your mouse pointer over a button and leave it there for a
second, it will tell you what that button does. And here are the functions of
the action pad buttons:

The leftmost object on the action pad is the To be sent button which displays
the number of notes you have in your outbasket and, when pushed, opens the
outbasket window if there's anything in it.

Next comes the Compose button, which opens a compose window so that you can
compose a new note. See Sending Mail.

Then comes the Send button, which is only enabled when there is a note in the
outbasket. See Sending Mail.

The Forward and Reply buttons let you forward or reply to the selected note in
the inbasket. See Sending Mail. These buttons never apply to notes in any
folder. In fact, all of the action pad buttons which cause something to happen
to a particular note, apply only to the selected inbasket note(s), never to the
selected note in any folder.

You can drag a note or group of notes from the inbasket to the printer button,
to print them, or you can push the printer button to print the selected note(s)
in the inbasket.

The print queue button and shredder button are used in the same way as the
printer button, to add note(s) to the print queue or to the shred queue. You
can push the tiny up arrow buttons above the print queue and shredder buttons,
to open the print queue and shred queue folders, instead of using the
corresponding items on the inbasket's Windows menu to open them.

The file cabinet drawer button, like the Folders option on the inbasket's
Windows menu, opens the List of Folders window if it's closed, or closes it
when it's open.

The Launch Pad button brings your LaunchPad to the foreground if the
miscellaneous page of your settings notebook is configured properly. Of course,
if you're running OS/2 Warp 4 (a.k.a. Merlin), you have the Toolbar instead of
the LaunchPad, but the button will still serve the same purpose.

The Window List button brings up the OS/2 window list.

The Refresh button refreshes your inbasket. See Receiving Mail.

The big green number at the right end of the action pad shows you how many
notes (including ones which have been marked for the shred queue if you don't
use the Remove notes immediately when deleted setting) are in your inbasket.

And the triangle button above the Refresh button opens an options window which
holds many of the options that are available via the Features menu, the Windows
menu, and the settings notebook. Pushing the button again closes that options window.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 7. Outbasket ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Each inbasket has a corresponding outbasket (SNDNOTES subdirectory), and this
is where your notes are kept between the time you compose them and the time
they're sent. If you use the Send notes immediately, if connected setting and
you always have an active internet connection, then your outbasket will never
have anything in it for more than a moment. After a note has been sent, it is
moved from the outbasket to whatever folder you've told the compose window, or
the compose page of the settings notebook, to file it to after sending.

In most ways, there is no difference between the outbasket and any other folder
window. But there are exceptions.

You can't access the outbasket folder from the List of Folders window. Instead,
it's accessed via the Outgoing notes option on the main inbasket window's
Windows menu, or via the black and red To be sent button at the left end of the
action pad, or the View Outgoing Notes button on the toolbar. That is, if there
are any notes in it. If there aren't, you can't access it at all, since there's
no reason to.

Notes in the outbasket (and notes which have been filed to folders after being
sent from the outbasket, and notes which have been saved as drafts) are in
*.POP files of a different format from that of incoming *.POP files. Each
portion of these *.POP files (the To line, Subject line, Body, Signature, etc.)
begins with a two-character control tag. That's how the program knows which
part goes where, when you want to load the note back into the compose window to
edit it before sending, or to resend it later.

(Notes that the Post Road Mailer has sent from the outbasket to the Personal
Post Office directory, and notes that you want the Post Road Mailer to send
from the Alternate send queue directory are in the same format as incoming
*.POP files, rather than the outbasket *.POP file format, even though you would
think of them as outbound notes. Incoming *.POP files are plain ASCII text
files, the exact output of the POP3 server when the Post Road Mailer [or any
other mail program] asks the POP3 server to give you your mail.)

Because of the different format of outbasket *.POP files, and because it
doesn't make sense to reply to yourself or forward a note which you wrote
yourself, outbasket notes (and notes you've sent which have since been filed to
folders) cannot be replied to, forwarded, or redirected. Instead, outbound (and
previously outbound) notes have a menu option which inbound notes don't have:
Edit in compose window (in the outbasket) or Resend (in other folders). The
former lets you change anything about a note before you send it. The latter
lets you resend a note to the same person without changes, or to the same or a
different person with changes.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 8. Saving and Organizing Mail ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Instead of shredding (deleting) notes to get them out of your inbasket, you may
very well want to save them to read again later. If you like to manage files
manually from the command line or your favorite file manager, you can create
subdirectories under your inbasket directory or under other folder directories,
and the Post Road Mailer will see them and use them as folders or subfolders.

But better yet, you can use the file cabinet drawer button on the action pad,
the Open Folders button on the toolbar, or the Folders option on the main
inbasket window's Windows menu, to open the List of Folders window and create
your folders there. The File menu of this window will let you create, delete,
rename, and open all your folders. Of course, the easier way to open a folder
(if your hand is on your mouse), is to simply doubleclick on it in this window.

Folders which contain notes that have not been opened are displayed with their
titles underlined, so you can pick them out easily among the other ones. This
is particularly useful to people who have filters which file notes to folders
upon arrival.

You can use drag and drop methods to copy and move notes and folders, from
inbasket to folder, from folder to inbasket, and from folder to folder. When
you drag a note from a folder to the inbasket, by default it does a copy rather
than a move, since the inbasket is the Post Road Mailer version of a Desktop
and since there are so many applications which have made a standard of doing
copies, rather than moves, when the destination of a drag is the Desktop. If
you want to move a note from a folder to the inbasket, rather than just copying
it, you simply need to hold down a Shift key while you drag it. Shift is the
key which turns a default OS/2 copy into a move, just as Ctrl is the key which
turns a default OS/2 move into a copy.

You can also use the Copy note to a folder and Move note to a folder options on
the menu bars and the right mouse button menus, to copy or move notes from
inbasket to folder or from folder to folder.

And there are a lot of other things you can do to notes in folders, from the
menus of the folder windows. Here's what you can do to folders from the List of
Folders window:

The File Menu

Create a new folder
     Creates a folder at the top level of the List of Folders. You can specify
     a directory which will be used to house the contents of the folder, if you
     like. If that directory doesn't already exist, it will be created. But it
     can be an existing directory. This is especially useful since it means you
     can have all your inbaskets sharing some or all of each other's folders,
     if you like: just create a folder in one inbasket, and then in the other
     inbaskets, create a folder in the directory which represents that folder
     in the first inbasket. If you don't specify a directory name here, on the
     other hand, then the folder will be created in a subdirectory of your
     inbasket directory, and its name will be the first eight characters of the
     folder title, with underscores substituted for spaces and illegal filename characters.

Create a sub-folder
     Creates a subfolder below the selected folder, and creates a subdirectory
     under the selected folder's directory, to hold the new subfolder.

View a folder
     Opens the selected folder. Same as doubleclicking on it.

     Delete
     Deletes the selected folder, its contents, and all its subfolders and
     their contents. It first prompts you to confirm that you really want it
     all deleted.

     Remove
     Removes this inbasket's link to the selected folder without doing anything
     to the contents. This is for folders that are not subdirectories of your
     inbasket directory nor of other folders. That is, the folders which you
     created by specifying a directory name as well as a folder title, and
     whose links are stored in the FLDINDEX.NIX file in your inbasket directory
     (for those of you who care about technical details). It first prompts you
     to confirm that what you want to do is remove the link without deleting
     the contents. Or if the folder is not one listed in the FLDINDEX.NIX file,
     the program tells you to use the Delete option instead.

Change folder title
     Changes the title by which the selected folder is listed in the List of
     Folders window and elsewhere within the Post Road Mailer.

Set folder prune size
     If you specify a non-zero number here, then each time you open this
     inbasket (or restart the program), the oldest (according to the time
     stamps of the *.POP files in the folder directory) notes will be deleted,
     leaving only your specified number of notes in the folder. If you turn on
     the Delete attachments with notes checkbox, then any attachments belonging
     to the deleted notes will be deleted during pruning, as well.

Expand all
     Shows all subfolders, as if you'd pressed all the + sign buttons at once.

Collapse all
     Shows only the top-level folders, as if you'd pressed all the - sign
     buttons at once.

Count notes
     We've tried to strike a good balance between giving you the information
     you need and avoiding unnecessary waits, so the count of how many notes
     are in each folder is not updated every time you do anything to any note
     or folder. So if there is a time when you do something which causes the
     count to change, but the List of Folders doesn't update its count, and you
     want it to be updated, you can use this menu option to cause a recount.

Refresh list
     Searches again for all the existing folders, in case you've added or
     removed some from outside this window (by creating or removing
     subdirectories at the command line or via a file manager, or via the
     Select a Folder dialog).

The Icons Menu lets you decide what size icons to use in your List of Folders
window. The choices are:

10x10 bits
20x20 bits
32x32 bits

The folder titles will spread apart to make room for the larger icons.

If you put an icon named FOLDER.ICO into a folder's directory, that's the icon
which will be used for that folder. If you use a 32x32 bit icon file, then you
need to be using the 32x32 bits option on the Icons menu or else your icon is
going to overlap its title and its neighbors.

The Select a Folder Dialog

This dialog comes up any time the Post Road Mailer needs for you to select the
folder you want to copy or move a note to, etc. It is much like the List of
Folders window, but with fewer options. Its File menu does let you create new
folders and subfolders, though, so your choices are not limited to existing folders.

Inbasket Subdirectories

Any directory you create under an inbasket directory or its subdirectories will
show up as a folder or subfolder in that inbasket, and any subdirectory you
create under a linked folder in another location will show up as a subfolder of
that linked folder. Exceptions: The program hides the following folders from
you because it knows that they are directories it uses for its own purposes,
not folders you have created:

     $$ACK$$
     Where acknowledgements are stored before they're sent.

     $$ATCH$$
     You should never see this directory. It's created and deleted during the
     processing of attachments. If it ever gets left behind by some error, you
     may delete it if the program is not doing a Refresh or Send at the time.

     DRAFTS
     The default directory offered by the Save draft option on the compose
     window's File menu.

     MIME$$
     Where pieces of incoming split attachments are stored until the other
     parts arrive.

     PQNOTES
     The print queue.

     QUICK
     See Text window.

     SHREDNTS
     The shred queue.

     SNDNOTES
     The outbasket.

     SNTNOTES
     The default folder, Notes previously sent, to which outgoing notes are
     filed after they've been sent, unless you specify otherwise in either the
     settings notebook or the compose window.

     TRANFILE
     The Attachments window.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 8.1. Folder Windows ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

A folder window is much like the Alternate display of the inbasket, which you
can use by selecting that option from the bottom of the inbasket window's
Windows menu.

First, there is a column for each note's Subject. Then the divider bar, which
you can move by putting your mouse pointer over it until it turns into a
two-ended arrow. Then come the From name, From address, To address, Date and
time of the note, File Bytes which is the size of the *.POP file, and the
actual Filename of the *.POP file in which the note is stored. (Remember, any
time you want to know the name of the *.POP file that holds an inbasket note,
you can just switch your inbasket to Alternate display to see the inbasket's
Filename column, too. Or from the note view window, use the Execute a command
against the note file option, and cancel out of it after seeing the filename there.)

Notes in folders have icons, like inbasket notes do, though they're smaller.
They can be unopened envelopes, opened envelopes, opened envelopes with red
checkmarks, or opened envelopes with X's, and they can have red pushpins which
represent sticky notes, or paperclips which represent attachments.

Each note in a folder has a right mouse button popup menu, which contains many
of the options in the dropdown menu bar, for those who find RMB menus more
convenient. See outbasket for an explanation of the differences between the
menu options available on notes you've received versus the options available on
notes you've sent.

The File Menu

Create a new sub-folder
     Lets you create a subfolder under the one you're viewing.

Print all folder notes
     Lets you print all the notes in the folder you're viewing.

Search for notes
     Same as the option on the inbasket window's Features menu, except that the
     current folder will be automatically selected for you in the list of
     folders on the search dialog.

     Find
     Lets you search for text in the folder view window, below the selected note.

Save the list of notes to a file
     Exports the displayed information (Subject, From name and address, Date
     and time, etc.) about the notes in the folder, in the current sort order,
     to an ASCII text file. You can then print the file, or manipulate it in
     whatever way you like, using any program that reads ASCII text files.

The Sort Menu lets you choose the order in which your notes should be displayed
in the folder. The choices are:

By date (descending)
By date (ascending)
By from address
By to address
By subject
By unopened/opened

The Threads Menu lets you view all the author addresses, recipient addresses,
or subjects, and select just one author or addressee or subject, and view just
the notes which are from that author or to that addressee or about that
subject. To return to the view of all the notes, select View all notes from
this menu.

The Notes Menu

Most of the options on this menu are the same as the corresponding options on
the Notes menu of the main inbasket window. Following are the exceptions:

     View
     Opens the selected note in a note view window.

     Delete
     If you use this option while a subfolder is selected, the program will
     deselect any notes which are also selected and ask you for confirmation as
     to whether you wanted to delete the subfolder or not, even if you have
     Confirm deletion of all notes turned off. The program will not allow you
     to delete notes and subfolders at the same time.

     Un-delete
     Removes the X icon from the extended attributes of a note that's been
     marked for the shred queue, so that it won't get sent there after all. Of
     course this option only works (and is only needed) when you do not have
     Remove notes immediately when deleted turned on, since that's the only
     time a note can ever get the extended attribute which means "I am marked
     for the shred queue". You can only use this option between the time you
     mark a note for deletion and the time you close the folder, since closing
     the folder is what moves the X-marked note to the shred queue folder. In
     the shred queue folder itself, this option has a different meaning.
     Deleting a note in the shred queue folder means that it will be really and
     truly deleted when you close the folder (or immediately, if you use the
     Remove notes immediately when deleted setting), rather than waiting until
     its time in the shred queue has expired. Un-deleting it in the shred queue
     folder means that it won't get deleted when you close the folder after
     all; it will remain in the shred queue until its time runs out.
     Un-deleting something in the shred queue folder does not remove it from
     there and put it back into another folder. You do that by simply dragging
     it or moving it to the inbasket or folder you want it to be in, not by
     un-deleting it.

     Resend
     This option produces a submenu which lets you select with changes or
     without changes. The latter copies the selected note or notes directly to
     the outbasket. The former opens a compose window so that you can send the
     note again to the same addressee, or to any number of others, after making
     whatever changes you might want to make to it. This option is available
     only on notes you've sent, not notes you've received. You resend notes
     you've received by using the Forward or Route option instead. See Sending Mail.

     Start
     Same as the Start option on the File menu of the Attachments window. Most
     of the items in a folder are *.POP files (notes) or subfolders, but since
     you can also put real files and attachments into them, we've given you the
     ability to use the Post Road Mailer's associations from here as well as
     from the Attachments window.

Modify associations
     This is one place from which you can create and modify your Post Road
     Mailer associations.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 9. Address Books ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Post Road Mailer address books can contain any or all of the following pieces
of information for each entry:

o   First name

o   Last name

o   Organization

o   Up to 5 email addresses, each of which can be associated with a nickname
    you can type into the compose window's To: field in order to use the
    address without typing the whole thing

o   Up to 2 telephone numbers

o   Fax number

o   Notes

You can view or change an entry by doubleclicking on it. The right mouse button
popup menu of each entry lets you change or print the entry, or open a compose
window with that entry as the addressee. If the entry has more than one email
address listed, you will be allowed to choose which one to write to.

The File menu of each address book window lets you add, change, or print entries.

The Groups menu lets you create (or, later, change) address groups, so that you
can send a note to a whole group of people by simply specifying or selecting
the group as an addressee. The names must exist as address book entries before
they can be selected and added to a group that you're creating.

When you select a group from an address book to go into the To: field of the
Header window, all of the names get placed into the list below the To: field,
so that you can edit or remove certain entries, as desired.

The only part of an address book entry that isn't self-explanatory is the
OK/Copy button, which is what you use if you want to save your changes to the
current entry and also copy the current entry's internet addresses to a new
blank entry window. This is useful when you want to add multiple entries for
people at the same company, so that you don't have to retype their entire
internet domain name for each entry you add. You can just change the first
entry's user id to the new one each time you add a new entry.

Several REXX programs are distributed with the Post Road Mailer, for use in
working with the address book files.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 10. Preview Mail ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The Post Road Mailer's Preview Mail feature lets you find out how many notes
you have waiting on your POP3 server, and who sent them, etc., without
retrieving them via the normal Refresh method. You can select notes as desired,
and view or retrieve or delete the ones you select.

When you choose this feature from the File menu of the main inbasket window or
by using the Preview Mail toolbar button, it lets you choose whether to just
count the notes or retrieve the entire header of each one. The former is much
faster, but doesn't give you any information about the notes nor allow you to
do anything with them.

Retrieving the headers takes nearly a second for each note, virtually the same
amount of time it would take to retrieve them via a Refresh. Don't think of
Preview Mail as a time-saver. It has many advantages, but saving time isn't one
of them, unless of course there's a very large note or attachment waiting for
you and you want to get your other mail without waiting for the large one to be
downloaded right now.

You might also use Preview Mail to view some mail without removing it from the
server (so that you can retrieve it again when you get to work) even if you
have the Delete from host: setting set to Yes and don't want to bother changing
it. Or to retrieve a certain note which you know is waiting for you, without
also filling up your inbasket with the other forty-two notes that are there,
which is what you'd have to do if you used the normal Refresh method. Or to
delete a note from the server without ever having to download it via a Refresh.
Or, since the dialog has fields for the POP3 server, Port number, Userid, and
Password, you can use it to get mail from another account without having to
create another inbasket for that account or change the settings of the current one.

Once you tell Preview Mail whether you want the headers or just the count, it
starts your dialer if necessary, and logs onto the POP3 server to get the
information. If you wanted the headers, you'll soon see a container window with
columns for Message Number, Bytes (size of note), Subject, an adjustable
divider bar (if you put your mouse pointer on it, the pointer turns into a
double arrow so that you can move the bar), and columns for Author, To address,
and Date/time. The right mouse button popup menu of each item in the container
has most of the options that are also on the File menu of the Preview Mail window.

At the bottom of the window are buttons to Refresh the list of notes in the
window, or Break the connection with the server.  The Break button aborts any
download or view activity that may be going on and logs off the POP3 server,
but does not close the dialer, even if Preview Mail was what had started the
dialer. Preview Mail doesn't close the dialer until you close Preview Mail.

The File Menu

Peek the selected note
     Retrieves and shows you the first 50 lines of the selected note.
     Doubleclicking on the note's entry in the window has the same effect.

View the selected note
     Retrieves and shows you the entire selected note.

Retrieve selected note to a file
     Retrieves the selected note and saves it to whatever filename and location
     you specify.

Retrieve selected note(s) to inbasket
     Retrieves the selected note(s) and puts them into the inbasket, as a
     Refresh would.

Retrieve marked note(s) to inbasket
     Same as the option above, except it acts upon the marked note(s) instead
     of the selected one(s).

Mark selected note(s)
     A selected note is one whose line in the container window has a gray bar
     over it (unless you've set up your OS/2 color scheme to use some other
     color to represent selected items). You select an item by clicking on it,
     and deselect a selected one by clicking on it while holding down a Ctrl
     key, or by selecting a different item. A marked note, on the other hand,
     has a red checkmark on its icon, and you mark a note by using this menu
     item. You cannot delete notes from the server unless you mark them first.
     You can mark a few notes to be deleted, view or retrieve some selected
     notes, mark another one for deletion, etc., and then when you're done
     looking at everything else, delete the marked notes from the server.

Mark all
     Marks (puts a red checkmark on) all of the notes in the Preview Mail window.

Unmark selected note(s)
     Takes the red checkmark away from the selected note(s).

Unmark all
     Takes the red checkmark away from all of the notes in the Preview Mail window.

Delete marked note(s)
     Deletes all of the notes with red checkmarks, from the POP3 server. Once
     this has been done and the Preview Mail function has logged off cleanly
     from the server, there will never be any way to retrieve those notes
     again. None whatsoever. This is why we've tried to make it somewhat
     inconvenient to delete notes from the Preview Mail window. You have to
     select the notes, mark them, and then choose to delete the marked notes.
     That option is only on the File menu, not also on the right mouse button
     menu, and the DEL key won't do it either, as it does in all other parts of
     the Post Road Mailer. Then the program will ask if you're sure, before it
     tells the server to delete those notes. After it has done that, it cannot
     allow the other notes to be manipulated any more until it has refreshed
     the list, because the message numbers will have changed because of the
     notes that were deleted from the server! So the program asks you whether
     you want to refresh the list of notes or not. If you have nothing further
     you want to do in Preview Mail after the marked notes are deleted, say no,
     and Preview Mail will close (and it will also close the dialer, if it had
     started the dialer to begin with). If you do have other things you want to
     do in Preview Mail, then say yes. Since POP3 servers never delete notes
     until the requesting software has had a clean and successful logoff, the
     Post Road Mailer must exit the server and log on again before it can get a
     list of notes that doesn't include the notes you just deleted. This takes
     only a couple of seconds, but it may be surprising to those who haven't
     read this and aren't expecting it, when they see it happening via the
     messages in the status line.

Refresh the list of mail
     Same as the Refresh button. See above.

     Break
     Same as the Break button. See above.

The Edit Menu

     Find
     Lets you search for specified text in the Preview Mail window, below the
     selected note. Obviously not much more useful than your own eyes, unless
     you have a large number of notes there!

The Sort Menu lets you choose the order in which your notes should be displayed
in the Preview Mail window. The choices are:

By marked
By message number
By bytes
By subject
By author
By date

The Preview Mail function stays logged onto the POP3 server the whole time it's
running (with the two exceptions mentioned above), so that it can retrieve
notes for you as soon as you select to peek or view them. But Preview Mail will
log onto the server again, any time you tell it to do something and it finds
that the connection has been lost.

Normally, you can still use the Send and Refresh functions from the main Post
Road Mailer application, even while Preview Mail is connected to your POP3
server, as long as you aren't trying to have the POP3 server actively do
something with the same account twice at the same time. But if your POP3 server
is one which doesn't allow two connections by the same account at the same time
(for security reasons), then Refreshes and POP3 Sends won't work for you while
Preview Mail has a POP3 connection, even if Preview Mail is just sitting idle
at the time.

See Frequently Asked Questions for a warning about how Preview Mail can
conceivably cause you to miss new mail, if you use the Delete from host: No and
Retrieve notes: New settings.

The Preview Mail feature does not work with the Personal Post Office feature;
it will attempt to connect to a POP3 server on the internet even if the
inbasket is set to retrieve mail from a PPO directory.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 11. Filters ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Filters are wonderful things you can use to delete certain pieces of mail
before you ever have to see them; to move certain pieces of mail to certain
folders before they get to your inbasket; to attach certain icons to certain
pieces of mail when they're placed into your inbasket or into a folder; to send
a certain reply to certain notes automatically; and many other useful
functions. Some people never even have mail in their inbasket; they have each
piece of mail delivered by filters directly to the appropriate destination
folders upon arrival, and read it from the folders instead!

The filters are processed after all the notes have been downloaded from the
POP3 server, before they're all loaded into the inbasket window (that is, the
ones which are still in the inbasket directory after the filters are done). No
note can match more than one filter, because if a filter applies to a certain
note, then after that filter has processed that note, the other filters don't
even get tested against it. Processing skips right to the next note, instead,
to see if any filters apply to that one, etc. So everything you want to have
done to a note must be done by the first filter it matches!

Filters are executed in the order in which they exist in the Filters window, so
it's possible to, for example, delete all of a group of notes except a certain
subgroup of that group, by having one filter move each note in the subgroup to
another folder first, and then having a second filter delete all the notes
which contain the search string but didn't get moved by the first filter. You
can change the order of the filters in the Filters window (and therefore the
order of execution) by dragging a filter and dropping it on the filter after
which you want it to be located. Then close the Filters window so that the new
filter order gets saved to the PMLFILTR.BIN file.

To create a filter, you select Filters from the main inbasket window's Features
menu, then doubleclick on the Add a new message filter object or select Add
from the File menu of the Filters window or from any filter's right mouse
button popup menu, and fill in the blanks. Or you can modify an existing filter
by doubleclicking on its icon in the Filters window, or by selecting Change
from the File menu or from the filter's right mouse button popup menu. The File
menu and each filter's right mouse button menu also contain a Delete option, to
delete the selected filter.

Each filter needs a Description, a Search String, and a Reaction. If the search
string is found in an incoming note, the reaction is activated. The reaction
may be one of the following:

File Note
     in which case you need to specify or select, while creating the filter,
     the Folder to which the note should be filed

Delete Note

Reply to Note
     in which case you specify or select the Reply File which contains the text
     that should be sent as the reply; see below for the format of this file

Redirect Note
     in which case you specify the Redirect/Notify address to which the note
     should be redirected; you can include multiple recipients by separating
     each from the next with a comma

Notify receipt of note
     in which case you specify both the Redirect/Notify address and the Notify
     text which goes into the resulting outbasket note along with indented
     Sender, Date, and Subject lines telling the addressee those pieces of
     information about the received note; the Subject line of the outgoing note
     will be Note received from - followed by the internet address of the
     author of the note which triggered the filter

Copy note to a directory path
     in which case you specify or select the Copy to path

[any one of several combinnation choices]

No Reaction

One situation in which you might want to create a filter that causes No
Reaction is if you want to attach a certain icon to all the notes which contain
the search string. You just specify or select the *.ICO file you want this
filter to use, it will be displayed in a spot below the right end of the Mood
Icon field, and it will be displayed in the inbasket or folder next to each
incoming note, as appropriate, until the first time you open the note. (The
Post Road Mailer also supports another type of mood icon, on outbound notes.)
Another situation for which No Reaction is appropriate is when you want the
filter to run a user exit but not to do any of the other actions.

The Search radio buttons let you decide what part of the notes should be
searched for the search string. The Entire Message, the Message headers, From
id, Subject, and Message body are some of the available choices.

Why, you may ask, is there an option to search the To id of a note, when it's
obvious that every piece of mail in an inbasket must have been addressed to
that inbasket's user? One reason is because the To line of a note, just like
the From and Reply-to lines, can contain the addressee's name as well as the
internet address. You can have more than one person on one internet account by
specifying different names. Or you can use Firstname Lastname <address> for
your personal mail and Company Name <address> for your business mail. Use the
name you want, as the Reply-to id on notes you send out, and that's most likely
the name/address people will use when they reply to you. Then you can use the
right search string in To id filters, to put your notes into the appropriate
folders before you ever see them, if you want to. The Post Road Mailer's
special Mail Mapping support feature handles this in an even better way, if you
want the mail for different name <address> combinations to be available on
different computers.

On the right side of the dialog box are the Options which let you temporarily
turn off a filter without deleting it (Filter is active), ignore
uppercase/lowercase differences in the search string or not (Case sensitive),
have the filter react if the search string is not found, rather than when it's
found (React if NOT found) and/or delete incoming attachments belonging to
incoming notes which are deleted by the filter (Delete attachments when
deleting notes).

If you want a filter to execute a user exit on notes which match the search
string, before it does whatever else (if anything) the filter is set up to do,
you can specify or select the program in the User Exit line and then you can
select whether you want the exit to run in the Foreground, the Background, or
Minimized. The filter-activated user exit is executed after the notes have been
renamed from the temporary filenames they have when they're being downloaded
from the POP3 server to the *.POP file names that they're going to end up with
when they get to the inbasket. The full pathname and filename of the *.POP file
which contains the search string and activates the filter which runs the user
exit is passed to the exit as a command line parameter, which the exit may
retrieve by using a PARSE ARG instruction so that it knows the name of the file
it's supposed to be working on. When the exit program has completed its work,
the filter does whatever else it's supposed to do, and then processing
continues with the other *.POP files and their filters. See the User Exits Page
topic for much more information about using user exits in the Post Road Mailer.

The format of the file that's used as the source for a reply, for the Post Road
Mailer to send to the author of a note that activates a Reply to Note filter is
quite simple. The Post Road Mailer is going to add the To line itself, and of
course the Date line. Your reply file should contain a From line, a Subject
line, the body text, and any signature you might want to use. So a reply file
might contain the following:

From: Joe Smith <[e-mail]>
Subject: On Vacation

Just to let you know, I'm on vacation until Wednesday, July 31, and will answer
your note as soon as possible after my return.

Joe Smith
ACME Corp.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 12. Automating the Send/Receive Process ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

If you want the Post Road Mailer to log onto your internet provider, retrieve
your new mail, and log off every few minutes or every hour; let you read and
reply to your mail offline; and then upload your notes and replies whenever
it's online downloading the next batch of new mail from the internet server,
then you just need to configure the following settings in your inbasket's
settings notebook:

o   Parameters on the dialer page to make your dialer log on automatically
    without stopping to get your user id and password

o   Hang up after Refresh or Send on the dialer page

o   Password on the POP3 page

o   Automatic inbasket refresh interval on the inbasket page set to a number
    greater than zero

o   Send queued mail after inbasket refresh on the inbasket page

o   Prompt before sending acknowledgements turned off on the acknowledgements
    page


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 13. InnoVal Select A File Dialog ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Whenever the Post Road Mailer needs to allow you to select or specify a file
for some purpose, it brings up the custom InnoVal Select A File dialog box
instead of the standard OS/2 file selection dialog. It has all the capabilities
of the standard OS/2 one, but also many more.

At the top left corner is the Filename: field, where you can type the filename
you want to use. Below that are the names of all the files (or all the files
with the selected extension) in the selected directory. Under that is the
number of files displayed, and the total size of those files.

The middle column shows the current directory, a directory tree like the one in
OS/2's standard file selection dialog, the amount of free disk space on the
selected drive, a dropdown list from which you can select a different drive,
and a dropdown list which offers you a choice of every filename extension which
exists in the selected directory.

There have already been a lot of features mentioned which aren't available in
OS/2's standard file selection dialog, but under the OK and Cancel buttons, on
the right side of the InnoVal Select A File dialog, are far more interesting features!

The Edit button lets you view or edit the selected file, using E.EXE or the
editor you specify via the Setup button (this is not the same as the editor you
select in the Post Road Mailer's settings notebook).

The Quick Finder button will show you the files in the selected directory which
match a wildcard specification you type.

The File Options button lets you copy, move, rename, delete, change the
attributes of, or print a list of files, or create a directory, remove a
directory, or kill a directory along with its contents.

The Speed Lists button lets you create, change, and delete speed lists. If you
have certain files and directories which you like to access often, but which
are hard to reach via the file selection dialog, a speed list is exactly what
you want to create. You just name the directory which you'd like to be able to
access more easily (or select it by pushing the ... button), and give it a
nickname. That's all. Once you create a speed list, you can check the Use Speed
Lists checkbox near the top right of the Select A File dialog box. Then, half
of the space previously used for the standard directory tree will be used
instead for your speed lists. From then on, you can select your favorite
directories from there by choosing the nicknames you had specified for them,
instead of having to open drives and directories and subdirectories in order to
find them. You can even specify a certain type of file, rather than a whole
directory full. For example, you could create a speed list for
C:\PICTURES\*.ICO rather than just C:\PICTURES.

The Setup button lets you configure the Select A File dialog. All of your
Select A File settings and selections are saved from one use to the next, in
your OS2.INI file, under the application name ZFILELIST, so that they can be
shared among all of your InnoVal applications that use the Select A File dialog box.

In the Setup dialog, you can specify that you want to see file dates, times,
and/or sizes, and whether or not you want to see files with System and/or
Hidden attributes. You can specify whether you want the files to be displayed
in order by filename, date/time, or file size; ascending or descending. And you
can specify (or select, by pushing the ... button) the editor you want to use
when you select a file and click on the Select A File dialog's Edit button.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 14. Personal Post Office ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

This feature is good for several purposes. If you want to test a feature of the
Post Road Mailer, without wasting time logging onto your internet provider, you
can set the Post Road Mailer to use a PPO directory as the server. It will then
treat the specified directory as if it were a real server, and send the mail to
*.POP files in that directory during Send, and download those *.POP files from
that directory during Refresh.

Or if you have another program which sends and retrieves your mail, you can
have that program put your mail into a certain directory, and have the Post
Road Mailer retrieve it from that directory. Then you read and respond to it,
have the Post Road Mailer send the outbound mail to the directory where the
other program expects to find it, and then have that other program send it on
up to the internet. The Post Road Mailer never goes near your SMTP or POP3
servers, then; it only interacts with the specified directories instead.

See the protocol page of the settings notebook to learn how to set up the
Personal Post Office feature.

If you use the Delete from host: No and Retrieve notes: New settings, then the
way in which the program will determine which notes are new and which are old
is that it will turn off the Archive attribute of each note it retrieves, and
then during each Refresh it just retrieves each one whose Archive attribute is
still on. This means that if you receive mail and then backup the drive which
contains the PPO directory before you've done a Refresh to retrieve that mail,
then you never will receive that mail if your backup program is one which turns
off the Archive attribute of files it backs up, as most do. Luckily, not many
people ever have any reason to use these two settings with the PPO feature anyway.

See MIME Attachment Problems for a few more uses for this feature.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 15. Skytel Paging ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The Compose a pager note option on the main inbasket window's Notes menu opens
a different sort of compose window for sending correctly formatted notes to
Skytel one-way and two-way pagers.

The Post Road Pager Window has many of the same options as the normal compose
window, but only the ones which make sense for use with pagers. The text input
area is limited to 240 characters, since that's what a Skytel pager can handle.
The Send to queue button at the bottom left puts the note into the outbasket
just as the regular compose window's OK to Send button does. The Send
immediately button at the bottom right sends the note to the internet as the
action pad's Send button or the toolbar's Send Notes button would, starting
your dialer first if necessary.

The other items on the pager compose window which don't have counterparts on
the normal compose window are all related to the replies which can be returned
to you by the owners of Skytel two-way pagers. You supply the possible replies,
the recipient of the page will receive them with a number next to each one, he
selects the number he wants to use, and you shortly receive the reply which was
associated with that number.

In the list box labeled Available, you can keep a list of the possible replies
you like to use. For example, you might have a list such as:

o   Yes

o   No

o   I don't know yet

o   Stuck in traffic

o   Stuck in a meeting

o   On my way

o   I'm sorry

o   Will call you later

To add an entry to this list, just press the Add button below it. To change or
delete an entry, select it and press Change or Delete. To put an entry into the
To be used list box, select it and press the Copy button. (This will not copy
an entry that's already there.) These four functions are also available on the
list box's right mouse button popup menu, as well as the buttons below the list box.

The To be used list box is the list of possible replies which is actually going
to be included in the note you're working on. You can Add, Change, and Delete
entries over here just as you can in the other list box, and you can bring
entries here from the other list box by using the Copy button under it.

The contents of these two list boxes are stored in a file named REPLIES.LST in
your inbasket subdirectory, so you don't have to re-enter them each time you
send a pager note.

You can also store and retrieve custom lists of replies in *.RPL files, so you
could have different ones for all the people to whom you send pager notes if
you wanted to. When you have the To be used list as you want it, just select
Save as from the list box's right mouse button popup menu or from the Reply
lists submenu of the window's File menu, and specify a filename that ends with
a .RPL extension. Later, the Open option on those two menus will let you bring
a *.RPL file back into the list box. If you want to save a change to one of
your custom lists, overwriting the old version of the same file, the Save
option on those two menus will do that.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 16. PRMSENDF.EXE ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The Post Road Mailer Send File utility lets you send someone a file from the
command line, a batch file, etc., by putting it into the Post Road Mailer
outbasket in the form of a note with an attached file. You can even use this
program to send a very short note, without sending a file, if you like.

Typing PRMSENDF by itself at the command line will give you a brief synopsis of
the syntax, which is as follows:

PRMSENDF d:\dir\filename.ext [options]

d:\dir\filename.ext is the file you want to send, and just like attachments
sent from the compose window, the file must still be in the specified location
by the time you have the Post Road Mailer send the note to your SMTP or POP3
server. Or if you want to send a short note without a file, just use empty
double quotation marks as a placeholder for the filename in the command.

[options] are as follows:

     -t
     The recipient's To address.

     -s
     The Subject line (optional).

     -b
     The body of the note (optional). Can be a short sentence or two, or the
     name of an ASCII file which contains the text that should be used.

     -i
     The directory name of the inbasket from which you want the file to be
     sent. The default is the first inbasket in your INBASKET.NIX file (the
     bottom of the File menu on the Post Road Mailer's main inbasket window).

     -u
     Send the file in UUencoded format.

     -m
     Send the file in MIME format (the default).

Examples:

To send the c:\gifs\mycat.gif file in MIME format to Bill Smith, whose internet
address is [e-mail], with a subject line of Here It Is!, and body text
which says He is a beauty, isn't he?, from the inbasket whose directory name is
prmbeta, you may type:

prmsendf c:\gifs\mycat.gif -t "Bill Smith <[e-mail]>" -i "prmbeta" -b
"He is a beauty, isn't he?" -s "Here It Is!"

To UUencode and send c:\gifs\mycat.gif to [e-mail] from your first
inbasket, with the same subject heading, and body text taken from the body.txt
file in your c:\ directory, type:

prmsendf c:\gifs\mycat.gif -t "[e-mail]" -u -s "Here It Is!" -b "c:\body.txt"

To send a note without a file, you might type:

prmsendf "" -t "[e-mail]" -s "Nice!" -b "You're right, that's a great
looking cat!"

The default signature in the specified (or default) inbasket will be used, just
as if the note were being created in the compose window.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 17. Acknowledgements ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

We would like to thank the many people and organizations who have contributed
support and technical information in the development of the Post Road Mailer.

We wish to offer special thanks to David Bolen of Elmsford, New York, for his
assistance with sample code for POP processing.

The Post Road Mailer is packaged on a disk using Info-ZIP's compression
utility. The installation program uses UnZip to read *.ZIP files from the
diskette. Info-ZIP's software (Zip, UnZip and related utilities) is free and
can be obtained as source code or executables from various bulletin board
services and anonymous FTP sites, including CompuServe's IBMPRO forum and ftp.uu.net/pub/archiving/zip/*.

IBM and OS/2 are registered trademarks of the IBM Corporation. Post Road Mailer
is a trademark of InnoVal Systems Solutions, Inc. All other brands both cited
and not cited are trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks of their
respective companies.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 18. Addressing Mail ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Internet addresses have two parts:

1.  Usually a code assigned to a person's mailbox by an internet service
    provider. It must be unique within the domain. This is commonly referred to
    as the user id.

2.  Domain identifier or host name for the computer or network that receives
    mail and stores it in the mailbox. These identifiers almost always consist
    of two or more codes joined with periods.

A complete address consists of both the mailbox identifier and the domain
identifier, joined by an @ sign. For example, [e-mail].

Certain rules apply for mail being sent to users on certain commercial systems:

America Online, for instance, allows spaces in user names, which are not
compatible with the internet and must therefore be removed. So when addressing
mail to someone on America Online, simply remove the spaces from the AOL user
name and append @aol.com. For instance, to send mail to AOL user John Doe,
enter the address as [e-mail].

CompuServe mailboxes consist of two numbers separated by a comma. A comma
cannot be part of an internet address, so when addressing mail to someone on
CompuServe, change the comma to a period and append @compuserve.com. For
instance, to send mail to 12345,6789, just enter the address as [e-mail].

FidoNet addresses consist of two-part names separated by a space and a series
of numbers punctuated with a colon, slash and decimal point. You must remap the
address as follows:

First Last at 1:2/3.4

[e-mail]

(The letters p, f, n, and z stand for point, node, network and zone,
respectively.) So for example, John Doe at 97:24/67.03 on FidoNet would be
john.doe@p03.f67.n24.z97 on the internet.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 19. Command Line Parameters ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

There are five command line parameters you can use to tell the Post Road Mailer
to do a particular thing at startup time.

     /R
     Makes the program do a Refresh, as if you'd pushed the Refresh button, as
     soon as it finishes opening the inbasket.

     /S
     Makes the program do a Send, as if you'd pushed the Send button, as soon
     as it finishes opening the inbasket.

     /Q
     Used with /R and/or /S to make the program quit as soon as it's done with
     the Send and/or Refresh.

     /I
     Tells the program to display the inbasket selection dialog on startup,
     rather than starting with the inbasket which was active at the time the
     program was last closed, as it usually does.

[name of existing inbasket]
     Tells the program to open that inbasket, rather than starting with the
     inbasket which was active at the time the program was last closed, as it
     usually does. You can specify the inbasket name exactly as it appears at
     the bottom of the File menu (which is also the second column of the
     INBASKET.NIX file); or you can specify the full pathname of the inbasket
     subdirectory (which is also the third column of the INBASKET.NIX file, for
     inbaskets that were created in a directory other than the default which
     the Post Road Mailer would have chosen for itself); or you can specify
     whatever it says in the first column of the INBASKET.NIX file. And if you
     use /R, /S, and/or /Q switches with this parameter, then this parameter
     must precede those switches.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 20. Common Email Abbreviations ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

     AFAIK
     As far as I know

     AOL
     America Online

     BTDT
     Been there, done that

     BTW
     By the way

     CIS
     CompuServe Information Service

     FWIW
     For what it's worth

     FYI
     For your information

     <g>
     Grin

     <G>
     Big grin

     HSIK
     How should I know?

     IMHO
     In my humble opinion

     IMNSHO
     In my not so humble opinion

     IMO
     In my opinion

     IOW
     In other words

     LOL
     Laughing out loud

     NBD
     No big deal

     NOYB
     None of your business

     OTOH
     On the other hand

     PMFJIH
     Pardon me for jumping in here

     ROTFL
     Rolling on the floor laughing

     RTFM
     Read the ******* manual

     SNAFU
     Situation normal, all fouled up

     SYSOP
     System Operator

     TKS
     Thanks

     TX
     Thanks


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 21. Control Tags in Outbasket Notes ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Notes (*.POP files) in the outbasket, and notes that have been sent and filed
to a folder, and notes which have been saved as drafts, have embedded control
tags which tell the Post Road Mailer which lines go where, in the compose
window, so that it's possible to load a note back into the compose window to
edit it before sending, or to resend it later.

For those who care what the control tags are or how they're used, each one is
two characters long. The first character is always 05h. The second characters are:

01h     To

02h     Cc

03h     bcc

04h     Means the note is a News As Mail posting

0Bh     From

0Fh     Subject

10h     Signature block

11h     Means the note is a Skytel page

13h     Pathname of folder to file the note to (this is where the note will
        actually be placed)

14h     Title of folder to file the note to (this is here only for filling in
        the File note to field in the compose window if you re-edit this note;
        it doesn't actually have any effect on where the note will end up; the
        13h code takes care of that)

21h     Full pathname of attachment file to be MIMEd

26h     Full pathname of attachment file to be UUencoded

27h     Quoted-printable encoding enabled

28h     PGP sign enabled

29h     PGP encrypt enabled

30h     Means the note is a Redirect, so the user's signature, tagline, etc.,
        should not be used

31h     Reply-to

32h     Priority

33h     Acknowledge-To

34h     Tagline

35h     Distribution list (To or Cc) at bottom of note when there are more
        addressees than the Maximum addresses allowed at top of note setting
        allows at the top of the note

36h     Full pathname of mood icon to be sent with the note

37h     Means the note is a FaxWorks Pro 3.0 fax

38h     Addressed to: line at top of note, between header and body, when there
        are multiple addressees (and which is followed by Distribution list
        (see below) when there are more addressees than the Maximum addresses
        allowed at top of note setting allows at the top of the note)

39h     Beginning of the note body text; this tag is needed only in notes which
        also have a 38h tag


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 22. Customized Icons ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

If a file named MYICONS, with no extension, is found in the directory which
contains your INBASKET.NIX file, the program will read it during startup. If
the file's contents are properly formatted, and the entries point to valid OS/2
*.ICO files, the program will use the icon files specified, in place of the
various envelope and sheet of paper icons the program normally uses to
represent unread notes, opened notes, notes with attachments, etc. You can use
the sample MYICONS file inside OLDICONS.ZIP as a pattern.

The file must be plain ASCII text, and have one entry on each line. Any line
which does not contain a valid key word in the very first column will be
ignored, so you can insert comments into the file to remind yourself of what
each line is for, etc. Each entry begins with a valid key word, followed by any
number of spaces, and then the name of the icon file. If the icon file is in
the same directory with the MYICONS file, it can be just the filename;
otherwise it should be the fully-qualified pathname to the file, as in D:\ICONS\LETTER.ICO.

The valid key words are listed below. The ones which contain the string _CLIP
refer to the icons used for notes which arrived with an attached file. The ones
which begin with the string SM_ refer to the icons used when the inbasket is in
Alternate display mode, and in folder windows. These smaller icons must use
only the center 10x10 pixels of the 32x32 pixel icon grid. The outer pixels
must have the "transparent" attribute, which is named Screen in the OS/2 icon editor.

The key words are:

For unread mail:
UNOPENED_NOTE
SM_UNREAD
UNREAD_CLIP
SM_UNREAD_CLIP

For read mail:
READ_NOTE
SM_READ
READ_CLIP
SM_READ_CLIP

For handled mail (replied, forwarded, etc.):
READREPLY_NOTE
SM_READ_REPLY
READ_CLIP_REPLY
SM_READ_CLIP_REPLY

For mail that's been marked for deletion:
DELUNOPENED_NOTE
SM_DELUNOPENED_NOTE

For mail with FaxWorks Pro 3.0 fax attached:
FAXWORKS_NOTE
SM_FAXWORKS_NOTE

In folders only, for files which aren't mail (*.POP) files:
SM_FILE
SM_FILE_DELETE

You do not have to choose icons for all of the eighteen key words. Use entries
in the MYICONS file, only for the icons you want to replace. So, for example,
if you wanted to replace only the icons which involve attached files in the
inbasket, when not in Alternate display mode, then your MYICONS file might look
like this:

UNREAD_CLIP   one.ico
READ_CLIP   d:\icons\two.ico
READ_CLIP_REPLY   three.ico


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 23. Emoticons ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

These are symbols which are often used in email and public notes online, to
show emotions which, in normal conversation, would be shown by body language or
tone of voice. These symbols are important, sometimes, to avoid the
misunderstandings that can be caused by the lack of the normal feedback you get
when talking to someone vocally or face to face. People can really take offense
when you say something jokingly or lightly, when they think you're saying it
seriously or sternly.

If you don't understand why an emoticon stands for the emotion or description
it's supposed to stand for, tilt your head to the left while you look at it.

     :-)
     Happy

     :)
     Happy

     :-(
     Sad

     :(
     Sad

     :-|
     Indifferent

     ;-)
     Winking

     ;)
     Winking

     ;-(
     Crying

     :-D
     Laughing

     :-\
     Undecided

     :-o
     Surprised

     :-@
     Screaming

     :-x
     Kissing

     :-X
     Big kiss

     ::-)
     Wearing glasses

     8-)
     Wearing sunglasses

     {:-)
     Wearing a toupee

:-?
     Smoking a pipe

     :-C
     Really sad

     :-#
     Wearing braces

     :-)8
     Wearing a bow tie


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 24. Frequently Asked Questions ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Here are the answers to a few of our Technical Support department's most
frequently asked questions:

Q. When I try to send mail, it doesn't work, and there's an error message about
an invalid command named XTND.

A. There are some POP3 servers which do not support the superior XTND XMIT
command for sending mail. Some Internet Service Providers are deliberately
removing XTND XMIT support from their POP3 servers in order to make it more
difficult for advertisers to send "spam" messages to hundreds or thousands of
people at a time. If you have a POP3 server which does not accept this command,
just use SMTP for sending, instead of POP3.

Q. Sometimes the Post Road Mailer retrieves mail from the server which I had
already received during a previous Refresh.

A. There are two ways in which this can occur. If you have the Delete from host
setting set to Yes and Retrieve notes set to All, it will always happen on the
next Refresh after there was a POP3 server timeout or any other error which
prevented the Post Road Mailer from cleanly logging off of the POP3 server. A
POP3 server never deletes notes which it has been told to delete, until the
program which gave the deletion order has successfully logged off. So if the
program can't log off, then the notes will not be deleted, so they will be
re-retrieved during the next Refresh.

If you have the Delete from host setting set to No and Retrieve notes set to
New, it will be likely to happen after any time you use another copy of the
Post Road Mailer, or the Preview Mail feature, or any other program, to delete
some notes from that POP3 mailbox on the server. You see, the Post Road Mailer
decides which notes are new by remembering the message number of the last one
it downloaded. If it knows that there were 16 notes last time, and there are 18
now, it will retrieve messages 17 and 18 from the server. But if there were 16
last time and there are 15 now, it will assume that something has gone wrong
somewhere, and it will retrieve all of the notes just to make sure you don't
miss any of your mail. You still can lose mail with this setup, though. For
example, if there were 16 notes at the time of the last Refresh, and then you
use Preview Mail or anything else to delete one of them from the server, then
that will mean that the highest numbered message the Post Road Mailer has
downloaded is now number 15, not number 16. But the Post Road Mailer doesn't
know that! So on the next Refresh, if there are 16 notes, it's going to say
there's no new mail even though you've never seen the one which is now number
16. If there are 17 notes, it's going to retrieve number 17 only. You may never
see number 16, nor have any idea that you haven't already seen it. So using the
Retrieve notes: New setting is wise only if you do not use anything else for
retrieving your mail, or if you look at the items on your server, using Preview
Mail, every now and then to make sure there's nothing there that doesn't look familiar.

Q. I have the Post Road Mailer configured to use DIALER.EXE, and it does start
the dialer when the dialer isn't already running, but I nevertheless get a
message that says Unable to connect with your mail server. Try again?

A. There are several things which can cause this to happen. Of course it will
happen when the server isn't responding. It will happen if the SMTP Server or
POP3 server name setting is misspelled or if part of it is typed in uppercase
when it shouldn't be. It will happen if you have turned off the Dial when
loaded checkbox in DIALER.EXE's settings so that it ignores the Post Road
Mailer's instruction to dial. It will happen if you've changed your SMTP port
number from 25 or if you've changed the POP3 port number from 110, unless you
know you're supposed to do so. It will happen if you have your Wait time for
connection setting set to zero if your server does not respond at light speeds.
And it may be that there's also a situation we haven't figured out yet, which
will cause it. The workaround for that situation is to use the Use the existing
connection setting instead of Use DIALER.EXE, and establish your connection
before you tell the Post Road Mailer to send or refresh.

Q. I have the Post Road Mailer configured to use the dialer, but it doesn't
start up the dialer when I tell it to send or retrieve mail, until after the
Wait time for connection period has expired.

Your computer is connected via TCP/IP to some kind of LAN, isn't it? (Or at
least your OS/2 Warp 4 installation program put a bunch of LAN configuration
stuff into your setup despite your lack of LAN, as it often does.) The Post
Road Mailer's feature of starting the dialer when necessary and not starting it
when not necessary is problematic for people who have both a LAN connection
without internet access and a modem connection with internet access. You see,
the first thing the program has to do is look to see whether you're already
connected to the internet. The only way it can do that is to ask TCP/IP for a
socket number. Ordinarily, when you have TCP/IP access to the internet, that
action is successful, and then the Post Road Mailer starts trying to talk to
the SMTP server or POP3 server. Or when you're not connected to the internet,
TCP/IP immediately returns a message which says "Sorry, can't do that", in
which case the Post Road Mailer knows that it needs to start the dialer and
then try again to get a socket number. But when you don't have a modem
connection and you do have a LAN connection, then TCP/IP often does not return
to tell the Post Road Mailer that it couldn't connect to the desired server,
because it's busy trying to find the server via the wrong TCP/IP connection! So
the Post Road Mailer can only sit and wait. After the Wait time for connection
period goes by, the program gives up on the earlier TCP/IP request, starts the
dialer, and asks TCP/IP again for a socket number, and then everything works.

Q. What are the differences between FAT and HPFS, as far as usage by the Post
Road Mailer is concerned?

A. We would strongly recommend using HPFS for the Post Road Mailer. On a FAT
partition, disk space is allocated in clusters. FAT clusters range in size from
2048 bytes (for partitions of up to 128M in size) to 32,768 bytes (for
partitions above 1G in size). Since *.POP files have extended attributes, and a
FAT file's EAs take a cluster of disk space just as the file's data itself
does, that means that even with the smallest possible FAT hard drive cluster
size, every *.POP file takes 4096 bytes of disk space no matter how small it
is. If it's larger than 2048 bytes, then it uses 4096 bytes (or whatever
necessary multiple of the cluster size) for the file as well as 2048 bytes for
the EAs. On an 800M partition, even the smallest *.POP file would use 32,768
bytes of disk space (16K for the file and 16K for the EAs)! HPFS drives, on the
other hand, allocate disk space in 512-byte sectors, regardless of partition
size. Each file has nearly a sector of space reserved for its EAs (in the
file's fnode, which is sort of the HPFS equivalent of a FAT file's directory
entry) whether it has EAs or not, so as long as the EAs are small, the file
takes no more space with them than it would take without them. And the amount
of space the file's data uses can be as little as 512 bytes, and goes up in 512
byte increments, not 2048-byte or 16,384-byte increments as it does on FAT partitions.

Speed is also an issue. The creation of large numbers of small files (like
*.POP files) is slower on HPFS than on FAT, because the binary trees which
point to the files need to be rewritten to keep the entries in order and
balanced. But finding a file in a directory which contains a large number of
files is much faster on HPFS because of the fact that the file system knows
just where to look since the filenames are kept in order like that. Whereas on
FAT, the operating system just has to look at each and every entry in the
directory, from beginning to end until it happens to find the one it's looking
for. It doesn't start looking at the end for "Z" names or anything like that,
because it knows that on a FAT drive, there's no reason to expect the "Z" names
to be after the "R" names or even after the "A" names!

Also, handling of extended attributes (of which the Post Road Mailer does a
large amount) on HPFS partitions is as fast as any other file access, but on
FAT partitions, it's incredibly slow, since it involves a totally separate file
named EA DATA. SF which holds the EAs for all the files on an entire partition,
and directory entry bytes which point from a *.POP file's directory entry to
the portion of the EA DATA. SF file which belongs to it. Extended attribute
handling on FAT drives is extremely kludgy, since the FAT file system was never
designed for such a thing as extended attributes, the way the HPFS file system was.

Q. Today when I started up the Post Road Mailer, the inbasket window was blank
and there were no inbasket names listed at the bottom of the File menu! What do
I do?

A. You're probably running a copy of POSTROAD.EXE which is not in the same
directory with its INBASKET.NIX file. If you aren't aware of anything you've
done which would have caused that, then the most likely culprit is OS/2's
object orientation. Those of us who were "raised" on plain old file oriented
operating systems like DOS are used to moving and renaming program files
without affecting the path and filename to which a menu program's program entry
points! But when you move or rename the file to which an OS/2 WorkPlace Shell
program object points, the pathname specified in that program object for that
executable file also gets changed, automatically! So we often do things like
moving a POSTROAD.EXE file to another location for safe-keeping before copying
a new version of it into the directory, in case we don't like the new version
and want to go back. Then we attempt to start the program by doubleclicking on
the Desktop object, thinking that we're executing the new version of
POSTROAD.EXE in the old directory, but we're not! That Desktop object is now
pointing to the old POSTROAD.EXE file in the new directory to which we moved
it. And there's no INBASKET.NIX file there.

Q. What happened to the Word wrap at (chars) setting from version 1.0x of the
Post Road Mailer? How do I make my outgoing notes less than 96 characters wide?

A. Some people love this new design, but others absolutely hate it, at least
until it's explained to them. In the Post Road Mailer 1.0x, the compose window
was always the same width, regardless of your word wrap setting. A huge amount
of Desktop real estate was wasted by having that window wider than it needed to
be when using a smaller setting. In version 2.0 and later, you have absolutely
as much control over the word wrap width as you had in 1.0x, but you also have
no wasted Desktop space, because the word wrap length is controlled simply by
adjusting the width of your compose text window. The window is never wider nor
narrower than your word wrap setting! There is one thing, though, which can
cause problems for the word wrap logic: a proportional font. There's no way the
program can possibly tell where your word wrap should occur with a proportional
font, since there's no way to tell whether you're going to type a majority of
wide characters or a majority of narrow ones. But that's not so bad; very few
people ever want to use a proportional font with a mail program anyway, because
they want to see their outgoing notes the same way their recipients will see
them, and see their incoming notes the same way their authors wrote them.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 25. MIME Attachment Problems ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

MetaMail is a freeware program, written by the author of the MIME specification
for internet message attachments, which the Post Road Mailer uses for the
encoding and decoding of MIME attachments. MetaMail is distributed as part of
the Post Road Mailer package. (The MetaMail documentation is in the
MISCDOCS.ZIP file, but from the standpoint of an ordinary Post Road Mailer user
trying to solve a problem, it would be far more confusing than helpful. It is
aimed at authors of mail programs, not users of them.)

Q. The Post Road Mailer did not decode an incoming MIME attachment. What can I
do with the encoded data now?

A. If you have the Do not resolve attachments setting turned on, turn it off,
move the *.POP file in question to an empty directory, set the Personal Post
Office feature to retrieve mail from that directory, do a Refresh, and then put
your settings back to normal. (Except don't turn Do not resolve attachments
back on, unless you really want your incoming attachments to continue not being handled.)

If you don't have that setting turned on but you think you see what, in the
*.POP file, might have caused the Post Road Mailer and MetaMail to fail to deal
with the included attachment, you can copy the *.POP file to a Personal Post
Office directory as above, edit the new copy to fix what you think is wrong,
and do a Refresh and then put your settings back to normal.

Another option is to run METAMAIL.EXE against the *.POP file, manually. Just go
to the command line, in your Post Road Mailer directory, and type METAMAIL
followed by the full path and filename of the *.POP file in question. MetaMail
will ask you for a filename in which to save the attachment. It looks like it
will accept the default filename it suggests for you, if you just hit Enter,
but it won't. You have to type the filename yourself. Or if MetaMail can't
handle the file, it may at least display a useful error message which will help
you (or our tech support team) figure out what the problem is.

If you have a \TMP directory on your hard drive, it may be that what you have
is a note with a Content-Type: header which isn't defined in the MAILCAP file
(see below). When MAILCAP doesn't tell MetaMail what to do, and MetaMail can
find a \TMP directory, it puts the attachment there (with a filename like
Ta00086) instead of returning a 255 error to the Post Road Mailer. All the Post
Road Mailer knows is that nothing ended up in the directory the Post Road
Mailer expected MetaMail's result files to go into (because MetaMail puts them
into \TMP instead, under those conditions), so the Post Road Mailer restores
the original incoming note and, since MetaMail didn't return an error code,
goes on about its business.

Q. What does Error 255 executing MIME program; please ensure the MAILCAP file
is present mean?

A. There are many things it can mean. The majority of the time, the cause of
the error 255 message is a MIME attachment with a Content-Type header which
isn't defined in the MAILCAP file. MAILCAP is a plain ASCII text file which
tells MetaMail what it should do with each type of attachment it receives. The
Post Road Mailer's MAILCAP file does have an entry for each of the Content-Type
values that are registered with the organization responsible for keeping track
of internet standards, but there are mail programs which use unregistered ones
for proprietary purposes. Any type that isn't listed in the MAILCAP file will
leave you with the note in the original form in which it arrived, with the
attachment still inside it, so that you still have a chance of using another
method to get the attached file out of it. If you don't have a program that's
designed to handle that Content-Type, and the attachment is base64 encoded, you
can change its Content-Type line to say application/octet-stream, and run the
file through the Personal Post Office feature as described above. This will
decode the file and place it into your Attachments window. Or you can run
MetaMail on it manually, as described above, and place it wherever you like.

But if you often receive attachments of a certain non-standard content type,
all you need to do to prevent the 255 error upon receipt of them is to add an
entry for that content type to your MAILCAP file. If it's an attachment type
that should be treated as a binary file, make the entry match the existing
application line of the MAILCAP file.  If it's a type that should be treated as
text, ending up back in the note view window (when it's the first piece of a
multipart message or the only piece of a one-part message), make the entry like
the text line in the file.  The only difference between the existing MAILCAP
lines and the line you want to create should be the first word, before the /* characters.

Q. I don't have Do not resolve attachments turned on, but I've received a MIME
message that did not get decoded. There was no MetaMail error 255 message after
the Refresh, there is nothing in the Attachments window, and all the encoded
data is still in my note view window. Now what?

MetaMail does not always return an error code when it runs into a problem. One
example is described above, when you have a \TMP directory on your hard drive
and the note has a Content-Type line that the MAILCAP file doesn't know about.
Another example is MetaMail's error message Incomplete multipart message --
unexpected EOF. This means that the message is missing blank lines or boundary
lines or something, so that MetaMail hasn't figured out what to do with it by
the time it has reached the end of the file. But it returns an error code of 0
(which means no error) when that happens anyway, so the Post Road Mailer
doesn't know that it should display an error message. However, since MetaMail
doesn't produce any decoded output files, the Post Road Mailer keeps the
original incoming note intact instead of stripping out some of the Content-type
lines and boundary lines and such, as it usually does when processing a MIME
message. This way, you still have the original message so that you (or our tech
support team) can figure out what MetaMail doesn't like about the file, fix it,
and run it through the Personal Post Office feature or execute MetaMail from
the command line, to get your attachment(s) out of the file.

If this happens to you more than once, there is something you might try, to
prevent it from continuing to happen. Instead of having the program object on
your desktop execute POSTROAD.EXE, have it execute a batch file which executes
POSTROAD.EXE. We have three users whose MIME support doesn't work unless they
do that. We cannot figure out what the problem could be, nor how it is that
using the batch file fixes it, but it works fine for those three people.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 26. Moving the Program Installation ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

There are several things you need to do to make the Post Road Mailer work
properly after moving or renaming the directory in which it is installed or
moving or renaming one or more inbasket subdirectories.

First, unless you specify otherwise at the time you create an inbasket, it is
created as a subdirectory just below the directory where you have the Post Road
Mailer installed. So if you move or rename your Post Road Mailer directory,
then don't forget that you're also moving or renaming the directories of all of
your inbaskets except ones you had deliberately put elsewhere.

o   If what you've moved or renamed is the main Post Road Mailer directory,
    check your Desktop program object's settings notebook to make sure the Path
    and file name and Working directory fields got updated there. That usually
    happens automatically when you change the path of the executable file
    pointed to by a Desktop object, but there are some move/rename methods
    which aren't noticed by the WorkPlace Shell in order for it to make that
    automatic update.

o   In your main Post Road Mailer directory is an INBASKET.NIX file. If the
    directory you've moved or renamed is the main Post Road Mailer directory,
    check that file and edit it if it contains the name of the directory which
    is no longer valid. If the directory you've moved or renamed is an inbasket
    directory, then you need to change its entry in this file (see the Program
    Files topic to find out what the entry should say). If you have any
    inbaskets which weren't created in the default location (that is, as a
    subdirectory of the main installation directory) or if you've changed one
    to a non-default location, then you must use an editor that does not
    translate Tab characters to spaces (the way most text editors do), because
    the INBASKET.NIX entry for such an inbasket must contain a Tab character!
    E.EXE is safe for this purpose.

o   In each inbasket subdirectory, there may be a FLDINDEX.NIX file. Check that
    file in each inbasket affected by the move/rename, and edit it if it
    contains the old directory name. You must use an editor that does not
    translate Tab characters to spaces (the way most text editors do), because
    all FLDINDEX.NIX entries contain Tab characters! E.EXE is safe for this purpose.

Then, from within the program, do the following for each of the affected
inbaskets (ones you moved or renamed, or ones which exist below the main Post
Road Mailer directory if you moved or renamed that):

o   On the Compose page of the settings notebook, reselect your Default folder.
    It may seem pointless to select something that's already selected, but it
    must be done because what's stored in the POSTROAD.INI file is the
    directory name, not the title of the folder represented by that directory.
    So if you select it again here, it will be rewritten, with the new correct
    directory name instead of the name of a directory which no longer exists.

o   On the Miscellaneous page of the settings notebook, just for the inbasket
    you want to have as your default FaxWorks Pro 3.0 inbasket, turn on the
    checkbox which makes it the default FaxWorks inbasket.  Yes, even if it
    already says it is the default FaxWorks inbasket, because what's stored in
    the POSTROAD.INI file is the directory name, not the inbasket title. So if
    you select it once here, it will be rewritten, with the new correct
    directory name.

o   On the Edit menu of the compose header window, specify your tagline file's
    new directory name, if it has changed.

o   In each of your filters, anything which specifies a pathname may need
    changing. And if a filter's purpose is to file a note, the folder will need
    to be reselected, even if it still says the right folder name, because
    what's stored in the PMLFILTR.BIN file is the folder's directory name, not
    its title.

o   Every draft you save and every note you send contains the full pathname of
    the folder to which it's supposed to be filed after it's sent. So any time
    you want to send a note created from a draft that was saved before you did
    this move/rename, and any time you want to resend a note you'd previously
    sent before you did this move/rename, you'll have to reselect the folder in
    the File note to field on the compose window, to change the stored
    directory name from the folder's old directory name to its new directory
    name. For drafts, of course, you can just make the change once and save the
    draft again, and never have to change it after that. But for notes you
    resend from folders, changes you make in the compose window only affect the
    note which goes into the outbasket, not the original copy which remains in
    the folder. So you'll have to do this every time you resend a particular
    note unless you use a text editor to directly edit the *.POP file in which
    the note is stored in the folder's directory.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 27. Network Use ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

There are many Post Road Mailer features which make it ideal for use as an
intranet solution. For example, some companies use the Post Road Mailer this way:

o   Only one computer (let's refer to it as the "server") has modem access to
    the internet, and all the others (the "clients") have access to a drive
    which the "server" can also access. The whole company has just one internet
    account with one internet address, and mail is directed to the correct
    recipient by means of the names specified with that address. For example,
    people might address mail to users at your company by specifying Jane Doe
    <[e-mail]> or John Smith <[e-mail]>.

o   The "clients" each have their inbaskets set to send outgoing mail to a
    Personal Post Office directory instead of an SMTP or POP3 server. They all
    use the same directory for that purpose, and that same directory is
    specified as the "server" inbasket's Alternate send queue directory.

o   The "server" machine's inbasket is set up with an Automatic refresh
    interval of, say, 60 minutes. The Send queued mail after inbasket refresh
    option is also selected.

o   In the "server" inbasket are many filters; one for each user who has a Post
    Road Mailer inbasket. A filter which looks for Jane Doe in the To field of
    the notes moves its finds to Jane Doe's inbasket directory; and the John
    Smith filter puts its finds into John Smith's inbasket. All Jane and John
    have to do is select their inbasket name from the bottom of the inbasket
    window's File menu (or restart the program) to have the Post Road Mailer
    show them the new mail that has arrived since the last time they did that.

o   Any incoming mail which doesn't match any of the filters will remain in the
    "server" machine's inbasket.

The Mail Mapping support is also very useful for companies that have just one
internet address used by multiple people who each have internet access. Each
user's inbasket can be set to download only certain ones of the notes waiting
in the POP3 server, according to what those notes say in their To lines. You
can prevent users from using the Preview Mail feature to snoop at each other's
mail, if necessary, by deleting their PMLPVIEW.DLL files.

Open a public inbasket is another feature that's useful in network environments.

Inbaskets can share folders by having one inbasket create the folder; and all
the other inbaskets create a folder by the same name, specifying that original
folder's pathname in the Folder directory field of the Create a new folder dialog.

As long as you own the appropriate number of licenses for the Post Road Mailer,
you can let all your users run the program from just one copy of it on your
network. Please see the last paragraph of the Program Files page for instructions.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 28. New Features ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

These are the features that have been added to the Post Road Mailer between
versions 2.6 and 3.0:

o   Route feature lets you resend or forward single or multiple sent or
    received notes, all at once to single or multiple addressees, without
    opening the compose window.

o   Resend option now lets you choose whether to open the compose window to
    make changes to the note before resending it, or to just copy it directly
    to the outbasket. The latter choice lets you resend multiple selected notes
    at once.

o   New Count folder contents setting lets you prevent the program from
    counting all the notes in each folder, whenever you open the List of
    Folders window.

o   A new toolbar, with bubble help, to replace the action pad. (Both may be
    used together, if desired, but they're redundant.)

o   A whole new set of icons to represent unread notes, opened notes, notes
    with attachments, etc.

o   Users who don't like the new icons can now specify the icon they want to
    use in place of any or each of the eighteen icons the program uses for the
    various types of notes. OLDICONS.ZIP is included, both as an example of how
    the new feature is used, and for those users who would like to continue
    using the same icons that previous Post Road Mailer versions have used.

o   "Virtual" folder named <Current Month> can be selected for the storage of
    sent notes. For example, such notes sent in November, 1997 will be filed to
    a folder named 1997nov. The folder will be created the first time a note
    with the <Current Month> setting is sent during each month.

o   Content-type: text/html body parts inside Content-type: multipart/mixed
    messages are now handled the same way as Content-type: text/html messages.

o   The List of Folders window and Select a Folder dialog now have Expand all
    and Collapse all options.

o   Save the list of notes to a file option on inbasket and folder windows lets
    you export the Subjects, To addresses, Dates, etc., of the notes listed in
    the window, in their current sort order, to an ASCII text file for printing
    or other manipulation by any text editor.

o   The Preview Mail window now has a column which displays each note's To address.

o   Folders, and the inbasket in Alternate display mode, now have a column
    which displays the byte size of each note file.

o   The program now warns you, if you close an inbasket that has unsent mail in
    its outbasket. (Of course, a setting lets you turn off that warning if you
    don't want it.)

o   Notes in the Alternate send queue directory can now be sent regardless of
    whether there are also any notes waiting in the outbasket.

o   There is now a way for Receive message exits and Filter exits to let the
    program know that they have created new note (*.POP) files, so that the
    program can automatically add the new notes to the inbasket display at the
    end of the Refresh process.

o   And over two dozen old problems fixed.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 29. Product Support ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

If you have any trouble with this product, please use one of the following
methods to contact us:

o   Send us an email. Address your email to [e-mail]. Please
    include the product serial number, your phone number, your time zone and
    the best time to call you, and a detailed description of the problem.
    Optionally, provide the name of your internet provider and information
    about your system's configuration. You can use the PROBRPT.FRM file to make
    this easier on yourself and on us.

o   Send us a fax at [phone]. You can eliminate the cover sheet. Please
    write Post Road Service in large letters across the top, and provide the
    information requested in the prior section.

If you have any suggestions for improving the product, please let us know your
ideas. The best way to do that is to send us an email at [e-mail].


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 30. Program Files ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

For people who want to know every little detail about how a program operates,
here is the list of all the Post Road Mailer's files and their purposes.

Information about the structure of the index files, for example, is not being
given to encourage anyone to tamper with them! On the contrary, it is to be
hoped that you wouldn't even consider modifying such a file. But since there
are those users who will do such things regardless of whether they know how or
not (and I am one such user, myself), it is safer and easier for us to tell you
how first, than it is to help you clean up the damage you might cause by trying
it without knowing how first!

Do not modify an index file which needs a Tab character unless you're sure that
you're using an editor which leaves Tab characters as Tab characters, as E.EXE
does! Most editors change Tabs to spaces, and the Post Road Mailer may not work
anymore after the Tabs in its index files have been changed to spaces!

     *.ADR
     Address books. The program will see whatever address book files are in the
     main Post Road Mailer directory.

     *.ATC
     Partial incoming split attachments in the MIME$$ subdirectory, while
     waiting for the other parts to arrive.

*.CMD, ADDRUTIL.DOC, FORWARD.CFG, PRMBLAMS.CFG, PRMBLAMS.DOC
     Some helpful REXX utilities, except for INSTALL.CMD which just creates a
     Post Road Mailer program object on your OS/2 Desktop.

     *.DLL
     Dynamic link library files. (If you don't know what those are, think of
     them as *.EXE files' helpers.) EMX.DLL is a third-party utility which
     provides functionality to other programs, and is included with the Post
     Road Mailer because MetaMail (another third-party program which does MIME
     encoding and decoding for attachment files) requires it. The other *.DLL
     files all belong to the Post Road Mailer itself.

     *.EXE
     The actual program files. METAMAIL, MMENCODE, and SPLITMAI belong to
     MetaMail, a third-party program which provides support for MIME
     attachments; PRMMIME interfaces with MetaMail; PRMFAX interfaces with
     FaxWorks Pro 3.0; PRMSENDF is documented elsewhere herein; and of course
     POSTROAD.EXE is the main executable file for the Post Road Mailer.

     *.HTM
     In inbasket and folder directories, the HTML files passed to your web
     browser when you view notes which arrived in MIME text/html format. These
     files are automatically deleted when you delete the notes to which they
     belong. They also will not show or count as files in your folder windows,
     since you didn't put them there.

*.ICO, other than POSTROAD.ICO
     A few icon files you can use as mood icons. You can also use any other
     *.ICO file in OS/2 format, for this purpose.

     *.POP
     Each note in your inbasket and each note in any folder is actually a *.POP
     file. Notes in your outbasket and notes that have been sent to your
     outbound PPO directory are also *.POP files. Outbasket notes and notes
     that have been sent from your outbasket and then filed in folders, and
     draft notes, are formatted with control tags. All other *.POP files are in
     the same format in which the data comes from the POP3 server when a
     program asks the server to deliver a piece of mail.

     It's perfectly safe to copy *.POP files from one directory to another from
     within the Post Road Mailer, because the target files will always receive
     unique filenames as they're being created in the target location. It's
     also perfectly safe to copy *.POP files to other folders from your
     favorite file manager or from the command line, as long as you check first
     to make sure you don't have duplicate filenames. The COPYPOP.CMD utility
     which is in your Post Road Mailer directory was designed especially for
     copying and moving these *.POP files, to avoid this problem. Don't worry
     about messing up any type of program index file by moving *.POP files
     around; the only way that can happen is if you add the same number of
     *.POP files that you remove from a directory, because the program ignores
     the INDEX.$@$ file any time the number of lines in the file does not equal
     the number of files in the directory (see below).

     In case you ever need to know the naming convention for the *.POP files
     the program creates, here it is: We start with an array of possible
     filename characters, 0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. The first digit
     of a *.POP filename is the last digit of the current year, according to
     the computer's clock. The second digit is the number of the current month,
     used as an index (starting with zero) into that array of characters. So
     January is 1 and December is C. The third filename character is the day of
     the month, used as an index into the array. So the 1st is 1; and the 31st
     is V, since V is the 32nd character of the array and we start counting
     with 0. The fourth character is the hour, 0 through 23, used as the index
     into the array, so the possible digits there are 0 through N. The fifth
     character is the whole-number result of the minutes divided by 36 (the
     number of characters in the array), so the choices are 0 (for minutes 0
     through 35) and 1 (for minutes 36 through 59). The sixth character is the
     remainder of the minutes divided by 36, used as the index into the array.
     So minutes 0 through 35 use characters 0 through Z, and minutes 36 through
     59 reuse characters 0 through N. The seventh character is the remainder of
     the seconds divided by 36, used as the index into the array, so the
     results are the same as for the sixth character. And finally, the eighth
     character starts at 0 and if that filename already exists, we try each of
     the other characters in the array, in turn, until an available filename is
     found. If we get to Z without finding a filename that isn't already in
     use, then the seventh digit is incremented and we try all the array
     characters in the eighth digit again, etc.

     So from a *.POP file's name, you can't tell the decade in which it was
     created, but you can tell the year, the month, the day, the hour, and the
     minute, with absolute certainty. And from the computer's clock, you can
     tell, with absolute certainty, what the first six characters of a
     newly-created (or newly-copied or newly-moved) *.POP file will be. Unless
     you have files in a directory that were created ten years apart, then the
     only way to run out of possible filenames for a copy or move operation is
     to attempt to create more than 1,296 files in that directory between :00
     seconds and :59 seconds of the same minute.

     For users upgrading from the Post Road Mailer 2.0 or earlier, the naming
     convention for your already-existing *.POP files was this: The first digit
     of the filename is the last digit in the year (0-9). The second digit is
     the month, in hexadecimal (1-C). The third and fourth digits are the day
     of the month, in hex (01-1F). The fifth and sixth digits are the hour of
     the day, in hex (00-17). And the seventh and eighth digits are the number
     of minutes, multiplied by four, in hex (00-F0), but of course the program
     increments the number if the file it would want to create based on the
     seconds already exists in that directory.

     *.RPL
     An inbasket's custom reply lists for Skytel paging.

any file with a $ in its name, other than INDEX.$@$
     A temp file which the program should have deleted, and which you can
     safely delete if it's been left behind while the Post Road Mailer is not running.

$$NEW$$.@@@ and $EXTRA$.@@@
     See User Exits.

     ATTACH.IND
     The index file, in the MIME$$ subdirectory, for pieces of split
     attachments that have arrived, while waiting for the other pieces to come
     in so they can be assembled and decoded.

     DOWNFILE.QUE
     Stores an entry for each file you've added to your inbasket's internet
     file queue.

     FLDINDEX.NIX
     Stores the links to all folders that aren't subdirectories of the inbasket
     directory. Resides in the inbasket directory of any inbasket which has
     linked folders. Tab-delimited; do not edit with an editor that changes
     Tabs to spaces as most editors do! Three columns. The first column is the
     name (just the name, not the full path) of the directory where the
     folder's files are. The second column is the folder's title. And the third
     column is the pathname of the parent directory of the folder's directory.
     For example, the entry for a folder named Sent Notes in the
     C:\OUTBASKT\JULY directory would have JULY in the first column, Sent Notes
     in the second column, and C:\OUTBASKT in the third. If the parent
     directory of the folder is the root directory of a drive, the third column
     contains just the drive letter and a colon. There is no backslash as you
     might expect, because the program is going to automatically include the
     backslash when it attaches the directory name to the parent directory, so
     if there were already a backslash, then you'd end up with two, and that
     wouldn't work.

     INBASKET.NIX
     Stores the links to all inbaskets. Resides in the main Post Road Mailer
     directory. If you have any inbaskets which you've created in a location
     other than the main directory, then this file needs to be Tab-delimited,
     in which case you must not edit it with an editor that changes Tabs to
     spaces as most editors do! Three columns. The first column is the name
     (just the name, not the full path) of the directory where the inbasket's
     files are. Normally, that's just the part of the inbasket user's internet
     address before the @ sign, but this can vary depending on the length of
     that portion of the address, the existence of a directory by that name at
     the time the inbasket was created, etc. For inbaskets which were created
     in user-specified directories rather than the default location the program
     would have chosen for them, this column is rather useless except to the
     program. It contains the directory name that would have been used for the
     inbasket directory if the user hadn't specified another directory, and it
     is the key word by which the program refers to the inbasket when it
     "thinks" about it. The second column is separated from the first by one or
     more spaces, and begins exactly at the tenth character of each line. It
     normally contains the internet address of the owner of the inbasket, and
     it is what is displayed in the Post Road Mailer's title bar and at the
     bottom of the File menu of the main inbasket window. Yes, you can change
     it to whatever you like if you have an editor that properly handles Tab
     characters (or if you don't have any inbaskets in user-specified
     directories), without causing harm to any part of the program. The third
     column, when there is one, is separated from the second by a Tab
     character. It holds the full pathname of the directory in which the
     inbasket's files reside, for inbaskets which weren't created in the
     default location.

     INDEX.$@$
     Whenever an inbasket, or a folder other than SHREDNTS, is closed, if it
     contains more than fifty *.POP files, then the data in the display (the
     From address, Subject, Date, etc.) is exported to this file so that it can
     be loaded into memory more quickly the next time the folder (or inbasket)
     is opened, than it could be if the data had to be read from the *.POP
     files again. The program does not depend on this file in any way, but when
     present, it speeds up the opening of the folder (or inbasket). As long as
     it has the right number of entries, that is. If the number of lines in the
     file is different from the number of *.POP files in the folder, the
     program will ignore the index file. Either way, the index file is deleted
     each time the folder is opened. The only time this scheme can cause a
     problem is when you are maintaining your mail files using your favorite
     file manager or the command line, instead of within the program, and you
     happen to remove and add the same number of files from/to a directory
     between the time you close the folder from within the program and the time
     you open it again. If you do that, then the next time you open that
     folder, the Post Road Mailer will see that the index file has the right
     number of lines for the number of files in the directory, and it will use
     the index file instead of reading the real files from the directory. So it
     will be showing you information, in the folder window, about the files
     that used to be in that directory instead of the files that are now in the directory.

     LAST15.ADD
     This file, in each inbasket directory, holds a record of the last 15
     addresses you've written to, so that you can get a list of them from which
     to choose, whenever you click with your right mouse button on the address
     book icon or the entry field portion of the address area on the Header window.

     MYICONS
     Activates the Customized Icons feature.

     MAILCAP
     A data file used by MetaMail.

     MISCDOCS.ZIP
     The MetaMail documentation; distributed as a condition of the MetaMail
     distribution license, not because it would be helpful to a Post Road
     Mailer user.

     NETWORK.LOG
     Each inbasket has this network log file unless you turn that feature off,
     on the notes page of the settings notebook.

     OLDICONS.ZIP
     The eighteen icons used in Post Road Mailer 2.x versions, to represent
     unread notes, opened notes, notes with attachments, etc., and a MYICONS
     file configured to make the program use those icons instead of the new
     Post Road Mailer 3.0 ones.

     PMLASSOC.BIN
     Associations.

     PMLFILTR.BIN
     An inbasket's filters.

     POSTPAGE.INI
     The settings saved from the Skytel paging compose window.

     POSTROAD.HLP
     The online help, viewable from within the program.

     POSTROAD.ICO
     The program's icon.

     POSTROAD.INF
     The online help in the format read by OS/2's VIEW.EXE program.

     POSTROAD.INI
     Each inbasket's settings.

     POSTROAD.TAG
     The small collection of taglines. You may use this file, add to it, or
     specify your own tagline file instead.

     PRMSYS.INI
     The program's global settings, which are not specific to each inbasket.

     PROBRPT.FRM
     This file gets copied into the QUICK subdirectory of every inbasket you
     create, so that you can easily import it into the compose text window to
     report to us any problems you find with the Post Road Mailer.

     PUBLIC.INB
     Enables the public inbasket feature.

     REPLIES.LST
     The most recent contents of the reply list boxes on the Skytel paging
     version of the compose window. The Available replies are above the
     ********* replies ********* divider, and the To be used choices are below it.

     SIGBLOCK.BIN
     Each inbasket's signature blocks.

     TIMEOUT.OFF
     If you create a file with this name, in the directory which contains
     POSTROAD.EXE, then the program will never use its own message box which
     times out after a certain number of seconds to allow the send/refresh
     process to continue if the user is not present. Instead, it will use the
     default OS/2 message box, which will remain until the user presses the OK
     button. This configuration feature exists because the message box that
     times out appears to cause a system hang on one user's network, so we had
     to provide a way for him to prevent that message box from ever being used.

     TRANFILE.IND
     The index file for the files in the Attachments window. Tab-delimited; do
     not edit with an editor that changes Tabs to spaces as most editors do!
     The first character of each line in a Post Road Mailer version 2.1 or
     later index entry is a ~ symbol; the program knows that if that symbol
     isn't there, it should add .TNS to the end of the filename since version
     2.0 attachments were all stored with that extension so the index file did
     not bother to specify it. Next, in the same column (no Tab preceding it)
     comes the name of the file as it is stored in the TRANFILE directory. This
     is followed by a Tab and the original name of the attached file, as it
     existed on the sender's system, if the decoding program was able to detect
     it. Then comes a Tab and a string which specifies whether the attachment
     had been MIMEd or UUencoded. The fourth column is the sender, the fifth is
     the subject, the sixth is the date, and the seventh is the *.POP filename
     which the attachment's note had when it first arrived in the inbasket.
     Each line ends with a final Tab character. Whenever you open the
     Attachments window, the entry for any file which no longer exists in the
     TRANFILE directory is removed from this index file, so you can delete
     attachments from the command line if you like, without harming anything.

     VIRUS.INI
     In the TRANFILE subdirectory of each inbasket, this file stores the
     settings for the Virus scan feature in the Attachments window.

Also see the list of directory names used by the program.

You may move all of the Post Road Mailer's *.EXE, *.DLL, *.HLP, MAILCAP, and
PUBLIC.INB files to another directory, which is on the PATH, HELP, and LIBPATH
lines in your CONFIG.SYS file, if you like. This is useful for networks, and
for people who like to keep their program files separate from the data files
which need to be backed up. (If you use SpellGuard for PostRoad, you may also
put its *.EXE and *.DLL files in that directory, and point your Specify a
SpellGuard directory setting to your SPELLGRD.DCT file instead of to the
directory which contains the SpellGuard program files.)


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 31. *.CMD REXX Utilities ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

ADR2ASC.CMD, ASC2ADR.CMD, FLDR2ASC.CMD, and NOTE2ASC.CMD are utilities which
are useful in working with Post Road Mailer address books. They are documented
in ADDRUTIL.DOC.

COPYPOP.CMD copies *.POP files from one directory to another, from the command
line. So you can copy notes from one inbasket or folder to another, easily,
without fear of overwriting existing *.POP files by the same names. It
automatically renames files (to a name as close as possible to that of the
original) while copying them, whenever necessary to avoid that problem.

COPYPOP.CMD takes three command line parameters. The first is required, and
it's the specification of the file(s) you want to copy. If the parameter you
type is a directory name, the program will automatically attach \*.POP to the
end of it. If not, then the program will attach .POP to the end, if it's not
already there. Which means that if you want to copy all the notes you received
(or moved to the folder from which you're copying them) on November 29, 1996,
from the current directory, you can type either 6B1D*.POP or just 6B1D* for short.

The second parameter is the name of the directory to which you want the files
copied, specified in the same way you would specify it in an OS/2 COPY command.
If the specified directory does not exist, the program will request permission
to create it for you. If you don't specify any target directory, the files will
be copied to the current directory.

And the third possible parameter is the /M switch, to be used when you want the
files to be moved rather than just copied.

FORWARD.CMD can be used as a REXX exit from a filter (or as a receive exit) to
forward or redirect certain (or all) incoming notes to any number of addresses.
Please do not try to use it without reading and customizing the FORWARD.CFG
file. The instructions are in that file as well, in comments.

MARKOPEN.CMD will mark all the notes in a folder as having been opened. This
program takes one optional command line parameter: the directory name which
represents the folder. If no directory is specified, the current directory will
be assumed.

MRKCLOSD.CMD will mark the specified note file as never having been opened
(which also gives it back its mood icon, if it had one). Specify the filename
of the note's *.POP file as the command line parameter.

PRMBLAMS.CMD (along with its configuration file, PRMBLAMS.CFG) is a "spam
filter" or "twit shield" for use as a PRMRECV.CMD exit. It is documented in