• Multiple mailboxes can be open for reading at any one time... each in a window of its own. Mail-reading windows have a summary pane at the top (one line per message, scrollable) and a message-display pane in the lower portion of the window (also scrollable). It looks and behaves a bit like a stripped-down Sun mailtool window. You can increase or decrease the height of the summary pane by clicking down in the window while holding down the command, option, and shift keys. Messages can be selected by clicking in the summary pane, or by command-N (Next) or command-P (Previous). Messages can be flagged for deletion with command-D (Delete) and unflagged with command-U (Undelete).
• When scanning mailboxes for messages, Fernmail obeys the standard Unix convention: a line which begins with the string "From " marks the start of a new message. Fernmail can read mailboxes which use carriage-returns to separate lines (Mac format), which use newlines to separate lines (Unix format), and which use 0xFF characters to separate messages (MailReader format). When it updates a mailbox, it honors the conventions that it observed when it scanned the mailbox.
• Messages are displayed using the TextEdit widget, so the actual text per message is limited to 32k. Extra text isn't lost; it just cannot be read from within the tool, and performance suffers when the message size gets this large.
• Messages can be moved from one mailbox to another by clicking on the message in the summary pane and dragging the flickering gray rectangle to another window. (Note that there may be a delay of a second or so before the gray rectangle appears... Fernmail is fetching a current copy of the message text during this time). Messages "moved" in this way are copied to the destination mailbox, and flagged as "deleted" in the source mailbox. Option-click-and-drag copies the message without flagging the source copy for deletion.
• The text of a message may be saved directly to a text file, either with or without the mail headers. Most messages (those which are under 32k bytes, and are being held entirely in memory) are saved from the message-reading panel... so, if you've edited them while reading, your edits will be saved. Very large messages (larger than 32k bytes) are copied from the disk mailbox when you save them; any changes you've made to the partial message displayed in the reading pane will not be saved. "Damn it, Jim, I'm a mail agent, not a word processor!"
• Messages which contain BinHex-encoded binary data can be decoded, by selecting the message in the summary pane and typing command-H (or selecting the "Decode BinHex" command in the Message menu). If the message consists of multiple parts in separate messages, you'll be prompted with a dialog box, and asked to select the message which contains the next part of the BinHex file. The messages must all be located in the same mailbox in order to be processed correctly, but they don't have to be stored in any particular order.
• Messages from the user's incoming mailbox are automatically saved in the "mbox" mailbox in the user's home directory, when the incoming mailbox is closed (a la "autosave" in BSD Mail).
• Fernmail keeps track of the status of messages (read/unread, new/old, deleted/not deleted), and stores this information into the mailbox when the mailbox is closed. Deleted messages are not actually removed from the file until you instruct Fernmail to "Close and compact" the mailbox; this causes a new copy of the mailbox file to be made, with the deleted messages eliminated. [Important exception... your incoming-mail mailbox is always compacted when it is closed, after the messages you've read are moved to your "mbox" file.]
• One or more outgoing messages can be composed at a time, each in its own window. Once again, TextEdit is used and there's a 32k limit on the message size. By default, the message text is preinitialized with blank "To:" and "Subject" lines. You may specify a different set of header lines, if you wish, by placing them in a text file in your personal directory, and storing the name of this file in the HEADERS configuration string.
• Fernmail will automatically wrap the text you type in a message-composition window, any time that you type out past column 72 (the wrapping occurs when you type a space or hit the Return key). Long lines are broken at the last blank occurring before column 72. The text after the blank will be moved down to a new line, and will be prefaced by the same number of blanks which appeared at the beginning of the previous line (that is, Fernmail maintains your indentation style). You may turn this feature off from the Edit menu, if you wish.
• You can write addresses in either RFC 822 format (user@host.domain) or in uucp bang-path format (system1!system2!user). The outbound mailer scans the mail headers for "To:", "CC:", "BCC:", and "FCC:" entries, and does a pretty good job of recognizing the RFC 822 styles and commenting (e.g. quoted terms, (comments), and <mailbox@host> strings). The BCC: header line(s) are stripped out of the headers when the message is delivered to people on the To: and CC: lists; the BCC: lines are left intact for FCC: file deliveries (including the user's mail.sent file) and BCC: recipients.
• You can create a file of mail aliases, with each alias referring to either a single address or a series of addresses. This lets you send mail to people more conveniently... you can send mail to "joe", for example, rather than to "js776@mishkin.breadloaf.berkeley.edu". You can send mail to a whole list of people at once (e.g. "friends") rather than having to type or paste the addresses into each individual message.
• There's a "Reply" command, to create a new outbound-message window and transfer over the address and subject from the currently-selected message in a reader window. The Reply command will honor a "Reply-to:" header in the message being answered, if such a header is present.
• The signature file is appended only for outgoing mail (to the MAILSERVICE or 'Rout' hosts) and is ignored for FCC: (e.g. mail.sent) and local recipients.
• Fernmail supports the clipboard, desk accessories, and all of those goodies. It's thoroughly MultiFinder-friendly. Message-composition windows have an extra Edit command, "Rewrap lines"; this command cuts out the current selection and then pastes it back in with word-wrap at column 72. There's also an extra "Paste quotation" command, which pastes the contents of the clipboard into a message composition window, prepending a "> " to each line. You can change the prepended string, if you want something other than "> "; simply place the string you want prepended to each line, in the QUOTATION string in your configuration file.
• Fernmail supports an "Attach text file" command, to circumvent the 32k text limit and make it easier to mail large text files. A text file, once attached, will be automagically appended to the body of the message (following the signature). If the text file exceeds a certain size (750 lines by default) the message will be automagically segmented... it'll be sent as several separate mailgrams, with "part M of N" information in the Subject: headers, "Cut here" lines at the beginning and end of each segment of the attachment, etc. You can change the segmentation limit (and thus the segment size) by adding a SEGMENTLINES string to your configuration file.
• There's also an "Attach binary file" command, which can be used to append an arbitrary binary file to a message. When you actually send the message, the binary file you've specified will be fed through a converter module to produce an encoded ASCII file in a format that's compatible with BinHex 4.0. This .hqx file is then segmented, if necessary, just as a text file would be, and is appended to one or more message segments.
• Fernmail can be configured to send mail to one or more uucp sites, based on the addresses of the mail's recipients.
• Fernmail has a limited ability to post net-news articles. Simply create an outbound message with no "To:" headers, and with a "Newsgroups:" header that lists the groups to which you wish to post the article. When the message is sent, it will be delivered to each of your 'Rout' neighbors for which you have set the flag that means "This site allows me to post news."
