CD Shareware Magazine 1996 December/CD_shareware_12-96.iso/WIN/INTERNET/PINF200.ZIP/POSTROAD.INF

OS/2 Help File | 1996-08-02 | 126.6 KB | 3,504 lines

ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 1. Introduction ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The Post Road Mailer is a program that will enable you to send and receive
internet email. 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   Automating the send/receive process
o   Previewing mail on the server
o   Saving and organizing mail
o   Address books
o   InnoVal Select A File dialog
o   Filters
o   Personal Post Office
o   PRMSENDF.EXE
o   Appendices


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. 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. (A few other settings are also stored via the
compose window.)

On the dialer page, if your internet provider is not IBM's Advantis, you must
specify another dialer.

On the POP3 page, you must fill in your POP3 server name and your user id.

If your internet provider doesn't support POP3 Sends, or the POP3 server
doesn't support the XTND XMIT command, then you must select SMTP, and supply
your SMTP server's name, on the protocol page. You may want to do this even if
you do have support for POP3 Sends, because SMTP is better, unless your company
insists that POP3 be used for security reasons.

On the compose page, you should enter your reply-to id, and a default folder
into which the program should place your outbound notes after they've been
sent, if you want your outbound notes to be filed.

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, and configure the following pages:

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 3.0 Bonus Pak's
    Internet Access Kit 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, 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 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 there isn't already a connection. 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.


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. If yours does, and if it
    supports 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 will
    probably want 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,
    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 that you won't get the speed
    advantage which you would normally get by using SMTP rather than POP3 for
    your outbound notes.

    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. 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 the 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, 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, you can find the above information
in the 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. (If you want such a program, you may be interested in
trying the Post Road 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 same thing it means when creating any inbasket), 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 a different 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.

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, 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, put a non-zero number into the
Automatic inbasket refresh interval 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 open
at the time, that's why. The automatic Refresh interval is restarted whenever
you open or close the settings notebook.

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
and Delete from host: No. See frequently asked questions for a warning about
how this setup can cause you to miss mail, though.

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 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 user when exiting
Post Road checkbox.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.6. Compose Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Internet notes 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. Most mail programs will address a reply to
the Reply-to address, rather than the From address, of the note to which you're
replying. Therefore, people who reply to you will usually be addressing their
notes to your Reply-to address, so you want to fill it in 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.
For example:

Kari Jackson <[e-mail]>

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.

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 a note.

If you don't want to use the Post Road Mailer's word wrap function in the
compose window when writing notes, just turn off the Default word wrap
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 Post Road Mailer to always reformat text files which you import
via the Import text file option on the compose window's File menu, and notes
you forward, 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 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.

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 names at the top of the body of the note. If the number of addressees
is larger than the number specified in the Maximum addresses allowed at top of
note setting, then the addressees' names will instead appear at the bottom of
the note, in a distribution list. If you don't want the distribution lists in
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, 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, so that the addresses won't be visible to everyone in the
note headers.

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.

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 multi-part attachment. You can adjust that chunk size
using the Attachment split size field, or even turn it off by selecting the Do
not split outgoing attachments checkbox.


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.

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 the inbasket or folder (or recycle the inbasket by selecting
its name from the main inbasket window's File menu), just turn on the Remove
inbasket/folder notes when deleted checkbox.

Normally, when you receive a note with a file attached, the Post Road Mailer
will split off the attachment and store it in the Attachments folder. 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 reconcile attachments checkbox.

If you want the Post Road Mailer to split attachments off into the Attachments
folder as usual, but leave the attachment in the body of the note as well, 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
reconcile attachments checkbox turned on along with this one.

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.

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 or the normal Address tree format.

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).

When you delete a note using the Post Road Mailer, it doesn't actually 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, to undelete a note you didn't mean to delete, or anything else you might
want to do with a note in the shred queue. 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 shredder 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 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.
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 from the Attachments window.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.8. Printouts Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Select the Send all print jobs to your default printer checkbox if you want the
Post Road Mailer to print to whichever printer driver you have set as your
WorkPlace Shell default, instead of letting you select from a list of all your
installed printer drivers each time you print something.

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 what 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, and 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 your inbasket directory on your hard drive.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.10. User Exits Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

A user exit is an *.EXE or *.CMD program 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've
received, between the time they've all arrived and the time they get loaded
into your inbasket, 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
the exit is run against each note just before it is sent, instead of on all of
them at once before any of them are sent. The exit is run against one note
file, then that note is sent, then the exit is run against the next note file,
that note is sent, etc.


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 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.

The PGP pass phrase field is 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, you will be prompted to type it again to confirm, and then 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. 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.

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 outside the Post Road Mailer. To do this,
the Save as option may be helpful, or you may want to use the filters feature
to put all your incoming PGP'ed notes into a specific folder or directory so
that you'll already have them where you want to de-PGP them.


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), none at all
(Never), or every piece of mail for which the sender had requested an
acknowledgement (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.

In the current Post Road Mailer version, the header tag that's being used is
not the one that should have been used in order to be compatible with other
mailers. (That was an accident, not a deliberate attempt to get people to use
our product just because they need to be compatible with someone else who does,
and we will correct it as soon as we find out the right header tag to use!) So
only the Post Road Mailer will respond to the Post Road Mailer's requests for
acknowledgement, and the Post Road Mailer will not respond to other mailers'
requests for acknowledgement. But of course if you choose to acknowledge all
incoming notes, the acknowledgements will all go out regardless of the mailer
used by the authors of the incoming notes.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 3.13. Miscellaneous Page (Settings Notebook) ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

On the main inbasket window's action pad is a button which will bring your Warp
LaunchPad to the foreground. If your default LaunchPad does not have the string
"LaunchPad" in its name, then that button won't work unless you specify a
search string that will bring up your LaunchPad, in the LaunchPad window list
search string entry field.

When you doubleclick on a URL (WorldWide Web document name) in a note while you
have an active internet connection, the Post Road Mailer will start the Web
Explorer (if it's not already running) and take you directly to that WWW
document. If the Web Explorer is already running, the Post Road Mailer will use
that copy of it instead of starting up a separate one, if your Web Explorer's
name shows up in Warp's Window List as "IBM WebExplorer", or if you specify the
correct search string in the WebExplorer window list search string field. If
you want to pass any parameters to the Web Explorer program, such as -Q -T 8,
put them into the WebExplorer startup parameters field. If you want to run a
copy of IBM's Web Explorer from an *.EXE file that isn't named EXPLORE.EXE or
that isn't on the PATH, you can specify the name of the *.EXE file here, too.
For example, EXPLORE2.EXE -Q -T 8. If the Post Road Mailer finds an *.EXE
file's name there, it will just execute the WebExplorer startup parameters
field's contents as the command line, instead of treating the contents as
parameters to EXPLORE.EXE.

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. Also, select the Make
the current inbasket the default FAX inbasket checkbox in the settings notebook
of the inbasket you want to have as your default FAX inbasket.

Then 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 and FaxWorks Pro 3.0, it will go right into his FaxWorks received
log. 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, or 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).


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 4. Receiving Mail ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

As soon as you have a working 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 in a mailbox in an electronic post
office called a POP3 server. The mailbox (and the POP3 server) is generally
provided by your internet provider.  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 in 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 envelope icon.

At the bottom of the main Post Road Mailer inbasket window is a toolbar we call
the action pad. (You can turn it off via the Windows menu, if you don't like
it, and all of its options will still be available to you via items on the
Windows, File, Notes, and Features menus.)

Pressing the Refresh button on the action pad (when you have the action pad
turned on) is the easiest way 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
load it into your inbasket.

To view one of the notes you've received, just doubleclick on 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.

The first note view window you have open at any time will save its size and
position when you close it, and that will become your default size and postion
for note view windows from then on, until you change it again. But since it is
possible to have many open note view windows at once, and since you obviously
wouldn't want to have them all opening right on top of each other, the second
and subsequent note view windows you open while you already have one open do
not use the saved default window size and position.

To view another note, you can open it from the inbasket window 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.

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 window 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.

     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), 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 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!

Save as
     Lets you put a copy of the *.POP file which contains the note you're
     viewing, in whatever location you want, under 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 Follow-up checkbox and set
     a date for following up on the note, and later use the Follow-up option in
     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.) 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.

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 turned on, the entire
     *.POP file (that is, the note, as downloaded from the POP3 server) is
     displayed in the note view window. When turned off, the body of the note
     is displayed, of course, but most of the header (the boring parts like the
     Received: lines, Message-Id:, X-Mailer:, 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. Now you can more easily view it, and you can print it
     on a laser printer which truncates lines that are too long to fit across
     the width of its page.

Rotate 13
     Subtracts 13 from each 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'ed 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 outbound notes via the
     compose window's Edit menu.

Download an internet file
     If someone tells you about a file you should retrieve from the internet,
     you can just select its name 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.
     You can also use this option by simply doubleclicking on the filename in
     the note, rather than by selecting it and choosing this menu option, if
     you like. This option 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 tells 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. If you're connected to your internet provider at the time,
     the Post Road Mailer will start the IBM Web Explorer and take you to the
     site. Otherwise, the URL will be added to a list of URLs that you want to
     visit the next time you are connected. You can also use this option 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.

     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 (first) attachment that belongs 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 folder (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 folder are stored with fake filenames on your
hard drive. An attachment's fake filename will be something like 670B23F1.TNS,
and will be listed in the Spool Id column of the folder. If the attachment was
properly encoded with its real filename intact, that filename will be listed in
the Filename column. If the real filename isn't specified, or if the encoded
data was just text, and not a file at all (the way the Mail Delivery Subsystem
often returns notes that it couldn't deliver due to incorrect internet
addresses), then this column in the Attachments window will be 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.

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

The File Menu

     Start
     Selecting an attachment and choosing this menu item is the same as
     doubleclicking on the attachment. If you have set up a Post Road Mailer
     association for files which end in the same filename extension as the
     attachment's real filename, the associated program will be executed with
     the attachment's *.TNS filename as its parameter.

     Associations
     This is where you create and modify your Post Road Mailer associations.
     (This can also be done via the Features menu of the main inbasket window,
     or the Note menu of any folder.) If you receive a lot of *.DOC files in
     Word Perfect format, as attachments, for example, you might want to
     associate *.DOC to your Word Perfect program, so that you can view these
     files from within the Post Road Mailer as soon as you receive them.

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

Save as
     Copies the attachment to whatever filename or location you specify.

     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. This is
     the easiest way of viewing the contents of a plain ASCII text attachment.

     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.

Scan all items
     If you've specified a virus scan program, you can use this option to scan
     all of your attachments.

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.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 5. Sending Mail ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

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

At the bottom of the main Post Road Mailer inbasket window is a toolbar we call
the action pad. (You can turn it off via the Windows menu, if you don't like
it, and all of its options will still be available to you via items on the
Windows, File, Notes, and Features menus.)

Pressing the Send button on the action pad (when you have the action pad turned
on) is the easiest way 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 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. 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).

There are many ways to reply to a note. The Reply button on the action pad
opens 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 the
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 or redirect a note as there are ways to
reply to one (see above), except that Redirect doesn't have a keystroke
combination nor an action pad button. The keystroke combination for Forward is Ctrl-F.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 5.1. Compose Window ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The compose window is comprised of two 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 compose window is actually two separate
windows. One window holds the addressee, subject line, tagline, signature, From
address, Reply-to id, attached files, 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 turn on 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 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 another part 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 when you enter your 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 (Return) key or the curved down arrow button to the right
of the address field, the address you've entered will be placed into the list
box just below the entry field, so that you can enter another address if
desired. 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's right
mouse button menu) 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's right mouse
button menu) 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 a
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 (Return) 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 as it's pushed down into the list box below the entry field
when you hit Enter.

In the top left 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, like so:

Your Name <[e-mail]>

Most people's Reply-to address is the same as their From address, and it can be
written in the same format. But if you want replies to a note to go to a
different internet address, it is the Reply-to field, not (just) the From
field, that you should change. Because the Reply-to field is the one that most
mail programs use when writing replies.

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.

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. 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 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. 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 click on the floppy disk button with your right mouse button and
select Delete.

When you're done composing the note and 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.

MetaMail, the third-party program which is included with the Post Road Mailer
for MIME support, cannot handle filenames with spaces in them (on HPFS drives).
If you want to attach such a file to a note, you must first rename it,
replacing spaces with periods or underscores.

The 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 permanently in the settings notebook).
You can also select the "folder" named <Do not file>, or create a new folder
via the File menu of the Select a Folder window when it comes up, and select
that newly created folder.

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
if 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 selection box for taglines, 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 Text checkbox, and the dropdown field next to it, are for ISO Latin-1.
Support for ISO Latin-1 for the Post Road Mailer is not ready yet, but will be
available very shortly.

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 for a particular note, will be displayed in the multiline entry field
next to the Sig button. Or 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.

The fact that 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 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, the way
changes you make to the signature line of first-time notes are saved if you
don't 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 receives your note. 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.

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.

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 contents of your compose window is 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 text will be brought into the Text
     window with the quoting character, as soon as the Text window opens.

     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 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. Alternatively, you can put the code
     .im followed by the full pathname of the file, into 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.

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 that is found on To:, Cc:,
     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.

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
     Tabs 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.

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

The Format Menu

Word wrap
     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 word wrap is off, you have to hit the Enter (Return) key when you
     want the cursor to move to the next line. When word wrap is on, the cursor
     will move to the next line when you reach the right margin. Adjust your
     line length by adjusting the width of your Text window. You can have
     different widths for different paragraphs within one note, if you like, by
     changing the width of your Text window between paragraphs.

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. This setting applies also to notes you forward, but does
     not have anything to do with text pasted from the OS/2 clipboard. Such
     text does not get wrapped in version 2.0 of the Post Road Mailer (see
     expected enhancements). VoiceType users can use the Key option rather than
     Paste, so that VoiceType will send the text as if it were being typed,
     rather than pasted, and then the Post Road Mailer will wrap it.

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 using the
     Quote button will be imported into the Text window as it is in the note
     view window. When it's on, quoted text will be reformatted to fit the
     current width of your Text window at the time you use the Quote button. If
     you write a reply by marking text before you select a Reply option, the
     quoted text will be formatted according to the saved window width, which
     is the final width of the last compose window you had open in glued mode
     (if that's your default compose window mode) or in regular mode (if glued
     mode is not your default).

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.

 Format entire note
     Reformats the entire note to fit the current width of your Text window.
     Use with caution, especially if you have any quoted text.

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. 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 another mailer which supports our mood icon format, then that UUencoded
icon will be displayed in his inbasket, in place of the normal 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 envelope 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 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.

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 Text window's Edit menu also contains the
Rotate 13 option. This option adds 13 to each character of the selected text,
just as the Rotate 13 option on the note view window subtracts 13 from each
character. And 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 envelope icon instead. A note that's
been handled (replied to or forwarded) gets a red checkmark over its opened
envelope, and a note that's been marked for the shred queue gets a red X. A
note that has an attached file has a paperclip on its envelope. Notes that
arrived during the most recent Refresh have a little NEW symbol next to them.

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

Toward the right are the date, time, and time zone from which the note was
sent. And 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.

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 inbasket/folder notes when deleted turned on, that is). You can use this
option to remove the X (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.

The title bar of the inbasket window tells the name of the current inbasket,
and the date and time of the most recent Refresh.

At the bottom of the inbasket window is the status line. Sometimes it just
shows the InnoVal copyright. 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.
Multi-part 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, 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 on the demo version of the Post Road Mailer.
     If you order the product from InnoVal, you will receive a License number,
     a Security code, and an Access number. Once you have those, select this
     option and plug those numbers into the dialog box, and the software will
     no longer be the demo version. This option will then be removed from the menu.

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

Preview mail
     Activates the Preview Mail window.

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

     Break
     Cancels a Send or Refresh in progress.

     Settings
     Opens the settings notebook.

     Print
     Prints the selected note(s), all notes in the inbasket, or the notes in
     the print queue.

Queue for printing
     Adds the selected note(s), or all notes in the inbasket, 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 asking you twice
     whether you're 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) in another directory, into
     the new inbasket and converts it to the current format, without altering
     or damaging the old existing inbasket. If you delete the PRMIGRAT.DLL file
     from your main Post Road Mailer directory, this option will not apear on
     the menu anymore.

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.

[names of existing inbaskets]
     The bottom of the menu contains the names of all the existing inbaskets
     (with a checkmark next to the active one). This is where you select the
     inbasket you want to work with.

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

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 on your system (or just in the folders you tell it to
     search) for a string of text and shows you a folder containing all the
     notes which contain that string. From that 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 really
     is a folder window--with one exception: It also has a column which tells
     you what folder the note actually resides in.

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

     Filters
     Lets you create and maintain filters.

     Associations
     This is another way of getting to the Associations window which belongs to
     the Attachments window.

Signature blocks
     This is another way of getting to the Signature Blocks window which
     belongs to the Header window.

Review network log
     Opens a window in which you can see the log of all the notes you've sent
     and received.

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 under note view window.

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. See Sending Mail.

     Forward
     Same as the Forward button on the action pad. See Sending Mail.

Reply to
     Same as the Reply button on the action pad. See Sending Mail.

     Redirect
     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.

     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 view.

     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 view, 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.

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 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. 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 undelete one you didn't mean to delete, or anything else you can do
     from a folder window.

     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.

Launch pad
     Brings your LaunchPad to the foreground, if you have the miscellaneous
     page of the settings notebook properly configured. Same as the Launch Pad
     button on the action pad.

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

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, unless you turn it off via the option near the bottom of the
Windows menu, 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 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 other
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 it/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.

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.

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) 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

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.

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. 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) 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. 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 or to a different person.

For those who care to know the technical details, the outbasket is actually the
SNDNOTES subdirectory of your inbasket directory.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 8. 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; 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 9. Preview Mail ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

The Post Road Mailer Preview 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, 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 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 getting the large one just yet.

You might use Preview during your morning coffee, to find out what's going to
be in store for you when you get to work. Or 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 normally set the Delete from host: setting to Yes.

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, it turns into a double arrow
so that you can move the bar), and columns for Author 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
Refresh or view activity that may be going on, 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 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, the same
     way a Refresh would, including running them through the filters, etc.

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. 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 list! So the program asks you whether you
     want to refresh the list 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 very useful 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. 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. But if
you're connected to a LAN whose POP3 server doesn't allow two connections by
the same person at the same time (for security reasons), then Send and Refresh
won't work for you while Preview Mail has an active POP3 connection.

See frequently asked questions for a warning about how Preview Mail can
conceivably cause you to miss mail, if you always use the Delete from host: No
and Retrieve notes: New settings.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 10. Saving and Organizing Mail ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Instead of shredding (deleting) notes to get them out of your inbasket, you
might often 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 folders, and the
Post Road Mailer will see them and use them as folders.

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

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 the 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 don't specify a directory name here, 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. Do not
     create a sub-sub-sub-...folder twenty levels deep, as the program may
     crash if you do.

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.

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, you can
     use this menu option to cause it to do so.

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

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.

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 created:

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

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

     MIME$$
     Where parts of multi-part attachments are stored until the other parts arrive.

     PQNOTES
     The print queue.

     QUICK
     See Text window.

     SHREDNTS
     The shred queue.

     SNDNOTES
     The outbasket.

     TRANFILE
     The attachments folder.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 10.1. Folder Windows ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

A folder window is much like the Alternate display of the inbasket, which you
can see 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, and the actual *.POP Filename 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.)

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, opened envelopes with X's, and they can have red pushpins which
represent sticky notes or paperclips which represent attached files.

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 and the options available on
notes you've sent.

The File Menu

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

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

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

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, to 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 Note 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.

     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.

     Resend
     Opens a compose window so that you can send the note again to the same
     addressee, or to any number of others. 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 option instead.

     Associate
     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.

List associations
     This is another way of getting to the Associations window which belongs to
     the Attachments window.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 11. 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(s) 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.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 12. 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. Some people have asked why
we use our nonstandard one instead of the one everybody's accustomed to using.
These people must not have ever looked at ours while using it.

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 just 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 remove a directory along with its contents.

The Speed Lists button lets you create, change, and delete speed lists. If you
have certain 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
currently used for the standard directory tree will be used instead for your
speed lists, and 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.

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 System and/or Hidden files.
You can specify whether you want the files 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 13. 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 reasons.
Some people never even have mail in their inbasket; they have all their mail
delivered by filters directly to the appropriate destination folder upon arrival!

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 and fill in the blanks.

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 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), Redirect Note (in which case
you specify the Redirect/Notify address to which the note should be
redirected), Copy note to a directory path (in which case you specify or select
the Copy to path), or several other choices, or 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.)

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? It's 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.

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),
and/or have the filter react if the search string is not found, rather than
when it's found (React if NOT found).

If you want a filter to execute a user exit, you can specify or select the
program in the User Exit line and then you can select whether you want the
program to run in the Foreground, the Background, or Minimized.

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 the subgroup to another
folder first, and then having a second filter delete all the notes which still
remain which contain the search string.

The format of the file that's used as the source for a reply, for the Post Road
Mailer to send to the sender 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 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 PPO. 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.

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 Frequently Asked Questions for a few more uses for this feature.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 15. 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.

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 Post Road Mailer compose window, the file must still be in the
specified location by the time you have the program send the note to your SMTP
or POP3 server.

[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 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 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 MIMEd 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"

The default signature in the specified (or default) inbasket will be used, but
if it uses the {date} and {time} symbols, they will unfortunately not be
resolved into the current date and time.  (See expected enhancements.)


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 16. Appendices ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

o   Acknowledgements

o   Addressing mail

o   Command line parameters

o   Common email abbreviations

o   Control tags in outbasket notes

o   Emoticons

o   Expected enhancements

o   Frequently asked questions

o   Limitations

o   New features

o   Product support

o   Program files


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 16.1. 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 16.2. 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 to 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 American Online, simply remove the spaces from the name and
append @aol.com. For instance, to send mail to John Doe, enter the address as [e-mail].

CompuServe mailboxes consist of two numbers separated by a comma. 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.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 16.3. Command Line Parameters ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

There are four 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 or /S to make the program quit as soon as it's done with the
     Send or Refresh.

[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, or for inbaskets whose directories are
     subdirectories of the main Post Road Mailer directory, you can instead
     specify the name of the subdirectory. Not the full pathname to the
     subdirectory, but just the subdirectory name, as specified in the first
     column of the INBASKET.NIX file. For example, one of my inbaskets is
     listed as [e-mail] on the File menu, and the directory it's stored
     in is e:\postroad\prmbeta. So I could specify this parameter as
     [e-mail], prmbeta, PRMBeta, or PRMBETA. (The directory name is not
     case sensitive, but the inbasket name is.) And if you use /R, /S, or /Q
     switches with this parameter, then this parameter must precede those switches.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 16.4. 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

     RTM
     Read the manual

     SNAFU
     Situation normal, all fouled up

     SYSOP
     System Operator

     TKS
     Thanks

     TX
     Thanks


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 16.5. Control Tags in Outbasket Notes ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

Notes (*.POP files) in the outbasket 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:

0Bh     From:

0Fh     Subject:

10h     Signature block

13h     Pathname of folder to file the note to

14h     Title of folder to file the note to

21h     Full pathname of attachment file to be MIMEd

26h     Full pathname of attachment file to be UUencoded

31h     Reply-to:

32h     Priority:

34h     Tagline

35h     Distribution list (To: or Cc:)


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 16.6. 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 16.7. Expected Enhancements ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

o   Text pasted into the compose window from the OS/2 clipboard needs to be
    word wrapped.

o   PRMSENDF.EXE needs to resolve {date} and {time} symbols into the current
    date and time.

o   POPPER.EXE, a tiny, separate program which you can run in the background to
    keep all your inbaskets up to date all the time without keeping the whole
    Post Road Mailer in memory. If for some reason you don't want it to
    download the new mail, you can just set it to let you know when there is
    some, instead.

o   Context sensitive help.

o   More work on making menus on various windows consistent with each other in
    regard to wording, placement of options, keystroke shortcuts, etc.

o   Redesign of the attachments situation, such that the program will always
    know exactly which attachment(s) came with which note even when there are a
    dozen notes and attachments with the same Subject line; such that it will
    be possible to have attachments deleted automatically when the notes are
    deleted if you so desire; such that attachments can be better handled in
    filters; and such that programs which refuse to work with *.TNS files will
    still be usable for associations.

o   Integrated EPM window which will seem as much a part of the Post Road
    Mailer as its own Text window does now, so that those who need a more
    powerful editor need not use EPM as an external editor.

o   Private address books as well as shared ones.

o   Some way to have notes which you write automatically filed into particular
    folders based upon the addressee's name or address book entry.

o   A Hide button to take all of the Post Road Mailer's windows off your screen
    at the same time when you need to have them out of your way for a moment.

o   ISO Latin-1 support will be a separate add-on, available shortly after the
    2.0 release. It will not be a large download; just a couple of files.

o   POSTCOMP.EXE will also be available, very shortly, as an add-on utility. It
    will allow you to add notes to the Post Road Mailer outbasket from outside
    the Post Road Mailer. You can use it from a Desktop icon, from the command
    line, or from a macro within programs like DeScribe, EPM, and The SemWare
    Editor, Junior. It can take its input from the OS/2 clipboard, an ASCII
    text file, or a dialog box which it will display.

o   Dozens upon dozens of other desired features are on the list for addition
    to the Post Road Mailer 2.01 (expected at the end of August or beginning of
    September) and 2.1 (around the time of the release of OS/2 4.0).


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 16.8. 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 a few POP3 servers which do not support the superior XTND XMIT
command for sending mail. If you have one of them, 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 for that internet address from 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, if you don't also use Delete from host: Yes and Retrieve notes: All
sometimes. 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. 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.

Q. I've opened the Post Road Mailer or one of its windows, but it doesn't
appear on my screen.

A. Is it in your Window List (Ctrl-Esc)? Whenever the Post Road Mailer attempts
to open a window that doesn't already have a saved window position on your
system, it uses an OS/2 feature called "shell position". When an application
tells the operating system to open a window in "shell position", the operating
system is supposed to decide the best place to put the new window, based on its
size and the positions of the windows that are already open on your screen. But
there's a bug in that OS/2 function, which has been there since OS/2 2.0 at
least, which every now and then causes it to open the new window on a part of
the Desktop that's not visible. The Desktop is much, much larger than your
monitor is, and of course the part on the monitor is the only part you can see,
so a window that's open on an invisible part of the Desktop looks to you as if
it hadn't opened.

To fix it, just select the window in your Ctrl-Esc Window List, use the right
mouse button to get the popup menu for that item in the Window List, and select
either Tile or Cascade. This will bring the window back to the visible part of
the Desktop.

Q. The Post Road Mailer did not decode an incoming MIME attachment.  What can I
do with it?

A. If you have the Do not reconcile 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.

If you don't have that setting turned on but you think you see what, in the
*.POP file's header, might have caused the Post Road Mailer to fail to notice
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.

Another option is to run METAMAIL.EXE against the *.POP file, manually.  Just
go to the command line and type METAMAIL followed by the name of the *.POP file
in question.

Q. My POP3 server hung up with an error in the middle of a Refresh, and the
notes that had already been received by that point were not run through the
filters on their way into my inbasket. Do I have to deal with them manually?

A. Not at all! Just move the *.POP files 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.

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. It will happen if
the POP3 server name is misspelled or if part of it is typed in uppercase. 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. 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 dial for yourself
before you try to send or refresh.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 16.9. Limitations ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

No computer program is ever perfect. Especially considering the fact that no
two people work exactly the same way or that different people expect different
things from the same program. There will always be things that someone wants a
program to do, that it can't do. Rather than sweeping them under the rug, and
leaving you wondering whether you just haven't yet found the way to do
something, we'd rather tell you right up front about the things the Post Road
Mailer can't do. See also Expected Enhancements and Frequently Asked Questions.

The List of Folders window, along with all other folder windows, is locked in
front of the inbasket window. We have some customers who wish that all of the
Post Road Mailer's windows could go behind the inbasket, and in version 2.0,
most of them can. But we have far too many customers using VGA resolution who
would have no idea how to arrange things so that they could drag notes from the
inbasket to a folder, if we were to let the folders go behind the inbasket. So
the decision we had to make was whether or not to make a simple task impossible
for a great number of users in order to remove a small inconvenience for a
smaller number of users. Phrased that way, I hope you can see why the decision
was made to leave the folders stuck in front of the inbasket as in previous
Post Road Mailer versions.

The alternate editor (specified on the compose page of the settings notebook)
does not always come to the foreground when you start it with Ctrl-E, if you
use a character mode (as opposed to PM or "GUI") one. The faster you let go of
the Ctrl-E keys, the more likely that it will, but we just can't seem to get it
to work for everyone. So if you use Ctrl-E to start your character mode
alternate editor and it seems like nothing happened, just find it in the OS/2
Window List and bring it to the foreground from there.

Some customers have expressed the desire to be able to assign macros to
keystrokes; for example, I might like to have the program type "the Post Road
Mailer" for me whenever I type Ctrl-Alt-P. We're not likely to ever implement
this wish list item, since so few people would find it useful, it would be a
huge amount of work, and those who do want it can use the integrated EPM window
which will be in version 2.1. Please don't think that this sort of statement
means we don't care about what you want, if you're one of those who would like
to have such a feature. We would ever so happily add this feature, and all the
others you've ever dreamed of, if there were an unlimited number of hours in a
day or we didn't also have a huge list of desired features which people can't
work around as easily as they can use an alternate editor from the compose window.

The same logic which applies to macro keystrokes also applies to the wish for a
paragraph indent feature.

If you have a filter which deletes all the notes from a certain person or with
a certain word in the subject heading, you might think that the program should
run the filter and delete the note before downloading it, instead of after, to
save time. But the fact that the program doesn't do that is not much of a
limitation, after all. You see, when the program asks the POP3 server to
deliver a note, the header and the body come together, as one whole. When the
program asks the POP3 server to deliver just the header of a note, it comes as
a smaller whole. Since the overhead of the command takes longer than the
transmission of the note (unless it's a particularly long note), the delivery
of a header takes only a tiny bit less time than the delivery of the entire
note. Now if the program were to be redesigned so that it would ask for the
header before asking for the note, so that it could then run the filters and
decide whether or not to download the note, every single note would take just
about twice as long as it takes now, in order to save the miniscule amount of
time that would be saved by not downloading the note on those few notes which
match the filter's search string.

When you tell the Post Road Mailer to preview mail or to send or to refresh, if
it finds that you do not have an active internet connection and you have it
configured to run a dialer program, then it will start that dialer program if
it's not already running, or tell the dialer program to dial if it is already
running and if it's a dialer program that will dial automatically upon second
invocation (such as IBM's DIALER.EXE). If the Post Road Mailer starts the
dialer, then when it's done, it also closes the dialer if you have it set to
Hang up after Refresh or Send. The limitation is that if the dialer is already
running and the Post Road Mailer only tells it to dial, then the Post Road
Mailer has no right to close the dialer when it's done. Since there's no way to
tell the dialer to hang up except by closing it, this means that your
connection is going to remain active after the Post Road Mailer has done its
work, whether you wanted it to or not. So if you pay for internet connect time
by the hour, you will want to pay attention and hang up the connection yourself
whenever you do a Refresh or Send or preview mail while the dialer is running
but not connected.

When looking for a note's Subject: line, From: line, and the line which divides
the body from the header, the Post Road Mailer only looks at the first 100
lines of the note. So if a note has such a long To: header that the Subject: or
From: line are line #101 or higher, the subject or author will not show up next
to the note's icon in the inbasket. And if the header/body divider is not found
in the first 100 lines, then the entire note (including the entire header) will
be displayed in the note view window even when you turn off the View headers
option on the File menu.

The header tag used for Acknowledgements is not the one which other mail
programs respond to.  We tried the only other one that we could find documented
in the RFCs (standards which internet programs are supposed to follow), and it
was definitely not the right one either, so we had to put it back to what it
was in the earlier betas. As soon as we can find out what it should be, we will
make it right!

Using the Paste option on the Edit menu of the Header window, to paste text
into various fields, usually doesn't work very well, or at all. But you can
always use Shift-Insert instead, which is OS/2's standard keystroke for pasting
data from the clipboard.

The List of Folders window's size and position get saved when you close the
program, even when the window is minimized. So the next time you open it, it's
still minimized, and it looks like it didn't open. You have to select it from
the Window List in order to restore it.  We apologize.

The Format text when quoted option works most unpleasantly when quoting
material which contains a quote of a quote! Please use it only for replies to
notes that don't already have quotes in them, until we get that fixed.

Ctrl-E currently does not work to start the alternate editor from a compose
window on a note you're editing in the outbasket.

If you type an entire line of text in the Text window without any space
characters in it, with word wrap turned on, then when you reach the right
margin, the character which causes the line wrap will either be lost or will be
placed after the cursor on the next line so that further characters typed will
be placed before that character. We're sorry.

The InnoVal Select A File Dialog crashes abruptly when you make it access a
directory which contains a file whose name has 18 or more characters after its
last period.

The InnoVal Select A File Dialog's Quick Finder function is not working. It
searches the files and reports how many it found, and their total size, but
doesn't put their names into the selection field.

Using the Break menu option to break out of a Refresh from a Personal Post
Office directory, as opposed to a POP3 server, causes a temporary file to be
left behind and locked open. Further Refresh attempts will fail until the Post
Road Mailer is exited so that the file gets closed and can be overwritten on
the next attempt. We're sorry.

Printing from the compose window is not putting all of the header lines onto
the printout as it should.

During a Refresh, the status line messages are confusing. They tell the author
of the note which has just been retrieved, and the number of bytes downloaded
so far for the note that's currently being retrieved, without giving you a clue
that the author and size being shown are not for the same note!

The Page-break after each note setting is currently being ignored (page breaks
are used even if you don't want them) when printing multiple notes at once
outside the print queue.

The Download an internet file dialog box can now go behind the inbasket window
so that it's out of your way, but it doesn't show up in OS/2's Window List when
you want to bring it back. Selecting it again from the Post Road Mailer's menus
works, though.

When the View headers option is turned off, the note view window nevertheless
displays all header lines past the Subject: line. We're sorry.

When replying to a note that has multiple To: addresses, cc: lines, or a
Sender: line, the Multiple Addresses window lets you select addressees other
than the Reply-to one. It doesn't offer the From address, though, since one is
not supposed to write to the From address when there's a Reply-to line present.
That rule, though, does not take mailing lists into account! Mailing lists
often use their own address as the Reply-to line and the author's address as
the From line, so with our current design, there's no way to automatically
write a private reply to the author of a mailing list note.

Whenever the Send queued mail after inbasket refresh setting is used, the
report of Refresh results in the status line gets overwritten by the status
line messages during the Send.

Format entire note menu option doesn't work on very large amounts of text.

The InnoVal Select A File Dialog displays directory names on HPFS drives in
order of uppercase letters first, alphabetically, then lowercase letters,
alphabetically. We're sorry.

It is not currently possible to select multiple files during one invocation of
the Select A File Dialog. This means that when attaching files to a note from
the compose window, if you want to attach more than one file, you have to open
that dialog more than one time.

Deleting a note from the Search Results folder deletes the note (the *.POP
file), but doesn't remove the note's entry from the inbasket or folder view.
That won't happen until the inbasket or folder is closed and reopened.

The Post Road Mailer puts the Priority: tag into an outgoing note's header if
you want it to, but it doesn't do anything special with incoming notes which
have that header tag, other than what you can set up yourself with filters.
Please let us know what you think would be the most helpful thing for it to do
with high or low priority notes.

The fact that the Multiple Addresses window comes up whenever a note contains
two To: lines, a To: line and a cc: line, or a Sender: line, in either the
header or the body, is a useful feature, but also has its drawbacks. If you
want to tell a friend that he should write to a certain person, you can include
the address in a note to your friend with To: in front of it, at the beginning
of a line, and if your friend uses the Post Road Mailer, then all he needs to
do is reply to your note. The Multiple Addresses window will come up and offer
that person's address as a choice. Your friend can select that address and
remove yours from the addressee list box on the Header window, to write to that
person without even having to cut and paste the address. But the problem is
that any time a line of a note happens to begin with the word To:, it will
cause the Multiple Addresses box to come up even if there isn't really anyone's
address on the rest of that line.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 16.10. New Features ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

We couldn't begin to list all of the changes in the Post Road Mailer version
2.0, even if we stuck to just the ones that have happened since the 1.05 beta
series. But here are some of the most important ones:

o   The folder architecture has been completely redesigned. Each folder is a
    subdirectory now, instead of being one huge data file and one index file.
    Each note is a *.POP file now, in folders as was always the case in
    inbaskets, instead of being one small piece of a huge data file. The
    ramifications are enormous. This new design means that many aspects of
    folder management occur much faster than before. It means that we have
    nested folders and subfolders. It means that anything you can do to a note
    in the inbasket can also be done to a note in a folder. (Unless we simply
    forgot to convert a feature; if you find one, let us know!)

o   Both inbaskets and folders can be kept outside the Post Road Mailer's home
    directory, wherever the user wishes to put them. An inbasket can use a
    folder in any other inbasket, if the user creates a link to it by
    specifying the other inbasket folder's directory as the directory for a
    newly created folder in the first inbasket.

o   A great many things have been done to make the Post Road Mailer easier for
    keyboard users to use. More menu items have hotkeys, more window containers
    have focus so that you can use your arrow keys to select them without
    clicking on the container with your mouse first, etc. Please let us know
    about any we've missed. We want keyboard users to be able to do everything
    mouse users can do, just as easily.

o   The note view window has tiny previous-note, next-note, and delete-and-next
    mouse buttons in the lower righthand corner.

o   Signature blocks can contain the current date and time.

o   Taglines.

o   Preview Mail.

o   Folder windows now have columns for both the To: address and the From:
    address, so it's much less confusing to keep notes you've sent in the same
    folders with notes you've received.

o   The folder to which your outgoing notes are filed after they've been sent
    is no longer saved from the compose window each time (it's in the settings
    notebook now), so you no longer end up with all your notes going to the
    wrong folder if you forget to change it back to your normal folder after
    having changed it for one note.

o   The inbasket is no longer recycled at the end of a Refresh, so the notes
    you've marked for deletion no longer get removed before you're ready, and
    other things you were doing during the Refresh no longer get undone when
    the Refresh is over. Instead, inbaskets are recycled only when you start
    the program and when you select them from the main inbasket window's File menu.

o   Sticky notes.

o   The action pad can be turned off.

o   Both MIME and UUencode are supported.

o   Acknowledgements.

o   Five compose windows can be open at once.

o   Mood icons.

o   The search engine, to search the contents of all notes in an inbasket and
    any or all folders you specify, for a string of text, and bring up a folder
    containing pointers to every note which contains that string.

o   Redesigned compose window. Your choice of glued mode, which is like a
    single window, or the new two-window format. Either way, the right margin
    of your text is determined by the width of your Text window, so that window
    is never wasting more of your Desktop space than it needs to.

o   Integration with FaxWorks Pro 3.0.

o   News As Mail.


ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ 16.11. Product Support ΓòÉΓòÉΓòÉ

We have put together support procedures that we expect are both effective and
efficient. We have created some alternatives, and with your help, we will do
our best to provide you with prompt and helpful service.

o   The following support is available from our Web page. The URL is http://www.innoval.com.

    -   A list of known problems along with temporary workarounds and
        correction plans.

    -   The latest maintenance release of the code. If you have a licensed copy
        of the Post Road Mailer, you will be able to download maintenance releases.

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.

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.

o   If you have a business emergency, or if you think it would be best to talk
    to us "live", then please call us at [phone].

o   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 16.12. 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 the index files unless you are sure that you're using an editor
which leaves tab characters as tab characters! 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.

     *.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 (the third-party program which does MIME
     encoding and decoding for attachment files) requires it. In the current
     version, EMX.DLL must be in the main Post Road Mailer directory or the
     program will not provide any MIME support. The other *.DLL files all
     belong to the Post Road Mailer itself.

     *.EXE
     The actual program files. METAMAIL, MMENCODE, and SPLITMAI belong to
     MetaMail, 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.

*.ICO, other than POSTROAD.ICO
     A few icon files you can use as mood icons.

     *.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, 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 it to deliver a piece
     of mail.

     *.TNS
     Incoming MIME and UUencode attachments.

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 the Post Road Mailer is not running at the time, that is!

     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. There is no backslash as you would 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 is 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. It contains the
     directory name that would have been used for the inbasket directory if the
     user hadn't specified another directory. The second column is separated
     from the first by one or more spaces, and begins at the tenth character.
     It 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 resides, for inbaskets which weren't created in the default location.

     INDEX.$@$
     Whenever a folder (or inbasket) is closed, if it contains more than fifty
     *.POP files, the data in the display (the author, subject, date, etc.) is
     exported to this file (overwriting the existing copy, if one exists) so
     that it can be loaded into memory more quickly the next time the folder 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. When there are fewer than fifty *.POP
     files in the folder at the time it is closed, this file, if it exists, is deleted.

     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.

     MAILCAP
     A data file used by MetaMail.

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

     PMLASSOC.BIN
     Associations for Attachments.

     PMLFILTR.BIN
     An inbasket's filters.

     POSTROAD.HLP
     The online help.

     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 instead.

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

     SIGBLOCK.BIN
     Each inbasket's signature blocks.

     TRANFILE.IND
     The index file for the *.TNS files in the Attachments folder.
     Tab-delimited; do not edit with an editor that changes tabs to spaces as
     most editors do! Six columns. The first column is the name of the *.TNS
     file. The second column is the original name of the attached file, if the
     decoding program was able to detect it. The third column tells whether the
     attachment was MIMEd or UUencoded. The fourth column is the sender, the
     fifth is the subject, the sixth is the date, and each line ends with a
     final tab character.

     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