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Text File | 1996-11-07 | 143.3 KB | 3,175 lines

1. HISTORY FILE (reverse chronology) ==================================== NOTE: RMB is Right Mouse Button. Changes included in v1.2 ------------------------ Mostly cleanup and solidification of previously added features and bug fixes. Many new and exciting features have been added since v1.1. I'm not done yet. I still have many items that have been on my todo list too long. I will attempt to handle these in the next couple of releases. In addition, I have a couple of really great ideas that will show up quickly. Don't forget the integrated news reader. This will be thr primary thrust for awhile. o Improvements to the single click/keystroke PASTE w/QUOTE feature including extra linefeeds and focus changes. o MANUAL FETCH MODE: To retrieve header-only entries in full, the procedure it now that you highlight one/more entries and press the FETCH toolbar icon (third from end) or Message->Poll for mail. All marked "previewed" messages, if any, will be fetched before a normal poll-for-new is performed. I stopped short of making manual mode selectable from the main menu. I want to test the case of switching it on and off while polling very thoroughly before depending on this. Manual mode must be toggled on/off from the Settings notebook at this time. - "Real-time" Help file improvements got pushed off, too. I'm more excited about the web-based manual, although a bit slower right now. I will end up incorporating this manual directly into the app, but the job is bigger than I had guessed (matching ID's) and I have to release to make a CD ROM release. NOTES ON THE WORKINGS OF PREVIEW MODE (HEADER-ONLY INDEX ENTRIES) ================================================================= When you turn on MANUAL / PREVIEW mode with your POP3 server, the system automatically fetches only headers for all new messages. You can open these entries as if they were normal messages, and this might be handy if you need to examine the headers. However, the more-common use of header-only index entries is to allow selective fetching. Header-only index entries will be marked with a round "dot" icon. To fetch one or more full messages from a group of header-only entries, simply MARK the desired items and invoke a pop3 poll (F2, Message->Check for mail or third toolbar icon from the end). All marked headers will be fetched first, then a normal poll for new headers will be performed. Remove from Server mode is ignored when Manual Mode is selected. To support this feature with POP3 servers that do NOT support the UIDL command, message counts are used, and deleting messages from the server would be risky. Hence, in manual/preview mode, manual purges must be performed periodically (Message->Purge from server). The MANUAL/Preview Mode flag is set by going to Options->Settings. On the first "network" page, in the POP3 groupbox is the "Manual mode" checkbox. PREFETCH FILTERS ================ Prefetch filters can be used in both Manual mode and "normal" mode to automatically and selectively control the fetching of messages in FULL or HEADER-ONLY mode. The disposition of a prefetch-filtered message will stay true regardless of the POP3 read mode. For instance, if a certain set of criteria defines a message to be fetched as "header only", only the header will result in either mode. Alternatively, if a "full message fetch" filter is created, messages matching this criteria will always be retreived in full-body mode, regardless of the overall POP3 fetch mode. I use PreFetch filters on my system at home, where I have a dial-up connection. The filter tells MR/2 ICE to only fetch headers when the message size is greater that 120,000 bytes. This allows me to see all of my mail more quickly and easily identifies mail that is probably including attachments. I then request to fetch these messages manually, but I am free to read and respond to all other messages in the meantime. Very handy. And "mostly automatic". Changes included in v1.19 ------------------------- o Preview/Manual mode fixed up for POP3 servers that do not support the UIDL command. Bugs fixed with purge-from-server mode. o Sig editor now allows only one copy to be loaded. o Bubble hints now have borders (Warp v4.0 made them bleed into listboxes). o New (simple) test code to set DBCS style bits for EntryFields when the system settings support DBCS. I need feedback! Does this help with DBCS subjects?? o First-time printer setup crash fixed. Again. o Filter maintenance screen now allows for the creation of a new folder, on-the-fly, while defining the filter. o A new convertor is available: PMMail v1.5 to MR/2 ICE. It will be available via web page at http://nick.secant.com/mr2ice.htm. Changes included in v1.18 ------------------------- I consider this release a beta, too. I'm targeting 11/1 as a release date for v1.2, but I'll happily push it back a couple of days if needed. o POP3 manual mode can be specified. In this mode, headers are fetched from the POP3 server but no bodies. Index entries are inserted with a new icon. The user can then pick and choose which full messages are fetched and when. - NOTE that this mode works ONLY with pop3 servers that support the TOP command. If the TOP command is not supported, MR/2 will fail when fetching the first message. No mail is fetched, but no mail is lost, either, as turning off MANUAL mode will correct the problem. - BIGGER NOTE! For those of you that have setup MR/2 ICE so that if fetches from multiple providers into a single MAIL directory (by manually editing the INI file :), please DO NOT USE THIS FEATURE. The uniqueness of message ID's is required, and mixing mail from two ISP's and/or POP3 accounts will surely confuse things. o PreFetch filters. Filters that control the automated fetching of messages from the POP3 server. Criteria can be defined based on a message's header and/or size. If the criteria is matches, the user can specify to have fetch the full message, just the header, or to skip the message entirely. There are two modes available. When used in normal "non manual" mode, PreFetch filters can be used to specify message for which only the HEADERS are desired. For example, messages from a certain user or over a specified size can be fetched in header-only mode, letting the user decide if/when to get the entire message. o In-Progress messages that *are not* ready to be sent can not be saved into the outbox with assurance that it will not be sent. Use Message->Save (but don't send). The icon for these messages will show as a paper and quill/pen. A message can be "saved" any number of times ... once you click on the SEND button, it gets saved and sent. o MR/2 ICE Ask-The-Experts(tm) Web Page! Yet another way to get user-based help for what's already the best-supported OS/2 email available! Simple web interface accepts and email address and question(s) from the user. This is then emailed to a panel of MR/2 ICE veteran users that have volunteered to share their knowledge. o UUPC/UUCP drivers for MR/2 ICE are available. This is a set of third-party Rexx scripts and a small EXE that, when used in conjunction with MR/2 ICE's new "custom mail driver" feature, allows the native reading and sending of UUCP-style email. See the ICE web page for details and to ftp the latest version. Thanks goes out to Michael Taylor <miket@pcug.org.au> for providing this wonderful tool! o Split-screen editor: ghost split-slider removed when zooming a message back to single window mode. Also, splitter position is saved to the mr2ic.ini file as a percentage and used each time. o More editor enhancements, particularly useful in split-window mode. ALT-Q and the menu entry and icon for PASTE w/quote now will function in the message "view only" window to immediately and directly paste information to the reply window. In additon, the CTRL-1 and CTRL-2 keys were enabled in split screen mode to allow quick and precise selection of the editor window. Finally, Edit->Undo will function correctly after pasting w/quote. NOTE that has a side effect, the clipboard afterwards holds an already-quoted copy of the original text. NOTE that Paste w/quote will also work in full-screen mode, with a reply active and while viewing the message portion. The effects are not immediately visible, though, until you switch back to the reply window. o MR/2 HELP menus now have links to various MR/2 web pages, including the home page, the FAQ and the Ask-The-Experts(tm) page. An online web-based manual with SEARCH capabilites should be available soon. This will no doubt be a long-term work-in-progress. o MR/2 HELP Entry for "Send this message to MR/2 ICE Support". Allows a user to quickly and effortlessly mail the currently displayed message to me as an attachment. This method preserves all original message formatting and markings. o Reindexing duplication bug (cosmetic) squashed. o I have a PM Mail v1.5 to MR/2 ICE convertor script started and looking faily good. Watch the web page for more details. o I removed the problems I caused in previous versions by defining a MIME association of "multipart/*". For the message-level header, I ignore the association and treat it as a multipart :) Changes included in v1.17 ------------------------- I consider this a BETA release of what will be v1.2. Seems stable to me, but TONS of low level code has been teaked and prodded. Could be some instability in there, somewhere. Be warned! o Folder-to-folder copying and moving performance improved. A move is now a TRUE file system level move, with far less overhead that the previous method of copying, then deleting. Both copy and move now steamline the updating of the target index file, providing another large performance boast. Still not perfect, but loads better! - Also cleaned up some window painting issues that should help speed up things even more. o Added a "Use MIME by default flag" flag to the MIME page. If checked, all dropped files will be MIME'd, and the default Message-Attach file mode will be MIME. Otherwise, the default for both is UUEncoding. o Better handling of progression indicator when the pop3 server does NOT return a message's file size up front. Previously, large messages would appear to start downloading quickly, then "frieze" (often at 85% or so). In fact, they were working, but the 85% was based on 3000 bytes (a made-up default), and the progression metter would never update > 100% of 3000. Now the progress metter may STILL not indicate actual percentages, but it will "bounce around" and continually update. (Specifically apparent with ISP's using PowerWeb pop server - e.g. os2bbs.com). o SENDS now connect with the SMTP/POP3 host once, send all messages, *then* disconnect. Previous, each message would cause a connect, send, disconnect. No real problem for quick connections to fast receiving hosts, but very time consuming to slower connections with mail hosts that do not "connect" quickly. o Custom "user programmable" Mail Drivers. New mail FETCH and SEND options in settings notebook ... CUSTOM. This allows for user defined REXX procedures to be called to create the collection of incoming mail and to send each outgoing message. I can see this working for UUCP and even MHS formatted message, and perhaps a whole lot more. Here's how it works. Read mail via CUSTOM. At the beginning of each poll for new mail, a rexx script called "getmail.cmd" is called from the base mail directory for the account. For example, the initial/default account would call "mail\getmail.cmd". After that, the system checks the defined SMTP delivery directory (change this path as desired) for new files, and these are recognized as new mail. If an error occurs, a one-line message describing it should be stored in a file called "getmail.err" in the base mail directory. This message is displayed to the user. The absense of this file indicates a successful custom fetch. Send mail via CUSTOM. For each message queued for sending, a rexx script called "postmail.cmd" is called from the base mail directory for the account. For example, the initial/default account would call "mail\postmail.cmd". The name of a temporary file housing the ready-to-send message is passed. If an error occurs, a one-line message describing it should be stored in a file called "postmail.err" in the base mail directory. This message is displayed to the user. The absense of this file indicates a successful custom send. Custom Mail Drivers (CMD's? :) should start by deleting their respective error files, as these are preloaded by MR/2 ICE before invocation with "REXX script not found" messages. o Long email addresses when saved to Address Book would sometimes get chopped and corrupted. We're talking *really long* addresses, but even these work now. o Marking a URL for Web Browsing/FTP now uses only the marked portion. Previously, marked section was ignored and the entire word/string would be used as happens when nothing is marked. o New "Redirect" option on RMB Message Index menus. Allows you to quickly "bounce" messages to some other email address. Message(s) remain mostly unaltered ... some header lines are appended to allow for POP3 sending and to preserve original information. o The default FORWARD template has been changed. The new template will actually preceed each header line with a ">" to prevent strange routing problems. o New Options->Settings parameter to control the HEADER created for FORWARDED messages. You can now specify whether, by default, your address goes into the Reply-To header, or the address of the original sender. o Missing first char bug. Often on resends and/or when working with previously sent messages, the first character of the message would get chopped. Fixed. o WarpUtil.DLL is now used to link in WPS features. Since this causes problems for OS/2 v2.xx users, an alternate DLL is provided. For v2.xx users, you MUST copy "nowarp.dll" to "warputil.dll". o Internal index changes. Size is recorded in bytes. An "o" is placed after the size to differentiate it from the previous method of counting and recording lines. Also, for messages that are "current" on the POP3 server, the server's UID for this message is recorded as a new field (very end of entry). o Message size are now shown in the message index, at the very end. Sizes ending in an "L" are old-style LINE COUNTS. Changes included in v1.16 ------------------------- o MIME settings page changes were not being saved. Fixed. o More detail on Filter Maintenance list screen. o NOOP command removed from SMTP conversation due to buggy NT server used by at least one ISP. o Efficiency of the unique file name generator improved. o Handling of single-type MIME messages improved. Previously, types other than text and multipart would get confused. o MIME attachments that included paths in the file name would error on detach. Fixed. o RMB->View for attachments now takes a "last step" if no MIME association is found for the type (OS/2 v3.0 or later only). Now, if no MIME viewer is defined, the attachment is opened as a desktop object. In other words, as if you opened it from the file manager. This allows all of your WPS associations and already-defined viewers to be used. This provides automatic access, for example, to all of the fancy ObjectDesktop viewers simply by accessing objects via the WPS. This may warrant actually REMOVING MIME association definitions. This will be a user's option; I will continue to try and improve the default association file assuming external viewers. o I changed the default "delete" flag for autoreplies to be OFF. This means that autoreplies WILL NOT be automatically deleted after being sent. This was somehow confusing the autoresponder and some autoreplies were being lost. This does not happen in save-after-sent mode. I may switch it back later, but until I can find out what's happening and fix it, it will stay this way. Changes included in v1.15 ------------------------- Nothing really "new" ... wanted to put out a stablized release before I added anything new or fixed larger bugs. o Bug with new Login submenu where logins did not always line up with a menu option. Also removed "MAIL" from the menu list. o 30 second freeze on new installs fixed. o Header-based filter bug resolved. o Some improvements to MIME-attached file parsing. o The new message count displayed in the title bar and task list is no longer linked to the "periodic beep" flag. New message counts will now show even if beeping is turned off. - Also removed a call to WinFlashWindow() when the message count is updated. I'm still looking for what steals the focus from Windows apps when polling. o Fixed the text on the initial-install "font test" to be consistent. o New Settings page ... nothing new, just spreading existing options out to make room for new items. o I added some code to the MIME association area, but it isn't accessible to the user yet (needs a pick-list form). o Mailto.exe (maillist.zip) now returns identifiable error codes on send failures. Changes included in v1.14 ------------------------- First, I'd like to acknowledge the foru generous and ambitious guys that helped put together the documention updates from last release. They are: rayfaulk@HK.Super.NET (R. J. Faulkner) os2@tir.com (Jason M. Gottschalk - http://www.tir.com/~os2) Jerry Koret <jkoret@ibm.net> os_support@theriver.com (James McKenzie) Thanks guys! NOTE: these guys can be reached via email as a group using the email address <mr2ice.doc@secant.com>. Darn! I was better at documenting this releases changes, but I left the paper listing them at home. Go figure. o Modified slightly the POP3 high count warning message to avoid false calls. o Notebook statusline counts when deleting messages kept more up-to-date. o Save-to-file now supresses divider line if first write (file didn't exist previously) o Filters and "on demand" functions that modified messages would sometimes NOT update the index. I was looking for changes in the file-modified time, but if the changes were quick (same second), I wouldn;t detect the change. File size is now also used, I'll think this out a little further. Works much better, anyway! o Login menu is now a conditional cascade and will list ALL AVAILABLE profiles, and a "default" that signs on as mail/mail. If the profile has no password set, you are instantly logged in. If it does have a password, the login form comes up with the name pre-filled. o Reindexing of folders code was extremely inefficient, particularly when the folder contained larger messages. Rewrote this and it is MUCH quicker. o Modified the message saving and moving code to identify and wait for locked index files. In my testing, I could not get MR/2 to drop an incoming messages nomatter how fast I moved through existing messages. I believe I've knocked this one off, but I'll wait for those having problems to confirm it. o I still had a problem with MIME character translations that came up during the last 2 releases. All seems to me back in order now. Text decoded from Base64 was never checked for needed conversions, now it is. o Wrapping of quoted text using the ALT-1-for-a-space mechanism now works as it should. o Sorting of index lists has been fixed. Again. Ah, the joys of multithreaded programming! One inbox function/thread would switch the sort order while messages were inserted into another index. I seem to have fixed this up ... another fix waiting for the test of time. o Demand filters are now functional, as is the RMB->Filters->Select menu item. o Better reply-to and from address matching. MR/2 now "normalizes" each header address before checking to see if they are the same. This avoid the "which one" prompt when both are found and they are logically the same but not textually. The longest address is automatically chosen in this case, in an attempt to preserve real names. A thought just popped into my mind ... does this effect Mailing List setups? o Reindexing OUTBOX would often show ghost index entries. I believe I've fixed this ... o More tiny ones; this was all from memory. I'll try to itemized anything else with the next release. Changes included in v1.13 ------------------------- Quick bug fixes. This will be replaced very quickly with a newer version ... matter of days. o Using CTRL-Fkey and/or ALT-X on an EXISTING message would result in the original message file being deleted. Fixed. o Long FROM lines would crash the forwarding process. o Forwarding and Replying to a message with long "unwrapped" lines would often crash. Fixed. o Simple filters with OR'd and/or AND'd parts would often malfunction, as the selected fields-to-check were ignored except for the first piece of the search criteria. o POP servers that send back lower case status words are now supported. Changes included in v1.12 ------------------------- There now exists a productive group of 4 people working on documentation for MR/2 ICE ... you'll notice some new doc files resulting driectly from them. I will certainly acknowledge each individual, after I've checked to make sure this is ok (don't know why it wouldn't be, but I'll play it safe :). Comments and/or suggestions are welcome. See install.txt, readme.1st and keys.txt. o Install zip now includes some new doc: install.txt, keys.txt and readme.1st. See readme.1st to find out what ALL TEXT FILES included with MR/2 ICE explain! o Fax-by-email support!! MR/2 ICE now supports the transport of faxes and other PMFax-related documents via email, with the potential to save fortunes in long distance phone calls! This feature will cooperate with the imminent release of PMFax v3.0. To support this feature, MR/2 ICE adds two new command-line capabilities ... o Command line parameter /D can be used as in this example: mr2i /Dmessagefile logfile and will load MR/2 ICE, detach all attachments found in the named message file. A list of all detached files will be found in the named logfile. If no logfile is specified, the log is written to stdout. This is used in the faxrcv.cmd file included with MR/2 ICE for use with a link-to-Rexx filter. o Command line parameter /Q has been modified so that, if a space follows the /Q, a specific mode is invoked. In this case, 3 parameters are expected: mr2i /Q filename address subject MR/2 ICE will create a new message to "address" (must be a valid internet address, wrapped in quotes if it contains spaces) and with the given sibject (again, ""'s if spaces are included). It then MIME encodes "filename" as an attachment and adds it into the outbox for sending. If a copy MR/2 ICE is already running, that copy will take over and send the message. If no other copy is running, and MR/2 ICE is invoked as above, it will load the message into the outbox and exit. To create the message, send and exit, without an existing running copy use: mr2i /XS /Q filename address subject Finally, if uuencoding is preferred over MIME encoding, you can add a "*" in front of the file name: mr2i /Q *filename address subject While this works nicely for the purposes of interfacing with PMFax, it has potential with any other third party tools and/or user scripts that need to send encoded files around. -- To set up PMFax to work with MR/2 ICE, simply go to Utilities->Settings->Program and insert the following text into the "EMAIL" field: d:\mr2i\mr2i /Q %FILE% %ADDRESS% %SUBJECT% /XS Where d:\mr2i\mr2i is replaced with YOUR location for the MR/2 ICE executable. -- To set up MR/2 ICE to pass incoming email faxes to PMFax v3.0 or later, simply set up a new filter: Utilities->Filter Maintenance ... New Description: Fax Tag: Fax Search type: Simple Areas to search: Subject Text to search for: "EMAIL FAX" & !"RE:" (include the ""'s) Filter type: Inbound Link to Rexx (mark this as checked): faxrcv.cmd Then press OK. You might opt to create a FAX FOLDER and copy these message there and/or removing them from the inbox, but this is not necessary for this to work correctly. o Install now includes the file faxrcv.cmd for use with the filter and features documented above. NOTE THAT fxrcv.exe, as supplied with PMFax, is expected to be somewhere in your PATH. If not, the script may be edited to point directly to the EXE, or this EXE can be copied somewhere in your PATH. o Double translations of MIME/QP text bug fixed. o New Settings->Prompts variable ... POP3 count threshold. This is a count that can be set or disabled. Once your POP3 count grows past this threshold, MR/2 informs you of the situation on program load. This to try and counter the problem with the default being to KEEP messages on the server, new users not knowing to purge, and mailboxes becoming full. o New warning that is issued when you attach a file via uuencoding and where that attachment's last line starts with a "." length character. This has proven to cause trouble with various combinations of POP3 servers and email clients, so MR/2 ICE suggests using MIME in these cases. Note that the odds of this happening are something like 1:72, so it does happen! o Sorting of inbox and outbox is consistent when new messages are added. o Creation of a new folder now inserts the new item in the proper sorted spot. o Crash: when a new outgoing message was created, then deleted from the outbox before sent, MR/2 would still try to send and crash at that time. Fixed. o Crash: Some mailer liked to send BinHex with the entire section left padded with spaces. I fixed both the code that crashed, then made it so the attachment is detachable. o Base64 text/plain is now decoded before display. o I spent an enormous amount of time reworking the way Tools->External Editing *and* the way CTRL-FKeys save and reload the work-in-progress message. External tools can now expect to get full header and text messages, including MIME encoding and other attachments when invoked. (This does NOT effect use of an external editor ... just when a message is modified in a "special" way). MIME markings (in particular, boundary strings) are preserved and reused on subsequent saves. This should help in the effort to support the combination of MIME and PGP. o Deleting the last MIME association no longer crashes MR/2 ICE. o Sometime recently MR/2 started creating messages with extra CR's in the header section. Fixed. o First-time users now see INSTALL.TXT automatically loaded into the E editor when they run MR/2 ICE. o The packed DLL's and EXE released as a test last time caused some minor trouble, mostly with v2.xx users. While these instances were "rare", I'm not going to make this the default release mode. I will come up with a scheme where users can compress these files or ftp compressed versions, but I don't want to cause more problems for any first-time users. o There were more minor bugs crushed, but I didn't track all of the little ones. Changes included in v1.11 ------------------------- Mostly small bug fixes. o Several crashes located and fixed. I don't remember all of them, but the Printer Setup crash on new installs was fixed. There were a handful of others. I didn't document them (sorry). o UUEncoded attachment bug fixed where UUencoding started on the very first line of a message (continuous loop condition). o Some minor additions to the HELP text, mostly covering areas where a new user might get confused (confirmation boxes). o Started support for nested MIME mutipart messages. If you define the viewer for a content type (e.g., "multipart/*") to be "*", and you go to view a part of this type (RMB->View) it will open up a SECOND message window with that part as the message. It stull needs some work, but it should allow access to some of these appledouble message now. o Oh! Almost forgot. I am distributing DLL's in this release as a test. Please note the following size differences between the normal versions of these files and the new versions: module orig packed mr2i.exe (v1.10) 598,539 361,227 c2151mt.dll 208,782 137,996 cp1bcmr2.dll 168,523 107,021 bsebcmr2.dll 178,033 86,863 opbbcmr2.dll 371,104 248,095 ------- ------- total 1,524,981 981,202 NOTE that v1.11's EXE size should be reduced to the same degree. This is simply the use of a freeware utility called lxlite on these files ... they still take the same overall memory to load and operate, we've just cut down on the storage size. Zip file sizes will not decrease ... these files are simple "pre zipped". PLEASE let me know it you have any problems with these (mostly I'm concerned with any OS/2 v2.xx users out there). Changes included in v1.1 ------------------------ This release marks the completion of "basic MIME" support. As usual, there are issues left outstanding, but MIME does work nicely. For example, items still needing attention include: o No Support for Multiple Message mime attachments (attachments "split" across multiple messages), either incoming or outgoing. o No automatic viewer launching, yet. o No outgoing BinHex. Easily added, if there is a demand. o Directing attachments to different target directories is still in the works. I meant to have this done, but failed, and since it is not actually part of "MIME", I left it for last. This will appear very soon. o Nested multiparts are not supported at this time. Ok, now for what IS there: o I improved all attachment code in general, handling user-supplied variations and adding them to my collection. BinHex attachments are now recognized even if NOT wrapped in MIME boundaries. Boundary spec in multipart header now handled for cases not wrapped in double quotes. Missing "end" boundaries are handled as a complete part. Multipart messages with no parts are now displayed (to accomodate a big PRM v2.0 bug that makes invalid MIME messages). MIME attachment files were never closed until ICE exited. Fixed. o Viewer now attempts to launch from the RMB->Viewer item. Error detection is minimal. I will have to expand on this. o Spelling checker and thesaurus improvements. Handling of contractions and words surrounded by punctuations is massively improved. Spell checking of marked blocks no longer flips words around <!!>. o Printing of unwrapped, long-lined messages improved, but not a total fix. o Modifying a message via CTRL-Fkey and REXX, and/or with an editor would often lose the read/replied/sent status. Fixed. o Many, many tiny little nits cleaned up. Of course, I still have many more to go. [Note that v1.1 was the next release after v1.07] Changes included in v1.07 ------------------------- This was mostly a bug-fix pass; much work was done on the MIME attachment engine (as well as with other attachments) and making existing things work and/or work better. Another case where I wasn't careful at all about documenting all of the bug fixes included (hence, I can't list them) o Mime Associations can now be defined via a pushbutton on the Settings->Advanced form. This form makes use of a different style of list-item maintenance ... looking to see who likes this style better than the normal "pick list", then edit style. o I enabled the RMB->View attachment menu item, and it worked in my limited testing, but I expect to do much more with this. o Various fixes and changes to accomodate William Geiger's PGP interface. This is looking very nice. o Again, more, but I didn't write everything down. E.g., templates can now be moved around (with the up/down arrows) and when you save they stay where ypu put them. Changes included in v1.06 ------------------------- o Now supports KOI8-R and ISO-8859-10 character sets. o New MIME options in settings allow very low-level control of character set conversions. o X-Sun-Charset header tag recognized and used. o New character translation tables ... I've reworked this logic and database to be less complex internally, allowing me to add new code pages and character sets as the demand occurs. o Outbox filter - testing, not meant for prime-time yet. o Attachment sizes are adjusted to better represent decoded sizes; File names now appear in uuencoded markers, o Better MIME handling for mixed case tags. Previously, upper case tages were not treated properly. o "Special" filters that detect attachments now check message parts, too. o Last byte(s) of MIME files sometimes encoded wrong. This could cause decoding problems on occassion. Changes included in v1.05 ------------------------- WARNING: I have totally reworked the attachment subsystem. Not only does this improve overall performance significantly, but it also provides seamless MIME and BinHex (Binhex is detach only at this time). HOWEVER, with any new code, there can be problems. I am considering the attachment subsystem "in beta" ... just this mechanism. I expect to release v1.1 on 08/01/96 with MIME support that includes user-definable viewers, an improved CP translation table with added support for ISO-Latin-10 and KOI8-R (Russian) character sets. In addition, a user will be able to select a specific Code Page translation for any message. BIG NOTE: The // command parameter, used in testing, should NOT be used. In fact, the program now warns you if it is used. AND, in fact, the // flag's function has been reversed. Using //, at least for now, will cause MR/2 ICE to revert (mostly) to the old "attachment text viewable in the message" mode. Just as a precaution. o Progress with attachments. Support for the basic MIME mechanism has been added. MR/2 will now recognize and parse MIME message, displaying text sections and replacing "attachments" with markers that represent the attachment. The Message->Detach function will now detach uuencode, MIME and BinHex attachments transparently. Attaching files also supports MIME messages. The Message->Attach menu now is a conditional cascade with UUEncoding still being the default (plans to user-configure). The sub menu lists other options, including MIME/base64. BinHex outgoing is not yet supported. The Text option is an experiment, but I believe it will be useful. o Drag file into reply window - becomes MIME attach. Beginnings of drag/drop support, just to say it exists, somewhere :) o RMB menu over an attachment is different. Not yet functional, tho. o Detaching from a message index (RMB menu) now handles MIME parts, too. Previously only detached uuencoded attachments. o /X and /XS fixed. I had to rework this quite a bit to get the timing right for ALL cases. o Fixed a possible heap corruption bug. Extremely long TO lines (>1K), when filtered, would (sometimes) overwrite one byte past the allocated buffer. o I've fixed it so that the deleting of MOST files is done "permanently". In other words, those using the DELDIR option in config.sys were having ALL deleted files "backed up". This has been changed, by default, to NOT backup deleted files to your DELDIR. Some specific cases have been left untouched. For those of you that want to remain cautious at the expense of speed, I have added the command line option "/W" which will use the old delete method, in most cases. o New command line switch /Qfilename. Will add the names file to the MR/2 ICE outbox and exit. File is assumed to be a properly formed message file. You can force MR/2 to attempt to send the message via use of the /XS flag. o New command line switch /Euser@domain.com. Starts MR/2 ICE and immediately invokes a new message to the address specified. For use by a third-party address book program still in the works, but it surely has other applications. o Command-line control of a running copy of MR/2 ICE. The commands above will actually cause an existing instance of MR/2, if found, to do the desired work. I went the extra step of support this for multiple accounts, so specifying an account should talk to the right copy of MR/2 ICE. So, using the /Q option to queue a file actually puts it in the outbox of a running copy, and proceeds to send it. Using the /E option causes a New Message header screen to pop to the desktop from a running copy of ICE. Also: /Qfile - as described above /Euser@domain - as described above /+ will restore and bring focus to a minimized/burried copy of MR/2 ICE. /- will minimize an existing, running copy of MR/2 ICE. Other commands can be added as the need arises. I'm open for good suggestions! NOTE that if a running copy of ICE is not found, a new copy is started and the work is done. In the case of the /Q option, MR/2 ICE will exit after queuing. /XS can be used to force it to send, too. The /E option will start a new copy of MR/2 if one is not running, and the application remains active. o POP3 server interface ... when an invalid password is given, will prompt you *only if* the config password is blank. Otherwise, it just reports the error in the status window. This prevents the prompting from interfering with auto-fetch scripts and procedures where the ISP might time out. o Using /S could end up racing the send thread with nothing for it to do, under certain conditions. Fixed. o Closing Editor would "close" the app completely. This was actually a crash condition in v1.04a. Fixed. o Pop3 logon errors now show message returned from the server. o Long free-form search strings (over 500 chars) could overwrite the stack of the incoming mail thread (crashing). Fixed. Changes included in v1.04 ------------------------- Didn't get to the massive bug-fix pass I had intended over the weekend; real-work duty called. Here's what I have to-date. o Text color in folder select when hilighted is now white on grey. o "Sending ..." message when /S param is used has been suppressed. o Save to file selection dialog changed back to enable file list. Title was changed to say "Save to File". o Minor cosmetic fix to Folder RMB button. o Changes to menu ID's to aid in accomodating HELP engine revisions. o Fixed the polling thread lockup when a Rexx filter failed due to error. o Added a new filter type: "Pre-Send" to the filter mechanism. Not yet GUI selectable. o Rexx filters can now be forced to the foreground by simply adding a "*" to the beginning of the command sequence. For example: *maillist icemail.lst would run the MR/2 ICE mailing list in the foreground. This allows REXX to prompt and accept input. o MIME coding started. This also includes recognition of UUEncoded files and the treatment of them as "non-displayed text". This is not auto-enabled in this release, but will be shortly. o Kludge. You can now add a char(1) to the end of the quote string, and this character will force a SPACE into the string. Press ALT and then the numeric pad 1 ... you will see a smiley face character (CP850/437). o PreSend filters. You can define a set of filter match criteria. Each message to be sent (queued messages) pass through this filter, and if found to match, can be passed through a REXX script. Most other options do nothing in this case, or have extremely minimal use. After the filter(s) is/are executed, the message is sent. This was implemented specifically for PGP signing and encrypting. It has other applications. o You may now specify a single filter to be BOTH an inbound and outbound filter. o Added support for internal MIME base64 decoding. It even works :) Again, this is not automatically enabled at this time; I still have some work to do on ATTACHING files with this new system. Detaches work very well, tho! o Editor temporary names are now forced to be compatible with FAT 8.3 naming conventions. Changes included in v1.03 ------------------------- o Problem with temp file names that are not FAT compatible when printing marked text. Fixed. o Indexing problem with filtered message to open folders fixed (apparent dupes, reindexing needed to match index with message). Fixed. o Stealing of addresses via both the Message->Save address and RMB address functions improved and corrected. o Titles changes on a couple of file open dialogs to better match the real function ("Save as" or "Append to" instead of "Open"). o Ctrl-+ plus works again, and Ctrl-= still works as an equivelent. o Bug in saving routine for Address Book, Group list, Filters and Templates fixed. If you attempted to exit with unsaved changes MR/2 warned you and appeared to give you a chance to save. It actually would throw out yoru changes anyway. Fixed. o Moving messages from one folder into the same folder ignores you. Previously, the messages would get deleted. This seems to have happened to enough people that figured I should "fix" it. o New way to register - via Compuserve's SWREG service. MR/2 ICE is SWREG #11797. From a Compserve command prompt: GO SWREG. Changes included in v1.02 ------------------------- o Date header timezone is now corrected for daylight savings time. o Filters that start REXX commands do so minimized now. If a REXX process is called fro my a filter, it is performed FIRST, before any copying to folders or other actions are performed. ALSO, if the Rexx process modifies the file at all, the index entry for that message is rebuilt. This allows for REXX to massage the incoming message and the index will reflect any of these changes. o Tools->Edit Externally now checks to see if the file is modified, and will rebuild the index entry, of needed. For example, you can change the subject of the message and the index entry for the message will immediately reflect the new subject. o MsgUtil.cmd is invoked via CTRL+Fkey. The same "has message been modified" checks are performed on return from this process, and the message index entry is updated, if needed. o Oops. Ctrl-Fkey would load msgutil against a message from the viewer. Initiate it against a reply and you'd get the original. Fixed. Initiate it against a new message and you'd crash. Fixed. - the four previous items took tons of code and should be considered new "beta" features. I'm sure there are some bugs to shake out before depending on this to be flawless. But, if you don't use them for these "advanced" functionality, you won't care :) o Fixed that pesky garbage-in-quote problem. Again. o Index-to-Messages mismatch diagnostic beep now checks FROM in addition to SUBJECT for a match. o Text Editor now honors configured FTP and WWW commands from RMB. o Session Manager thread (the one added in v1.01 to monitor external session threads) now starts up immediately (no delay). Previosuly, a delay was invoked which could caused any rexx-action filter to fail until after delay (termination queue did not exist until then). o Problem with attachments - sometimes got truncated (bug I put in v1.01 only). Fixed. Changes included in v1.01 ------------------------- o Outbound filters now function. These are applied to each message *after* it is successfully sent. o Formatting printing now correctly prints backslashes and {} curly brackets. o The /X parameter has always started MR/2 ICE in "poll for new mail and exit" mode. You can now add a modifier to this parameter to get it to poll for mail, send all queued mail, then exit. Use /XS o Better handing of filename collisions for messages being filtered. Files were never overwritten, but occassionally the index entry would get recorded incorrectly. Reindexing would be necessary. o Made the message index RMB popup menu's PRINT submenu a conditional cascase (menu with boxed-arrow). This now honors the Printer Setting's page RMB option box. Clicking on "Print" will take the default action defined on this page. o Outbox's Save Address menu now works correctly. It was bringing up the rebuild index confirmation dialog. o Added READ, UNREAD and REPLIED to the outbox/folder index RMB menu's "Mark As" sub menu. NOTE that these operations will only work on INCOMING messages, and SENT, UNSENT will only work on Outgoing messages. For example, Marking an Incoming message as sent will be ignored. However, a folder can contain either type of message, or both. o Freeform filters now will strip any hard linefeeds the user has entered before saving the filter to disk. This created problems in the previous version. o Minor revision to the QP conversion in outgoing message headers. Spaces were sometimes misplaced as defined in the RFC for QP in headers. o Message viewer/editor, Edit->Write to file option now works as it was supposed to. o Login/Logout now locks the POP3 service thread while transitioning. "Leaking" of messages while switching accounts was reported. o Message Editor: Pressing the Delete icon when in a reply-in-progress would result in the original message being deleted, too. Now it only deletes the reply. o Pressing CLOSE while in a reply-in-progress now honors the "stay on same message after reply" configurable parameter. This might take a little getting used to for long-time users. o External Editing now does a better job of creating file names unique for the current window. There's still a bug with the OS/2 IPC Queue mechanism that I can't get right (messes up when doing multiple, simultaneous external edits) o Ok, I figured out the "bug" with OS/2's DosStartSession and Queues. I now have a new "session manager" thread that does nothing but manages external sessions. Multiple editor sessions work nicely now, as will any other external viewer window when needed. o Display of Group addresses chopped strings at 32 chars. Fixed. o Printer Setup selection dialog selected the wrong "current" printer sometimes. It matched the "current" printer by LPT port, which could have picked the wrong printer when two printers shared the same port. Changed the headings on this form to reflect the *real* data displayed. Changes included in v1.00 --------------------------- I fixed so many things, so fast, without writing them down, that my change list is not worth listing. Official Release v1.0. Trying to remember the changes: o Added user preferences: DEL key active in viewer, Show account in title. o Printing in text editor, both draft and formatted. Printing now can use real Courier font, and accomodates backslashes. o Pick Address now includes group entries. o Welcome message now pops into inbox on first load. o Pop3 "wrong password" will prompt you again until you get it right :) o Detach files now preserves message window state (position in particular). o Inbox and Outbox RMB popup menus filled in. Still no demand filtering, but marking as read/unread, detaching files, and saving addresses to address book/group/file now works. o New "pick group" form used in saving address prompts. Includes "new" button. o Closing a folder now protects against lost data. o Group maintenance: group pick button removed as pick address book now includes groups. Also, European names in tags work correctly. o Extra garbage in quote-paste cleaned up. o Updated help file (still work-in-progress) o Hid some buttons/switches that weren't being used but causing some confusion. o Other items fixed as they were reported: Filter problems come to mind (boolean algebra and unquoted phrases). BETA Program change log: Changes included in v0.99z1 --------------------------- o HELP! No, HELP TEXT! This is still work-in-progress, but there is much more real text than there was! o Font option from main notebook can be used to change message list font. A few problems setting initial font ... o Web/Speller RMB invocations will now work when cursor is at the END of a word. o Mr2files.txt is now included (was missing). These are instructions on how to get the speller and thesaurus addons. If either of these is invoked and the files aren't there, the instructiosn pop up. o All RMB speller options should be active. o Template maintenance and managner object massively rewritten. It is now possible to add a new template and *should be* safe to edit existing templates <grin>. o Many utility maintenance lists now have up/down arrows for moving an items position in the list. These function only in filters and templates. The others will probably have these buttons hidden. o To, Cc and Bcc form fields now can hold a max of 2048 chars, as can the address book field for address(es). Hardly usable this long for normal address maintenance, but it will accomodate larger REPLY-TO-ALL lists this way. o Add a host of new options to the config object, all of which are waiting to me implemented. o Parsing issues with addresses containing commas inside quotes resolved. Also, "address (real name)" parsing left some space. This has been removed (SMTP sends failing for some servers). o Header searches for fields were semi-case sensitive. Still. Fixed. o Icon changed. I'll be playing with all of the contributions. The one I build was made different for each resolution. Thanks everybody! Changes included in v0.99z -------------------------- NOTE: Secant's POP3 Server was released 4/28/96. If you are interested, see http://www.secant.com. o In the previous release but not documented: Reply to all is now an option when using the RMB within the TO and/or CC fields. This function MAY choose to use both fields (To and CC) to distribute the addresses, depending on the size of the list. o HUGE speedups in tcpip operations. In particular, receiving and sending mail. I was using silly-size tiny buffers. Not any more! More noticable on large messages and/or faster connection speeds, but faster overall regardless. - NOTE that as an "advanced option", I added a /B command line parameter to allow control of the buffer size used. The default is now 20K (512 bytes previously :). Specifying /B32000 gets you a larger buffer and /B512 gets you the old "tiny buffers". Value is forced between 512 and 32K. o Speedups on loading. I spent WAY more time than I wanted to (how typical :) and the benefit was, well, relatively minor. I shaved tenths of a second off of here and there. I may have saved 4-5-6 seconds of load time on my loaded-with-messages 486DX33. o Context Menus reworked. Some parts may not yet be functional. I disabled most non or partially working items. Reply and Forward work but need some input. How should these work? I may add a "quick reply" and a "quick forward" that jumps right into the reply w/out hesitation. Hmmm. Wonder what edit-header-before turned off would do ... o I removed the message header from draft printing and left the summary header. Also, time now should print on both types of messages using the OS/2 settings for time. o MR/2 will no longer hog the CPU (and effectively lock up) when it is dragged partially off the screen. o Color dialog has a pushbutton for "default" which will set the original EDITBOX colors for the viewer and editor. o External Editor specification will now allow for exact placement of the file-to-edit, allowing parameters AFTER the file name. Use a "%s" to designate where in the command string to insert the file name. If %s is not found, the file name is simply appended to the end of the command line (as it did in previous versions). o Address parsing now handles nested parenthesis. o Modifying the header of messages with long addressed would crash. Fixed. o Filters and real-time text searches: Phrases containing spaces no longer have to be enclosed in double quotes to be handled correctly. o Printer Settings has a default for new RMB print menu parent item. AND, the printer setup button is functional on this form, as well as in the RMB popup menus. o Not that help exists ... yet <grin>, but the help engine now will bring up help panels when in the SETTINGS notebook window. o Modified the printing DLL slightly to try and eliminate the extra EOJ formfeed with some drivers. Seems it didn't work, but I'll keep the change. o Minor change that prevented resending of INCOMING messages that have been moved to folders (sounds weird, but I do it often :). o MailTo.exe had a problem with message bodies > 32K (as I tried to the body as one packet, and tcpip limits packet size to 32K. Fixed. o Improvements to broken connections on receiving from POP3. I have a little more to do, but I do understand what's going on now. A broken connection will result in the poll for mail to stop. The polling will attempt to start at the SAME message next time. Changes included in v0.99y -------------------------- Short list this week. I have more code to show than this <grin> but none of it ready for prime-time. o Quoting messages is MUCH faster. More notable on long messages, but faster overall. o I made the = key mean the same thing as a + in the viewer (next message), as I saw someone pointing out that a PLUS is a shifted key on keyboards with no numeric keypad. o Printing DLL upgrades for real this time :). Better paper size matching to printer driver sizes. Fixes 107 errors. o Reply-to garbage in header on new messages (affected only those with no reply-to set). o I added dozens of small optimizations. None of them seems to have amounted to much, but they're there. Perhaps enough of these and we'll slowly see a difference. o You can now force a particular code page for translations to/from your machine. I'm not sure if this is really what's needed, but it was very easy to do and *might* help in the cases where a keyboard/video translator is installed. To force MR/2 ICE to *think* you are using CP866, for example: mr2i /C866 Changes included in v0.99x -------------------------- Release date for MR/2 ICE v1.0 will be May 8, 1996. Mailing List add-on package will be available later today, 4/17. We'll call it an "early beta", even though it's working for me. o Enhanced msgutil.cmd, mostly by using all the code supplied by Jason Gottschalk <os2@tir.com> :). I took his whole code structure and added in his "unpack AND view" code. I did pull out many of the hard-coded executable names and moved them to the front where they can be more easily reconfigured. CTRL-F1 will now create an attached directory if one does not exist. It will attempt to run munpack AND xbin against the current message. These will either need to be in your path OR in the attached subdirectory of MR/2 ICE (get them from my web page). THEN, in its default form, the script will attempt to run a viewer against the resulting file IF it matches a predefined set of file extensions. It's Rexx, so it's easily extended! Thanks, Jason. o Additionally, msgutil.ccc has been renamed to msgutil.org and if you do not have a copy of msgutil.cmd in use, msgutil.org will be copied to msgutil.cmd. You will need to copy the file over by hand if you want the new copy and hae been using this feature. o Modified printer.tf for "variable margins". Should print better on A4 tray systems. o Printer DLL updated (equivelent to cpdll.zip patch released earlier in the week). This should fix MANY of the recently created printer problems. o Message lines starting with the period character are now sent and received properly. o Folder sort order is now preserved when reindexed. o Attribution line does not appear in reply if "no quoting" is selected. o The crash caused by use of the /X comand line argument has been fixed. o Fixes to the MIME headers when using BCC's. Also, MIME headers were being produced with the incorrect CTE types of 7-bit and 8-bit. Now correctly uses 7bit and 8bit. o More code to deal with improper blank lines in the message header that previously would result in blank or incomplete index listings. o Duplicate header problem with external editor AND edit headers option resolved. o When forwarding, the subsequently re-editing the header, the reply-to line would be removed. Fixed. o One more SMTP open step added. If all else fails, a low level connection is forced with port 25 (bypassing services file). This solved at least one strange problem :) o Opening of large messages is now faster by a dramatic margin. I may still have a little more I can do, but this was a big leap. o Saving of large messages is also now massively faster. o Ha! I found the problem where To/cc/bcc lines would get truncated at 160 or so characters. You could add up to 512 chars when first editing the header, BUT, if you reedited the header, it would get chopped. This was deep inside the ObjectPM core, and I removed the limitation. In fact, I also discovered that 512 bytes IS NOT the limitation of the OS/2 Edit field as I had thought. MR/2 ICE now supports address collections of up to 1024 characters per field. That's roughly 30 well-formed (full, with real names) addresses. By using the To and CC fields, 60 addresses can easily be handled; double that if real name comments are not important. This is the way it will remain for now, with the option of using a distribution list available for longer lists (but the distribution list is not displayed in the message). There may be more room to play here, but I still want to spend more time with this issue. The situation is at least "much better" until that happens. I also adjusted the address book's address field to allow 1024 bytes to accomodate a maximum address list. o Changing accounts now corrects status line message counts. o When an external edit session is started, a ".Type" attribute is of "Plain Text" automatically assigned to the message file. This will save a step or two when using the E editor :). Changes included in v0.99w -------------------------- A big THANK YOU to all of those mentioning MR/2 ICE in newsgroups and BBS conferences. The ICE Mailing list is up to 250 users, volume is still high, but not as bad as the first couple of days. I'd say 60-100 messages a day? <grin>. I'll make the mailing list code available next week. I should also have some enhanced REXX stuff. More donations, but not in time to include with this release :) o Filters enhanced. I've opened up the REXX and Special options. Minimal testing, but they SEEM to work. The example file testmail.ccc is provided as a simple example of a rexx test. I'm still researching the rexx interface, but for now, I'm using a kludge to return the results from rexx (Rexx is being called from a cmd.exe session). If the file "mr2_rexx.$$$" is created by the named script, the message is assumed to match. SPECIAL includes tests for message size, line count and attached files. Autoreply is now functional. You must specify a template section to use in creating the auto reply. This is tricky, since you cannot create a new reply template from within ICE, yet. Sorry. It's an easy edit, tho ... edit your mr2i.tf and splice in the lines from mr2iorg.tf. If you haven't customized your mr2i.tf file, you can simply copy mr2itf.org to mr2i.tf and be all set. Currently, autoreplies are added to the outbox for sending, but deleted on send. I'm considering some options here. MR/2 added a header value for AUTOREPLIES as an aid in preventing endless loops of auto-replying. Any filter that auto-replies should test for the existence of "X-AutoReply: Yes" and NOT autoreply if found. Filter like: (whatever) & !{H:X-AutoReply}"Yes". ... Autoforward is next. o Printer setup lockup fixed. o Search/Replace lockup. It doesn't lock up anymore. Replace all works, replace one-at-a-time is still bad (but harmless). o Several problems with editing externally on-demand fixed. Also fixed bug when editing header AFTER and cancel was pressed. It now keeps you in the message with all of your text :) o Message are saved to disk with CR/LF's, and subsequently sent out this way. (helps with some rare SMTP servers that require this) o Incoming messages. Insertion into open folders was horribly slow. Fixed (ok, it's at least MUCH better :). Also, fixed another place where index was being updated unnecessarily on message open. I see some other areas that can be improved ... I'll address these as we move along. o Fixed several small bugs with QP conversions. Outgoing header translations for hi-ASCII values are performed. Still a few items I want to add, but this is about done. - Also, I believe I've made QP working with the external editor options correctly. ALTHOUGH, if you edit an "incoming" message externally, it WILL NOT be translated from QP nor from the source char set. This is the way it will work ... I should show, tho, outgoing messages (modifiable) in "readable" form when editing externally. o New sort option for message index: Message status. Sorts in unread, read, replied, unsent, sent order. o Right Mouse Button (RMB) popup menu in message indices now has a "select to" entry. Click on a startng message, find an "end" message, RMB->Select-to. Highlights these two message and all message between the two. o Spelling checker now takes into account your own quote string when deciding which text is quoted (and should not be spell-checked). o Bugs with several menu items crashing when invoked on "new message". o Template file would not be referenced if "edit headers before" was not checked. Fixed. o Opening 7-8 folders at once would crash. Fixed. o The CheckInstanceExists() routine now uses the full path of the running MR/2 when testing. This allows for multiple copies of MR/2 ICE without specifying mail configs, as long as they are based in different directories. Changes included in v0.99v -------------------------- I release this with a small bit of hesitation. There has been some discussion of problems with the new build of the support DLL's, which I have chosen to use. If there are too many problems, I will offer a separate version linked with the "old" DLL's. o Outgoing MIME Quoted Printable and CTE Character set conversions. Your choice of 9 outgoing ISO sets, or US-ASCII. Other options. (See new settings page). Conversion of header strings is not in, yet, but will be quickly. [Incoming conversions have been in place for awhile now]. o New Settings page "Advanced features" ... MIME QP options and settings for Web Explorer and FTP commands spawned from Right Mouse Button (RMB) inside viewer/editor. o More Filter options started, but I disabled the controls for these again, as I didn't get to finish them. They're next. Fixed dozens of smaller bugs: o Last character of formatted print output chopped. I cannot find the reason for the extra formfeed some users are experiencing. o Edit Externally did not always save current work to file before spawning editor. o The UUDecode logic would loop forever on error or if no attached uuencoded file existed. Path prefixes are stripped (better) from embedded file names. o I've added an experimental area in the title bar for account name. o Stabilized the threads a bit so that "false starts" should no longer occur. o Modified cleanup code on exit so that threads all commit suicide. This seems to have fixed the "failure to exit" bug. o Minor address book and group address book issues fixed. o Made subjects prefixed with "Re: " logically equivelent to "Re:". o Network Settings: modified the FROM and REPLYTO fields to have mnor validations. Also modified the initila import of TCPOS2.INI data to guess better at the FROM string. o Creating a new user profile failed to add this to the "valid" list, so logging on with that name was not possible until you exited and reentered. o Folders now reset the "new" count to zero on close. o Printer errors now display to the user with a popup window. o Text searching and body-text oriented filters were broken. Fixed. o Logging off sometimes messaged up the current INI. Fixed. o Logging into a new account would leave empty grey area on right. o Split screen editor now allows "header" button to work correctly. o Cell boxes for outbox and folder index will now remember fonts dropped on them. o STILL NEW!! An MR/2 ICE mailing list. Send email to mr2ice.list@secant.com with a subject of SUBSCRIBE. Discussions of MR/2 ICE bugs, problems, solutions, tips and tricks! Changes included in v0.99u -------------------------- NEW!! An MR/2 ICE mailing list. Send email to mr2ice.list@secant.com with a subject of SUBSCRIBE. Discussions of MR/2 ICE bugs, problems, solutions, tips and tricks! NOTE, LAST TIME!: If you've registered MR/2 ICE and are not getting email notifications of new version (and want them, I guess), please drop me a note specifying your serial number, real name and email address. I may actually wait TWO WEEKS for the next update. I want to track down some strangeness, and keeping the same released code out longer may help. Not sure yet, but just to prepare you! For those getting the occassional SYS3184 (devide by zero), please report the crash address again. I will keep an EXACT DEBUGGING COPY of version U around for the purpose of finding this one. o That anoying "beep" and hour-glass cursor often when opening a message? Gone! o Message viewer Tools menu now enabled External Editor for read-only messages. Changes saved to disk (e.g., to incoming messages) *are* reflected in the message window. For PGP users and other folks wishing to edit incoming mail for whatever reason (I need it on occassion :). o Some Quoted-Printable character translation bugs fixed. o Addresses with commas inside comments (parenthesis) failed. Fixed. o Most import text/save text standard file dialogs now remember there previous paths and file names. By request :) o Blank message may now be sent. MR/2 had trouble with these before. o Ooops, BMT Micro's phone under "help" was listing their FAX number. o Printer template: modified big time. Played with the footer spacing. Added some new @variables. o Printer Settings page revamped. Now has Paper Size, simple font and font size selection. NOTE that I still have some work to do with right margins (A4 paper size still has Letter size's right aligned headings), but this is minor. So, the special A4 template I sent to some of you is obsolete, use the printer.tf file supplied in this release, and set your paper size to A4 in Options->Settings->Printer. o Almost forgot! By request, and something I've needed myself. Support within viewer for "Move to folder, Next/Prev message". Navigate menu shows these options with keyboard connections to CTRL+UP and CTRL+DOWN. No toolbar icons or menu quick-folder lists, but I should get to these soon. o Modified the print thread to delay in starting. There was a hint that this thread might be involved in the exit-while-loading problem. You won't be able to print for the first 4 seconds ICE is running :) o Minor revision to msgutil.ccc, prompted by Jason Gottschalk's <os2@tir.com> post to the MR/2 ICE mailing list. Ctrl-F3 has been made to support viewing of HTML embedded within a message. I only stole a small part of his code (with permission, of course!) but like his code layout better than mine and will model the next release after that. Thanks Jason! Changes included in v0.99t -------------------------- NOTE, AGAIN!: If you've registered MR/2 ICE and are not getting email notifications of new version (and want them, I guess), please drop me a note specifying your serial number, real name and email address. OS/2 Shareware's system does not provide an email address, and I sometimes miss the BMT Micro carbon copies (but do get email addresses later). o More printing issues. Polling my list of registered users, we came up with a majority confirmation that long descriptions passed to various drivers caused trouble. I've fixed a limit of 40 chars to spooled file descriptions (detail printer view document descriptions). This should help tremendously. Some other printing changes ... I'm hoping to hear of great results, but I assume I'm not quite done yet. NOTE: Form change dialogs. I added these in and expect some of the remaining problems to be with these. If the driver knows you last printed on Legal paper, or on Envelopes, the Job Properties dialog will pop up. There still seems to be a problem here (it still doesn't print after changing the settings) and I am looking into this. If this message comes up, try setting the properties outside of ICE, then reloading and printing again. BTW, the default paper size is LETTER for printed messages. I am curious as to if this causes problems for European users. Let me know and I will try to address them. UPDATE: I modified things a bit at the last minute <oh no! gasp> and the popup job properties seem to be recognized now. We'll see. o Modified printer.tf some. Removed the $HEADER dump of raw headings, cleaned up spacing and alignment a bit. o Sorry. I had inserted a new formatting loop in versions S/S2 that was invoked on pressing the SEND button. Very slow, very inefficient. Caused long message (e.g., attachments) to slow so badly that you would think the system was locked. Fixed (rewritten, then written in assembler). o Printer settings use the same code in all 3 places it can be invoked. o Added some code to the HELP menu for "Registration info" and added a new "View read.me file" option. Works OK, except I now realized that the internal editor has no print capabilities (can't print the registration form!) so it still needs some work. o Yes, I fixed several tiny bugs, but I can't recall them at this time. Humph. I'm getting old :) Most of the focus *was* on printers, tho, and now that I'm close on this (I think?), I'll spend less time on it and get some other stuff done. Changes included in v0.99s -------------------------- NOTE 1: If you've registered MR/2 ICE and are not getting email notifications of new version (and want them, I guess), please drop me a note specifying your serial number, real name and email address. OS/2 Shareware's system does not provide an email address, and I sometimes miss the BMT Micro carbon copies (but do get email addresses later). NOTE 2: Groups. I'm working on some instructions, as this is creating much confusion. At the same time, I'm thinking about ways to improve this. Printing took an incredible amount of time this week. QP, configuration issues (Explorer, ftp, code pages, etc) and the a blitz on RMB menus are next; lots of great ideas! o Printing? I believe it's fixed ... at least the BIG problem with formated printing. It turned out to be a driver-specific problem, which I knew before but couldn't place any logic behind it. I have an office HPIII and HP4Plus that work perfectly. Others had HP's that wouldn't. It all depended on how the driver handled a seldom-used FORM specification. This parameter is usually ignored, so it is now removed and I've managed to print to my collection of dot-matrix test drivers. IF YOU STILL have a problem with formated printing, please let me know. I'd like to know the version of WARP you are using (I've found that this matters in this case), the printer driver used, and and trap address and source. I NEED ONLY the address as in "generated an access violation at xxxxxxxx" and the module (MR2I.EXE, PMSPL.DLL, etc). o Other printer additions: settings. The "Other port" option for draft printing has been enabled. You can now specify any weirdness you want, although error checking is at a bare minimum. Specified file/device is opened in "append text" mode. Also, a new draft setting that controls the end-of-print form feed. Sometimes it's needed, sometimes it produces a blank page. Now you can pick which one you want. o I added some code to make printer selection persistent. Testing will be very limited, and I'll know quickly if something doesn't work. It's simple enough, tho. o The formating problem with outgoing text has been fixed. It had to do with left over LF's, usually in pasted text whose lines were previously wrapped longer that MR/2's wrap column. o The Message viewer window now has a menu entry for "Edit->Copy message file name". This copies the fully qualified file name for the current message to the clipboard. o Minor bugs: Auto-split window should now work when replying from a folder. o I tried to switch the filter system's REXX stuff to not load the command processor by calling RexxStart() directly. Still needs work. o Ctrl-Fkey invoked REXX functions ... oh well, I didn't get a chance to finish for this release. Basically, a REXX file is invoked with a key code and the file name, so you can do ANYTHING you want, including detaching binhex and mime attachments. This isn't what I'll depend on for this ... it's just an escape for "special processing". There's a msgutil.ccc file that can be renamed to a cmd. UNDERSTAND, please, that this whole thing may be reworked in the next release. Consider it a toy/prototype at this time. Ctrl-F9 is not processed, Ctrl+F1->F12 are available other that that. Stay tuned. Changes included in v0.99r -------------------------- March is almost here. I have committed to release a v1.0 sometime in this month, and it is important to do so. This will undoubtable mean that v1.0 will not have all of the features on my to-do list. That list has been growing at a fast pace, and some long-time entries have not yet been addressed. Releasing a v1.0 is a mere formality to me ... work will not cease, and I will continue to upgrade the product quickly. I'm pushing it with once-a-week releases, I will probably drop back to every 2 weeks, with "specials" in between, when warranted. I anxiously await the release of the two major competitors' updates. Right now they have a bit of an advantage, as my work is out in the open and there's still a bit of mystery as to what to expect from "them". I can't wait to have some visible and relatively static new targets :). And there's the key ... I do not believe that the competitors can maintain the pace that I intend to keep. Only one has the resources, but they also have the most overhead. We'll see. It will be interesting. Rest assured. If you see a v1.00, v1.01 will be out in another week or two, v1.02 shortly after that. That's how I've reached a version level of 2.26 with the QWK reader, usually at a .01 release at a time :) I've been beating back bugs. Lot's of them. Again, not documenting too well: o Editing template sections is now more reliable. Problems with changing the size of a section have been fixed. o TCP/IP updates w/regards to SMTP sends ... minor bug with one user's host. Some other changes with POP3 receives and odd packet sizes. o Replies crashing on send from folders AND navigation being disabled upon incoming mail. This was a tricky one to fix, but I believe it's reliable now. When a message was being copied/moved to a folder (including the copies done by incoming filters), the entire folder index was reloaded, invalidating the previously loaded memory image of any one that was open. Fixed. o Ah. I have dusted off my assembler books. MR/2 ICE now includes two small assembler routines for manipulating message contents. This code was applied to some new areas, so existing code will not increase in speed. However, I see many places where things can be made snappier with some assembler applied. I will start to do this over time, probably more realistically AFTER v1.0. I once wrote a database code generator and report writer (under CTOS/BTOS) that blew away all the competition w/regards to speed (and features, too :). I accredited the speed to a small core set of assembler helpers. I will apply the same technology to MR/2 ICE. o ALT-Q, paste with quote, now wraps better (by removing previous line breaks). o Minors: RMB invocation of explore.exe will clean up URL's better. Updated the default template file for forwards. Preparing for the support of selectable sigs and secondary-account specific support files. Edit menu would disable entries when switching "back" to the source message ("<" button) that were never reenabled. Fixed. New reply-time variable: @SignatureFile@ that doesn't yet have a use :) Spell checker buglets, a couple accelerator issues, etc.,. o POP receives. Yet another strange case where lost data occured was plugged. This was due to a connection disconnect and a subsequent hurried closing if ICE my the user, but it still had ugly results. This effected PURGE mode only. I have cleaned up the warning message so as not to invoke unneeded panic and fixed it so that the same actions will not lose messages. NOTE that I have also removed a "cleanup by purging old messages" loop that may result in dupes. Maybe. Better this than lost data, IMO. o Oh, yes! Almost forgot (Cheryl :-). I added persistence when dropping a font on the INBOX. If this works OK, I'll add it to the others. This is a test ... colors are pending, but dragging a font to the inbox should "stick". There are some kinks, most w/regards to non CP850 fonts that will be fixed next release. o I have added some code to Filters that enables a REXX script to be executed upon a filter match. This is preliminary and spawns a command shell for now, until I rework it. I also have an example script that I will use to maintain, over time, an automated mailing list. The file is provided as maillist.ccc ... you should copy this to a .cmd file. I will only update the .ccc file, so that overwriting any modifications you may make will be avoided. To invoke this file at this time. I use this as so: Link to Rexx: maillist.cmd maillist.lst The mail message file name is appended to this command line and the script is run. Maillist.lst is the email address list I want to create ... it can vary based on your needs. Naming the list in this manner allows multiple lists to be supported. The script support two commands at present, SUBSCRIBE and UNSUBSCRIBE, both as the first word of the subject line. Obviously this is work-in-progress, but it will fill a long-standing personal need :). You would then use it by defining a group, where the group consist of At Least this file (maillist.lst) as an entry. I *do* intend on continuing until ICE can work as a list server (receiving posts and routing them to all members on the list). GENERAL NOTES! 1. The movement between open folders issue was brought to my attention again just now. This, after a bit of a rough discussion on Usenet not long ago. As I explained that I didn't, personally, like PM Mail's setup for folders, I remembered another gadget I had coded to help here. The Windows menu. Has anyone ever looked at this with a bunch of windows/folders open? You should! It's a quick and dirty index into almost any open and accessible MR/2 Window. The same menu is on the main notebook as well as each message window. Editor windows are not listed, but are on my todo's. Just a subtle "fun fact". 2. Installation over existing setups causes constant concerns. And questions. I have built the ZIP files so that the risk of overwriting user-modified files is slim. So, USUALLY, it is safe to simply unzip a new distribution set over an existing setup. I WILL RECCOMMEND, as always, to backup the MR/2 ICE base directory, as a precaution. This also gives you protection against a newly introduced bug that might render your mail system unworkable. Changes included in v0.99q ----------------------- --- SIMPLE HELP NEEDED: I would like to see some examples of ISO-8859 based messages that are not *-1 or *-2 character sets. Does anyone receive messages in one of the other char sets that can forward a copy to nick@secant.com? Thanks! ALSO, I'm looking for suggestions for OTHER ftp sites on which to place MR/2 ICE initially on release. Places that will benefit large numbers of people and ease the strain on my site. I'll gladly crosslink my web page to these sites. Gary Hammer's page would be a great choice, I'll write him, but he's pretty quick about grabbing released anyway! Specifically, a place in Europe would be ideal. I've had some suggestions, but upon logging into these 2 sites, had no idea where I would even place the files! Just trying to spread things about some, and improve access. o Unsynchronized SEND and RECEIVE threads. From the beginning, I coded it so you could not do both at once. Not sure why, but I spent the week with them de-synched and all worked well. I received messages while waiting for my last MR/2 released notice was going out. I see even more possibilities here :) o A host of bug fixes ... bugs introduced in the P version. Sorry! includes /L crashing, Read/check marks having a mind of their own and others. Once again, I wasn't too careful about remembering them all. Oh, also the new install blank-page-if-no-data-to-list bug was fixed. o Improvements to Multiple Account support. Passwords now work <again!> as do the menu options for change password and delete profile. Oh, ya, pathing bug fixed when a default profile is created by simply starting with the /Mnewprofile.cfg flag. I've got just a couple minor issues to handle this week to call this "done". The biggest issue is how to allow each account to have sigs, filters and templates with the least negative impact on existing setups. A couple of other ideas, too ... o I've created a reindex.exe utility, not included this time but will be next release. This will aid in the creation of more other-mailer to ICE migration tools, as I've externalized the hardest part of MR/2 ICE messages ... the message index creation. o Printing is still struggling, although I've made headway. If I can't close out the largest of the bugs in the next week, I may back off and code up a simpler system, worrying about all the fancy features later. Sorry this has continued on so long ... Changes included in v0.99p --------------------------- I've included the listings for a couple of interrim v0.99o fixes in this list, since only a couple of folks collected the patched releases. I also didn't do any better with documenting smaller bugs that were fixed. I know I did quite a few. I should be handling the smaller ones more quickly. o Code Pages - I handled Latin-2 conversions, but my libraries always used a CP850 font. Fixed to honor the systems current CP. o CP conversions STILL weren't done unless quoted-printable was specified. Fixed. Also, "quoted-printable" was tested for too tersely, and was not found if prefixed with too many spaces. o Minor menu disabling for folder index fixes. o Conversion of QP and Base64 codes in message headers. There are still a few quirks, but they are minor. o Folder indices may now be closed simply by clicking on the "Close Window) icon, third from the left. It seemed more handy to change the meaning somewhat. We'll try it and see. o Folder message count fixes. Again. o More menu items disabled when not appropriate. o Two more viewer navigation options ... open next/previous INDEX search hit. I'm sure I'll find plenty more of these, and I'll probably add the "delete" versions, too. o Some minor fixes to Multiple Accounts. I expect to delve into this more this week. That, and finally, formated printing. o Reworked this read me so that change logs are at the top of the file. The Changes included in v0.99o -------------------------- I had hoped to have more "results" in this release, but the process of debugging the printing is still underway. I understand the problem(s) much better, but don't (yet) have concrete, blanket results. o How to say this ... printing sometimes works again :). If you were able to print formated before, then couldn't, you probably can again. The major problem with formated printing still exists ... but I've narrowed it down. o Miscellaneous filter issues handled ... saving, modifying, initial entry activation. What's there seems to be stable now. o Folder issues with marking read messages, handling counts, etc. Some fixed, a few more to track down. o Quite a few bugs that I don't remember ... it was one of those weeks where I tried to fix some things as soon as I heard about them, but failed to write them down. For example: Web Explorer was launched as a child of MR/2 ICE. So, exiting MR/2 ICE would close any internally launched WEB links. Fixed so that WE's are separate independent session. o Translation cleanups. ICE now recognizes the MIME quoted-printable header regardless of the charset and performs escape char translations. o Character set conversions. I massively rewrote this into the ultimate conversion engine (IMHO :). MR/2 ICE now supports 45 code pages / character sets, including ISO-8859-1 thru 9. It supports more code pages than standard Warp does at this time, but I've planned for the future :). No DBCS code page conversion is supported at this time. All MIME ISO headers (1-9) should be properly converted for display. I still have send-side conversions to handle. I'd like to hear, either positively or negatively, if display-side conversions are working for you (this goes out to non-US users mostly, I guess!). Is this working OK for you or not? o I've removed the DBCS flags from all ENTRY fields ... pasting should now work. Investigating better fixes ... o Multiple Instances of MR/2 ICE may now be started, as long as EACH instance references a different mail configuration file. This allows the monitoring of different accounts. For example, if you've created a second "account" to monitor mail at a different ISP, and that account is called ISP2 (thus, a file ISP2.CFG exists), you can monitor mail for both the "default" account, mail.cfg and ISP 2 this way: start MR2i start MR2i /Misp2.cfg Changes included in v0.99n2 --------------------------- o Filter bugs. First, I left filtering out of SMTP "read" mode. Fixed. o Filters would actually NOT filter some messages. This was due to the unobvious occurence of a name collision. What this proves is my filter-error recovery works great (if an error occurs, message stays in the inbox). I've fixed the name collisions ... I could explain what happened, but it doesn't matter ... it's fixed. This problem arose when TWO or more messages filtered within the same second to the same folder. All but the first one would fail and remain in the inbox. o Filter maintenance ... saves sometimes weren't performed. Fixed. Changes included in v0.99n -------------------------- There is MUCH new code in this release. Please, save your v0.99m executable as a precaution, just in case something doesn't work right for you. Previous MR/2 ICE version are usually available on my ftp site in the mr2i sub directory. o Added inbound support for quoted-printable message (simple MIME messages using the ISO-8859-1 character set). Display only support at this time (no outgoing translations). Messages sent in ISO-8859 with proper headers will automatically be converted to your default code page. Only code pages 850,437,860,863 and 865 are supported at this time. This means that those anoying "=0D" symbols in certain messages should be converted, and hi-end ASCII should display language-specific characters properly. Let me know how this works ... o Filters? You bet! Consider this a "real beta", as this code is all new and messes with the heart of my email delivery engine. It still has worked flawlessly here. The Filter Maintenance form gives away many of my ideas, and there were even some I believe to be original! It all starts under the Utility menu. There are many areas of the Filter form that are disabled, as the code to support them is not there yet. What you have at this time is a pick of simple or freeform search criteria. You can copy/move a matching messages into a specific folder, if desired. You can then choose to keep the message in the inbox or delete it from the inbox. If no folder is specified, and you delete the message, it is the same as "killing" it. Simple searches let you pick the area(s) to test, and a simple keyword or phrase (multiple words inside double quotes!). Boolean symbols are allowed, but this mode is meant for users having simple search needs. Freeform searches follow the syntax spelled out for text searches, below (see version L). This allows for very complex search criteria to be specified. For example, it is possible to test a user-defined header line and match against its content. Only Inbound filters are supported at this time. You can see from the other options on the form hints of my intended direction. o Font selection and application to the Message Viewer/Editor. Certain outline fonts were shown in the font selection pick list, but were not actually used when selection. This has been corrected, and the Russian font example kindly supplied by a user works just fine :). I also fixed the font selection dialog to display with the currently active font displayed. A bug remains with the outline fonts where point size is not selected correctly. I'll work on that ... o Folder Index has been enhanced to show a count of "new" messages and to display folders with new messages in red. o Folder message listings now work better ... icons correspond to the original status of the message, and status-line counts tend to be more accurate :). May still be some strangeness, but much of what's been reported is fixed. Changes included in v0.99m -------------------------- o Another UUencoding bug fixed ... actually a bug in the MLE text import code that would have the largest effect on attached files. Occurred when a partial section being imported ended with a LF. o Double click on a word in the editor no longer invokes popup menu. o Double click to close a window would press an underlying toolbar botton. Fixed. o Filters have been started and are mostly "in", although you can't see them yet! I have spec'd out what I believe to be an extremely comprehensive filter system. I looked at quite a few "other mailers", and read all user comments I have received to date (NOTE that I could not find filters within Eudora ... but I'm no expert!). All of this will be implemented in due time, although a subset will probably be offered to get everyone started. o New configuration option: Queue unsent message on program start. Does just that ... a popular request! o I laxed off on the nag screen a little. I moved it back so as to start popping up after 120 days instead of 60. This will move back to 30-60, once I release, but I felt funny bugging people this early. ALSO note that, once released, unregistered users' X-Mailer line will be marked with "(unregistered)" after the grace period. This isn't enabled yet ... o Worked on code to handle individualized group sends ... something that will allow groups to be used with POP3 sends too. Not ready yet, but just so you know what I'm working on :) Changes included in v0.99l -------------------------- o You can now register via the OS/2 Shareware BBS, online with any major credit card! Use your modem to call the OS/2 Shareware BBS at (703) 385-4325 or telnet into os2bbs.com. o Resending a message multiple times now only sends it once. A message can exist in the send queue only once. After the queue is cleared, it can be readded, but not until. o Address book doubling fixed. o Folder deletion would not remove the folder directory if it was ever reindexed. Fixed. o Yet another POP3 server variation ... server never reports size of a message. I now have a mechnism that expands the message buffer before overflow. Should have done it this way to begin with ... o Pasting-with-quote strangeness fixed up. Also Remove CR's (CTRL-F9) tendency to chop tail carraige return off. o Marked source-message text is used as the source for a reply's quote if more than 40 characters are marked. o Delete-and-Next now works correctly on the LAST message in the list. o Forwarding a message now respects the "always use external editor" setting. o Logout now confirms with a message box before clearing the current profile. o OK, I added some new search code in. While it doesn't yet show, there are a TON of new features in the program :). For those of you familiar with MR/2 Classic, the complete Virtual Conference string-match engine is now in, waiting to be thoroughly exploited. This code will be the basis for filters, too. o I've added to the main index FIND menu ... Text search options. This will allow you to text search through the contents of ALL message in the currently displayed index. This begs for some polish and options (and I'll get these in quickly). The search is currently NOT MULTITHREADED and will make you wait, but will pop up the first "hit" message and highlight all hits. There are new "Navigate" message-menu options for next hit, previous hit. In all, a basic "grep" system. Now, for text search strings, ICE supports full boolean expressions, parenthesis for grouping, forced case sensitivity (case is ignored by default) and exact word matches. Oh, and soundexing. Thanks to MR/2 Classic again :) I have many. many other ideas ... I'll steal some samples from MR/2 Classic's docs and include here to provide some "quick start" instructions for those that want to try this out. x Boolean match logic is now available ... Keywords can be OR'd together, AND'd together and/or NOT'd. In addition, parenthesis can be used to control the evaluations of the test. There is also an operator that will match a word, remaining sensitive to case. I've also added support for quoted strings so that spaces and the special boolean operator symbols can still be searched for. Some simple examples: (OS/2 | OS2) & !WARP (OS/2 or OS2) and not warp Windows & OS/2 Windows and OS/2 Windows | OS/2 Windows or OS/2 ^warp warp, but ONLY if all lower case letters The "operator" symbols follow the conventions used by C and C++ for boolean operations: & is the AND operator | is the OR operator ! is the NOT operator () cause the expression inside to be evaluated as a single expression. and two others that I added: ^ causes a case-sensitive match to be performed. The word that follows must be found with matching capitalization to be concidered a "match". ~ causes an exact word match to be required. String/phrase that follows must be found with standing on it's own; not imbedded within another strings. The following will find all messages that contain one or two different words referencing OS/2 that also mentions "bugs". if the message doesn't match under this criteria, then it is tested for the words "Windows" and "slow" in the same messages: ((OS/2 | OS2) & bugs) | (Windows & slow) The following is somewhat similar. It will also find all messages that contain one of two different words referencing OS/2 that also mentions "bugs". If the message is found to match, then it is tested for the words "Windows" and "slow" in the same messages. If these words are both found, however, the message is eliminated (compliments of the "!" NOT operator): ((OS/2 | OS2) & bugs) & !(Windows & slow) A few more examples: ObjectPM | "Object PM" spaces are ignored unless witin quotes "R&D" operator characters must be in quotes if part of a search string. R&D finds the single letters R and D, anywhere in the message. This *isn't* what you want! "(ch | 0xFF)" more special characters within quotes. The operator characters will be treated as any other characters. """Windows""" Looks funny? It will find the Windows in message but only if between quote marks. Two quotes together are treated as a single " mark, but they must still be part of an entire quoted string. Tricky? Maybe. Just know that ... ""Windows"" WILL NOT WORK, and that ... "can you say ""neighbor""?" will find the prase 'can you say "neighbor"?' The word neighbor must be within quotes to be concidered a match. "&Windoze" Soundex search for anything sounding similar to "Windows". ^warp | phasers Looks for the word "warp" in all lower case ONLY, or the word "phasers" ^NT | ^Nick Looks for the capital letters "NT" or the string "Nick" where only the N is capitalized. x Further enhancements to the text-string search function. Support for selecting message-specific areas to check within a search specification. For example, you can now ask for all message that have "OS/2" in the SUBJECT field, but not in the message itself. You may tag any word, or set of words within matched parenthesis, with a set of areas to test. The default is to test all parts of the message. For example: {S}OS/2 Matches "OS/2", only checking SUBJECT {F}"jim@gilliland.com" Finds ONLY message FROM Jim Gilliland {M}"Tim McClanahan" & !{FT}"Tim McClanahan" Finds references to Tim McClanahan inside any message text, but excludes messages FROM or TO him. {S}(MR/2 | MR2 | MR-2) Matches any of these three strings when they exist in the SUBJECT field. {Conclusion} Probably won't find what you want :) "{Conclusion}" Probably is what you want. Finds any occurence of the word "Conclusion" that is enclosed between curly-brackets. Valid areas are From, To, Subject, Message and Header, represented by the letters F, T, S, M and H, respectively. The value 'H' may be followed by a header field "tag" to specify a specific header line. For example: {H:Cc}nick@secant.com will match all email cc'addressed to me !{H:X-Mailer}"" will find all messages without an X-MAILER header line. {H:X-Mailer}"MR/2" will find all messages with an X-MAILER header line containing "MR/2". {H:X-Mailer}"" & !{H:X-Mailer}"MR/2" will find all messages with an X-MAILER header line that does NOT containing "MR/2". Another search string modifier ... the tilde (~). This, when placed at the very beginning of a keyword, requests the match be qualified as an "exact word match". If the strings is embedded as part of some other word, it will not match. For example, searching for the word "owl" will match "owl", but also words like "knowledge" and "scowl". Using the search string "~owl" will match only with "owl" as a standalone word. Beginning and end of line cases are handled correctly in this mode. Changes included in v0.99k -------------------------- o Fixed a dozen or so little bugs, most of which I didn't record. Mostly smaller items. In particular, I remember the logging out bug that left folders open. o Problem with POP3 polls in purge-from-server mode. Under certain circumstances, the internal start counter would get corrupt and the risk of losing mail was possible. I've fortified this code, making sure the count is always remembered conservatively. o FP16 kludge/fix. I spent alot of time with a couple of select users creating intermediate version with more logging built in. During this process, I determined that the exit problem appears to be originating in the formatted printer object of MR/2 ICE. I don't know why yet, and I probably won't look harder under the FP16 fix is out. I've got to rework the printer code anyway. NOTE that I'm not POSITIVE this is the problem, but the logs indicate it probably is. I also made soem thread code changes that might help. If MR/2 ICE exits under Fp16 for you, try running with /V. This suppresses the formatted printer driver. I'll await further feedback (as to whether this allows ICE to be loaded reliably). Changes included in v0.99j -------------------------- o Logging into a account would automatically poll for mail. This has been changed to respect the "automatically poll for mail" flag of the newly loaded profile. o Modified startup logging to flush the output buffer after every line. This will prevent 0 length log files and perform the function it was meant to do in the first place. o Resizing of open folder pages now works correctly. o Reorganizing the index of an open folder would leave the folder selection entry in an inconsistent state. This caused a crash if it was reopened. Fixed. o Wow. The option to edit the header AFTER editing never really worked. I guess most people (except for the 2 folks that reported this problem :) don't use the after options! Changes made on the "after" header form were totally ignored. Fixed. o Related somewhat to the above, I removed the inconsistencies I could find with the insertion of the "Re:" prefix in Subjects. This was getting inserted far too often. Small nit, but it bothered me :) o Split screen editor resets to single screen once reply is sent. o Reworked the Inbox and Outbox popup menus a bit. Removed things that weren't implemented and/or didn't make sense here. Add the abitlity to rebuild the message index for each of these lists. Rebuilding a major index is something that shouldn't be done without a reason. I will add more text to the confirmation screen in order to explain more thoroughly. Changes included in v0.99i -------------------------- This is a quick intermediate release targeted towards fixing a few items I broke in the last two release. That, and to make LaMail imports cleaner. o File names generated by MR/2 ICE are always full 8 digit names with 3 char suffixes. Shorter base names did not previously function correctly under ICE. Now they do. The only suffixes officially recognized for messages are still .RCV and .OUT. o Multiple Accounts. The new password logic prevented account configs made with older version from working. I now check the DATE the config (the profile) was created, and if before 12/26/95, the password is tested against the user name (the OLD way). Otherwise, the password must match that chosen at creation time. There's a grey area here that isn't handled, but it's small. o Beeping on SEND attempts subsequent to a failure are suppressed. Changes included in v0.99h -------------------------- Bad week, but I still managed to fix many bugs ... and I believe I'm ready with OS/2 Shareware registration utilities. I have a on of code items started, but can't add them until I've had more time to test. o Logging was changed quite a bit (error/event logging, invoked by the command line switch /L). The output is directed to a file named "mr2i.log" ... redirection is no longer neccessary and, in fact, will no longer have any effect. I've added logging for the entire startup process of MR/2 ICE. This in an attempt to track problems with fixpack #16 and ICE. If your program exits starngely upon startup, please run: mr2i /L and try again. If it exits again, please email me the file "mr2i.log". Thanks. o Focus issues, fixed as they were reported. o Yet-another attached file problem, caused by the MLE import routines. Adjusted one more time. o Pop3 purging is now performed by the mail fetching thread. This means that the rest of the interface is functional while purging. o I modified some procedures related to the key system. o Refixed the POP3 receive thread for message size reports that are not what was previously expected. The G fix didn't work, this one does (as reported by two test subjects :). o Flush send queue after successful POP3 poll. This happens automatically, but only if a previous send failed because of a missing internet connection failed. Only mail queued in this session is resent. I've got some other ideas, but this will provide most of the functionality that has been frequently requested here recently. o Modified all ENTRY type fields to allow DBCS sequences. Thanks to Matt Smith (ala Prominaire Designer) for the inside scoop. This may not solve all of the DBCS issues, but I'm working on them! o On a side note, I managed to figure out how to convert character sets to the "current" code page so that non-US displays can show message correctly. This code is not currently in, but I've been enlightened :) o Better error handling of "disk full" and other write-type errors when trying to record new mail. These were not properly accomodated previously. Changes included in v0.99g -------------------------- o The BIG news, athough I can't take credit for it! CONVERSIONS!! Dave Martin has provided two well-done REXX scripts that will convert PM Mail and LaMail addresses and folders to MR/2 ICE format. They worked well with my test setups! See my web page at http://nick.secant.com for more info. I received another smaller REXX file converted, but did not get a response from the author when I asked if I could post it. Will try again, but these two look very capable! o BMT Micro is now carrying MR/2 ICE. Credit card orders can be placed with BMT Micro at 1-800-414-4268 or visit their WEB page at http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro, or email them at orders@bmt.wilmington.net. I will also be taking advantage of the OS/2 Shareware BBS registration system set up by Peter Norloff. I just have to get busy and write a small utility! ... o Bug where POP3 server sent back message size in an unusual place/format. All the info is there, but the SIZE of the message isn't where MR/2 expect it. So, it "defaulted" to 96K. When this happens, large message would cause trouble. I now have beefed up the size parsing and I think I've got all the bases covered now. o Also saw some extra work being done by MR/2 ICE, because of the buffer size I chose. By increasing my buffer size internally by one character, I've cut down the number of packets transfered on some system ... by half! My bet is that the size issue is common o POP3 receive ... closing of messages invoked a cleanup filter that was horribly inefficient. I spent a short time on this and sped it up tremendously, most noticable with large (uuencoded) messages. o Persisitence of POP3 counter on failure ... MR/2 ICE will now save the last-read counter on each successful read. Previously, on error, MR/2 would reread many successfully improted messages when restarted. o Folder sorting has been implemented (the form was always there, but no code was behind it). Rebuilding a folder index no longer does the strange things it used to (although I'm aleways watching for other stange things to appear :) o Counts on folder index screens, folder edits (name, tab text) now save; were previously not flushed to disk. o Open Folder lists now update when added-to using MOVE or COPY message. o Move/Copy on RMB menu have been enhanced to be "conditional cascade" sub menus. You can still click on the COPY or MOVE text to invoke the pick-list dialog. Alternately, you can now click on the arrow symbol to get options for NEW folder, or to pick from a list of commonly used folders. o You have always been able to edit Folder info from the folder screen by highlighting a folder and using the RMB to "edit" the folder. This form has a "include in MOVE/COPY submenus" checkbox. Checking this for folders of you choice will include them in the submenu mentioned above. The Y/N flag is now shown on the Folder List, and I'll eventually allow toggling of this flag from there. o Multiple Account improvements. While not completely finished, things work a little bit better. For example, any NEW account created will remember and enforce the specified password. Folder lists are now correctly modified and displayed as accounts are changed. Accounts that already exist still have a password that matches the user name; I'll allow you to change this next time. o I almost forgot ... I added some code to the logic that is triggered the very first time you run MR/2 ICE. The program invokes the settings notebook, then immediately explains the common Cirrus Logic video bug that exists, and asks you if you see the settings tabs. If you respond that the BUG does indeed exists, MR/2 ICE sets up a "forced /F9" command line flag. You can override this with a command line switch, and I'll have this option on the settings form next version. o ALSO, if you invoke the speller and/or thesaurus, and the necessary files do not exist on your system, MR/2 will now pop up a text file (via an editor window) that explains how it works, and where to get the files. It also suggests using the RBM to load my home page into the browser. o Fixed a problem with some URL's that wouldn't load from the RMB "Web browser" option. Had to do with them starting with tab characters. Fixed. Converted the ftp logic to also load the browser, at least for now! Changes included in v0.99f -------------------------- I did alot this week, but I don't have much to list. I spend tons of time finalizing the registration scheme. I will start sending registration keys via email very soon. I fixed a dozen or so bugs, but I wrote no details down. I started several really neat ideas, but can't even hint at them until I'm further along :). I expect the next 2 weeks to consist of filling in gaps and crossing off items on my bug list. This includes the uglies in the area of Folders. I have started "filters", but this is a biggie and will take a bit of time. At least for what I want to do :). I worked more than I should have trying to get printing problems resolved. I made progress, I was able to identify much of the problem ... waiting for Secant's Component division to give me some time to fix it. I expect this to be soon :) o Pop-up "context" menus in the viewer and message editor. Use the RMB to quickly cut, copy, append, paste, reply, forward and send. There are some other options, and some disabled items waiting for completion. Oh, the speller and thesaurus entries are enabled, but appear only on the Editor side. NOTICE, please, the Web Browser and FTP entries on this menu. Click on any fully qualified URL and select one of these to invoke a separate session. Configuration is called for, but it is functional as it stands. I launch the commands EXPLORE or FTP, depending on what you select. If you use some other browser or FTP client (I use ncFtp), simply make an EXPLORE.CMD or an FTP.CMD in the MR/2 ICE directory. For example, my ftp.cmd file looks like: ncftp %1 NEVERMIND. It appears this doesn't work (creating an ftp.cmd file). I know why. I'll leave it like this until next release, where I'll at least convert to CMD files so you can do what you want. Better if this can all be configured from a dialog ... So, if your mail includes a web page URL, left click once, RMB, Web Browser and you're loading it. There's a listing for a file you want, with a fully qualified URL (for example, ftp://nick.secant.com/mr2i099f.zip), a couple of clicks and another session is loading it. o Fixed a case where the accent character (`) was used in a subject field and blew up my cell box (inbox) code. I selected this code as my field delimiter. All of my index entries now filter for this character. o Groups: The address field is no longer required before allowing a pick-list button to work. Other minor fixes. BTW, groups do not work with POP3 sends. I have to think about this, but the current technique for exanding groups requires that MR/2 lists the recipients, and the To: line is ignored. This is contrary to how POP sending works. o External Edit: I was ignoring the option of hiding headers in the editor window. If this is checked, the external edit does not have access to the message header. o New Registration dialog under the main HELP menu. Will allow me and other distributors to supply key codes for "instant registration", or at least "quick email registration". o More fixes ... I just can't recall them at this time. Changes included in v0.99e -------------------------- o Address Groups are now "in" and seem to be functioning well. There has been a minimal of testing, tho. I personally created a couple of small groups that worked well. I also created three larger groups, all external-file based. One contained all of my original beta testers, one contained all users who have registered to-date, and the third combined these two by "including" the two lists by tag. I have tried to come up with a very flexible group-addressing scheme, but in doing so, may have made it look a little more complex than it really is. Groups can be simple lists of individual addresses, all maintained online. Groups can also be mixes of individual addresses, address book tags, other group tags, and "address from file" entries. I have included code to prevent circular references, but the error messages/warnings are weak at this time. An address file is simply a text file (I started using the file extension ".lst") that contains one address entry per line. Great for those of us who keep lists generated from "other" programs. Oh, yes, these entries can also be address book tags, group tags or other file references. THE one thing sorely missing is a "pick group" button on the header entry form and the Pick Group button on address entry needs to be hooked to the same code. Next release. Groups WILL popup in the RMB menu, if the appropriate checkbox is marked. As a short example, you could easily create a group that references three other groups. Each of these groups could reference whatever they needed to ... more groups, addresses from a file, address book entries and/or individual addresses. I'm open for comments. Try it out, let me know what you think, and feel free to give me your ideas :). Oh, one last note. Group address entries can be disabled. To toggle the checkmarks, you can euse the "edit" button on each, but clicking ON THE LISTBOX CHECKMARK will also toggle it. o Importing text CLOSE to 64K would chop a small portion of the text. This became acutely apparent when I tried to send a UUEncoded file that was about 63K. The problem was the import into the MLE ... I had the "switch to my pieces-parts import" threshold set too close to the MLE's chop-point. Fixed. o Font selection ... for some silly reason I was showing only BitMap fonts. That will teach me to steal code from sample programs without studying it closer :). Fixed. o Template processing would sometimes remove the "@" symbol in email addresses and other tokens that were supposed to have them. I believe I fixed this, but it warrants some time-testing. o Hint Bubbles!!! (Tool Tips, whatever you want to call them). They're fixed, at least as far as speed goes. I was able to get some of Mike's time (Mike is Secant's OS/2 Control "guru" :) to look at what was going on. A couple of code snips here and there, and we're operating at blinding speeds. You should be able to turn these on without noticably effecting performance. NOTE that for MAXIMUM performance, they should still be off ... even faster, creating 20 tiny windows still takes time. o Crashes on program load. Some of these (all? Too wishfull a thought, I guess) were caused by my changes to the way the printing system is initialized. If your system had NO OS/2 PRINTER DRIVER installed you would probably crash. If you had a driver with an internal name that did not have a '.' as part of it ... sme thing [My home system had an old IBMNULL with no '.', and when I switched to that printer, crash!]. These have been fixed, although printing itself is still being worked on. o NOTE: an early report of Object Desktop's Tabbed Launchpad crashing ICE on load. This started with a recent update/path to their v1.02 level. Running ICE with the /T switch worked-around this, as did not invoking the tabbed launchpad. They've been notified, write to them if this incoveniences you. o Thesaurus and Speller limits were still in a few obscure places (reported as "Unregistered User" limits). These weren't supposed to be there, and I've removed the ones I can see. I don't believe there are any more. o Message received from some UUCP gateways were crashing ICE on reply. This was due to invalid date formats in the source message's header. I would assume I had a good date and crash on trying to use it. MR/2 now takes precautions and defaults to a zeroed-out date (1/1/1900) if the date is invalid. Maybe not the best technique, but certainly better than crashing :) o Calculator now accepts keystrokes matching the button keys. o Pop3 messages reported to MR/2 as "Error" were previously simply skipped. This would happen here if/when a message was just being recieved by SendMail, the pop server could see it, but the file was still in use by SendMail. Now, MR/2 will retry the message, trying up to 20 times at one second intervals before giving up. o Notebook "back arrow" will no longer show blank pages when invoked from the Inbox screen. o Dozens of other minor fixes too tiny to itemize. Changes included in v0.99d -------------------------- o Well, address groups are close. The whole idea, because I wanted to do it a certain way, is taking longer than I guessed. With a couple of more hours, I would have included it. The menu option for Address Group Maintenance is disabled. It is relatively functional, barring a few bugs, and can be enabled by running with the "//" flag on the command line. This is just so those interested can comment on the overall layout. It is NOT meant for real use, and may change before finalized. SENDS do not recognize Groups yet. In general, groups will allow for lists of raw addresses, aliases, other groups and/or lists of all of these contained within an external file. Resolution will be fully recursive/nested, so that a group can be defined as a set of other groups, and each of those can contain more groups. Address Book entries can contain group names, also. I will add code to prevent circular references. There's a chance I may release a mid-week version, if I can complete and test all of this. I must also finalize my registration key system in the next day or two. o Speedup and memory leaks plugged. Found these while looking for the reason the message window opened so progressively slower. Found that I had left in some debugging code (checking the heap) 2-3 times each message was displayed. Removing these has sped up the message opening greatly. o Added code to SMTP import process to better recover from file in use errors. (LDA is still delivering when ICE tries to import). o Progression indicator on pop receive. Resized both indicators to be smaller and allow more text to show. o Country date settings are now used for most (all?) date/time displays. o External editor is now functional. You can alwasy use the editor by checking the box on Options->User Preferences, or you can invoke it on demand via the Tools->Edit externally menu item from within the message viewer. o SMTP mode would still include LaMail's NDX files. It was a case sensitivity issue. Fixed. o Pressing DEL in the message viewer, then cancel, closed the message. o Suppressed auto poll on startup if auto-poll is off o Toolbar display toggle bug. Toolbar would sometimes appear twice. o Pop3 long UIDL server error messages handled better o Fixed Text searches inside any editor window. Again. This time I believe it's fixed for good :) o Ouch. I accidently hit ALT-C in the reply editor and the message closed w/out warning or chance to save. Fixed. o Mail tab is now set correctly when login to another account. o Internal editor: now gets focus on startup. o Better detection and resolution when tcpip services file is wrong. o Removed pop3 check before optional password prompt. o Mesage window: Close via sysmenu, cancel would crash. Fixed. Changes included in v0.99c -------------------------- What a week. It started off with almost immediately finding that several key features of MR/2 ICE were broken by the B release. I believe this one to be in much better shape. I've got groups/lists pretty close, and the external editor code was yanked at the last second because of a crash in one spot. Next week, I'm sure. BEEP on window open. I tried to get rid of this, but couldn't wait any longer. Sorry! It's only when you double click and the message part is over the click spot. I'll get it, but it will be annoying for a week. o Fixed problems with checking for mail under various user settings. o Pasting text with quoting cleaned up. Still needs another pass :( o Addresses of the form "nick knight <nick@secant.com>" are now normalized so that picky SMTP server's should no longer complain. o Ctrl+, Ctrl-, shift del should now work as they're supposed to. o Cursor pos when header is scrolled off screen starts at current line. o UUEncode process wasn't closing source file. o Complex multi-addresses can now be up to 512 bytes. Still working on groups/distribution lists. o Crash when sending and status displays too long (rare). Fixed. o SMTP Receive and all related file-type problems have been fixed. Sorry! Includes "can't create folder" problem and user not registered on multi-accounts. o AutoSave and sending would sometimes conflict and crash. I do believe this was the crash that was so prevelant, yet random enough to not be recreatable "on demand". My mail has been stable for a couple of days; I'm sure you guys will tell me if something's still loose in the code. o Ctrl-E is now an accelerator to the internal text editor. This is available on both the mail index and message windows. The Message menu's "Edit file" item is now hooked to this editor window. o Notebook page buttons a tad larger o Toolbar FIND on MW no longer loses text highlight. o Problem with POP receive when lines *started* with a '.'. Fixed. Was messing up around 1 out of every 77 uuencoded messages. o Did I mention the calculator? No?? Well, I added a simple, integer- only (no decimal points) calculator to the Utilities. I use this thing often, but can never find it fast. Now I know where it is. This item is an almost snap-in part from Secant Technologies' ObjectPM toolkit, provided there as a sample. I plan on spending very little time improving this, except to add a keyboard interface and full decimal support (all easy). If you find it useful, great, if not, don't use it :) o More fields opened up for hi-end ASCII. Folder form in particular. o Templates are now editable via the Utilities menu. This is brand new code, so I'm watching for bugs. Still can't make a NEW template, but I ran out of time. o Text Editor fix ups and enhancements. o Tons of tiny nats squashed. Changes included in v0.99b -------------------------- Again, my todo list above didn't get all the attention I had hoped to give it. Still, it was a pretty productive week. The best news is that many crashes have been eliminated. There seems to be one more pesky crash scenario that I'm having trouble catching (the crash-on-send), but I've added some code to try and help. Ironically, since doing this, I have been unable to make it crash. I may have fixed it while making other code changes, but only time will tell. Reporting crash addresses is very important with this release. Thanks! QUERY: Has anyone created any from-other-mailer conversion tools that they'd like to share? I've had many requests for conversion tools, and I'd certainly like to supply them, and I know I can. Time is the problem. I can see how to convert PMMail's stuff to my format, but if I stop to do this, I don't get to add important features to my own work. Any REXX guru's want to show there stuff off and get some recognition? Of particular interest are scripts that would convert address books and folders from PM Mail, Post Road Mailer, Ultimail/LaMail and things like PINE. o Added a command line switch: /- which tells MR/2 ICE to minimize on load. There's still some screens displayed, but then it does minimize. o The /S command line options was broken. Fixed. Also, configuring for NO POLLING was ignored. Fixed. o Crash scenario: When paging through message using the next/prev menu command or toolbar options, MR/2 ICE did not properly set a complete message state for each message. This could case crashes under some circumstance. o Crash scenario: Folders not opening, exiting the program abruptly and without explanation, and crashing. This was a big error on my part. Each folder would actually create another copy of the SEND thread, and this would do some very strange things. Fixed. o Crash scenario: Address Book maintenance. Tags/Aliases longer than a couple of characters would cause a crash when the address book as closed/saved. Fixed (sorry!). o New prompt option: disable pop3 counter reset warning/prompt. o Send toolbar icon now has correct bubble hint. Send is no longer disabled in the menu for "new" message. o Bubble hints now use smaller font ... this is possible because: o All 3 Secant-based DLL's are "new" and offer several low level bug fixes, including better font handling. Was not able to "fix" the Cirrus chipset bug, but smaller fonts now space correctly. I hope to freeze these DLL's soon and be able to release updates without the DLL's. o Index cellbox: highlighted text is now WHITE on black background. o Address book listings now show tags/aliases. o Tried to increase secaondary thread robustness. Increased all stack size slightly. More error checking; more overflow detection code added to low-level TCPIP interface code. o Password on POP3 prompt form is now masked from the user. o Opened up many form fields to hi-end ASCII character for the European and Chinese (and other, I guess) uses that have requested this. Please let me know if this helps! o ALT-Q pasting would often crash. I rewrote this routine, and while it does not crash, it still needs work. Next release for sure. o Sig editor added and functional. This will change some next release, but at least you can edit the default SIG file. I missed having the complete template editor ready by an hour or two ... next release for sure. o Simple file editor included on utility menu. Simple? Don't know about that, but I've got more to add to it. I got tired of using the E editor to open files for "clipping" sections. This will work more gracefully, particularly when I add some persistence and history to it. In the meantime, I'm open for comments. o More tiny little changes that I forgot to document. More to come ... Changes included in v0.99a -------------------------- Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your angle :), my todo list above didn't get the attention it deserved. Too many "new" problems were reported that required immediate attention. I expect to have more time this week to "fill in the blanks". I expect weekly-or-so updates until I release v1.0. o Removed the Edit signature file menu item. I added much code to this feature, but it isn't yet workable (made a bigger monster than originally planned out of the editor). This will be readded in the next release, complete with the editor. The signature file can be manually edited with the E editor. Look for "mr2i.sig". Note that the sig file itself is just a very simple file that's "included" by reference into the various template file sections. *This* is where MR/2 ICE gets much of it's power, although not yet documented. *This* is where you can have as many selectable reply templates are you want, each with custom attribution lines, multi-line sigs, information blocks or complete documents as "canned replies". I currently use my own template file to offer canned literature replies for ObjectPM and some of Secant's other products. Just FYI, so the feature doesn't go unnoticed by those of you who might find it useful. Templates are in "mr2i.tf". o SMTP package is now part of the distribution zip. See mr2ilda.doc for more information. o Many bugs and nits fixed ... too numerous to even remember. This version is much more stable than the previous. Still one crash scenario seems to elude me. Perhaps I'll catch it by next release. o Empty template sections now work correctly and don't include parts of the next template section. o Pop sends and "no save" would update the index anyway and cause problems. Fixed. o Removed spell checker and thesaurus limits inherited from me/2. I may reinstate more laxed limits in unregistered programs after 60-90 days. o Resending a message after modifying message would crash most consistently. Fixed. o Protected other multithreaded message handlers so that no harm is done if message is deleted or moved with another thread is processing same. o Some systems have missing default fonts in special windows including the bubble hits, the settings notebook (tabs squashed and no text) and in the calendar. I'm still chasing this one, but to "work around" the problem, those users can now use a sepcified font using the new command line option /F. From the new MR/2 ICE FAQ www page: There seems to be a bug in the class libraries I'm using where, on some systems, the system proportional font fails when used as the "default". I have a system in-house that exhibits this problem, so I'm in search of "the answer". In the meantime, I have added a "default font override" command line parameter: Mr2i /F9 Where a zero is used to denote the System Proportional Font, and a number 1-30 can be used to override this setting (for the problematic windows ONLY). Using /F1 will cause the text to show up and make the application functional. For those that are more particular about their fonts, you can select one of these following numbers: 0 - SystemProp 16 - HelvOLB 1 - Courier8 17 - HelvOLBI 2 - Courier10 18 - TmsRmn8 3 - Courier12 19 - TmsRmn10 4 - CourierOL 20 - TmsRmn12 5 - CourierOLI 21 - TmsRmn14 6 - CourierOLB 22 - TmsRmn18 7 - CourierOLBI 23 - TmsRmn24 8 - Helv8 24 - TmsRmnOL 9 - Helv10 25 - TmsRmnOLI 10 - Helv12 26 - TmsRmnOLB 11 - Helv14 27 - TmsRmnOLBI 12 - Helv18 28 - SysMono10 13 - Helv24 29 - SysMono12 14 - HelvOL 30 - SymbolOL 15 - HelvOLI o While it was possible to use a different POP3 port by editing the TCPIP etc\serviced file and changing the POP entry, I added a command line /P option. Specifying "Mr2i /P1111" will cause ICE to try the port number 1111 for POP3 services. o When the settings were changed to turn word wrap off, MR/2 would fail to quote text correctly. Also, the word wrap column changes were always reset to the default, nomatter what you changed them to. This works much better now :) o I calmed the aggressive rewrapping of text somewhat in an effort to stop MR/2 ICE from messing up user sigs. o SMTP users: Remove *.ndx from SMTP new message list so that LaMail setups would quit importing its inbox.ndx file. o Toolbar: The Reply bitmap is now replaced with a Send bitmap when in Reply or new message mode. o SMTP read settings now do not require POP settings. You may leave these blank, as long as the SMTP Host has been filled in and SMTP reading and sending are used. Changes included in v0.99 ------------------------- First widely distributed beta. The adventure begins. o Message Index counters (notebook status windows) now update. o Various bugs: Re-editing header used to cause extra CR's in messages; paste from clipboard w/quote format improved. Others ... o Settings notebook: more prompt options, more config options. SMTP read choice activated. o Shrunk several forms down to better show on standard VGA systems. Still could use another pass, but at least the settings notebook is mostly on screen :) o SMTP reading is now offered in preliminary form. Write me for the instruction sheet, as I need to know who's using it and what problems are encountered (write nick@secant.com). o Multiple account support added/enhanced. Won't document this until next release or so. o Message window: Toolbar display options functional. New "Pushbutton" option to hide/display bottom buttons. Font toggle on menu. Other minor menu additions. o Tiling and cascading of message windows is in, although some time- testing is required on my end to assur usefulness. o Address book tags now expand! For example, you can attach a tag of "nk" to my default name in the address book (if you are a new user, the starter address book lists me). When creating a new message or sending a reply, you can enter "ice" as a user name and it will expand to my full address upon exiting the field. o Major notebook tabs now default to a "hidden" state. Option on the main index menu enables tabs. Since "news" was not yet functional, these tabs simply wasted screen area. Tabs were also reduced in size, for when they *do* display.