Working With Email

To create a new email, either:

Click the new mail button on the toolbar.
Press Ctrl+N.
Click Mail -> New Message.

To the left of the toolbar you will see panels for the "To" and/or the "From" fields. These can be collapsed to leave more room on the window, when collapsed they appear next to the toolbar. To show them again, click on the "+" sign.

Inscribe: The from panel has a drop down to select a different sending identity from a available list configured in the accounts. To set a default identity use the identity menu in the main window.

If you have text processing plugins loaded they put their commands next to the toolbar.

Under the toolbar is where the "To" and "From" will appear. Depending on the context these window will be made visible. And address in the "To" or "From" panels has a right click context menu that allows certain commands to be executed on that address.

The "To" panel contains a list of recipients that the email was/is sent to. To add another recipient, type an the email address into the space above the list and hit enter. Alternatively if the address is in the contacts database you can just type their first, last or nick name and the address will be looked up automatically. You can also browse the contacts and directory services plugins by clicking the "..." button to show the "Add contact" windows.

To set a recipient to CC or BCC select them in the list and use the right click menu.

You can open the associated contact record by double clicking the recipient. Otherwise if the recipient is not in your contact database, there is a right click menu to add them. This also works on the from panel, handy for adding someone who just emailed you.

The "From" panel shows who the email is from.

Underneath the addressing panels is the subject bar and tabs for the email's content. The first tab displays the text of the email where you can compose your message. The second tab displays a list of files that are attached to the email. If there are attachments present then the tab is bolded. The internet headers tab displays the raw headers of the email. The fields tab has a few extra peices of information not displayed elsewhere. The label on this tab can be used to store custom data and is accessable via the Scribe DOM.

The text compose area seems rather sparten, as there is no "rich text" editing facility. There are quite a few options hidden away in the right click menu of the compose control, to set various parameters and even run some actions.

Using the "remove" sub menu you can strip out leading ">"s that some email client has added along the way. Also cleaning all the HTML tags out of the text is useful for HTML email that is incorrectly marked as "plain/text".

The filter sub menu lets you execute a particular filters actions on the current email. The conditions on the filter are ignored, as the email has already been implicitly "selected" by the user. See the filters section to see what you can do with that.

The convert selection menu allows you to convert the selection of the control to and from base64, in the case that some content is encoded, or you want to encode something.

If the message is not being displayed in the correct charset, then use the right click menu open "change charset" to reload the message in a different charset. This charset will be saved with the message if you hit "save" on the toolbar. It has no effect on email you are composing but it's useful for viewing incorrectly encoded incoming email.

Using Attachments

To attach files to a email you are composing, either click the attach files button on the toolbar or right click in the attachment list (away from existing entries) and browse to the file you want to attach. Or you can drag the file onto the mail window from the explorer/tracker window.

To view an attachment sent to you, double click the entry in the attachment list. It will save the file to a tempory directory and open it using the program associated in the operating system with the attachment's MIME type.

If you edit the attachment after openning it, the changes are not saved back into the email.

If the attachment is an executable program, Scribe will warn you about virii and the possibility of infecting your machine. There is every chance that the attachment IS actually a virus, even though someone you know sent it to you. The from information of an email is easily forged, so you can't trust anything. So heed the warning and don't run the attachment.

Reply [All] And Forwarding

You reply to an email to send a response back to the sender. Sometimes as email is sent to a lot of people at once. If you want to reply to all of the people the email is sent to then use "Reply All". Otherwise "Reply" sends just to the author of the email.

It is considered bad form to reply all when the message really only needs to go to the email's author. And something the list of people the original email was sent to might not want their addresses distributed to everyone. To hide someones address from being distributed via a group email set it to "BCC" in the recipients list. Unless you specifically want everyone your sending email to know who else is getting the same email then you should probably set your recipients to BCC.

When replying to a message it is standard internet procedure to "quote" the old message with ">" signs at the start of every line. Scribe can do this for you. Then as you respond to various parts of the message you add your own messages below the original text, obviously without any ">" signs. This way people can follow who said what as email goes back and forth. The ">" signs can be nested several levels deep. e.g:

>> How much memory does Scribe need?
>
> About 5 mb's with a basic folder loaded.

That sounds good.

>> Is it possible to use Scribe on a USB drive? I've got one and
>> I want to take Scribe around with me.
>
> Yes it's quite portable, and tries to use relative paths where
> possible.

Ok great, thanks!

So you can see the original author's text is in green, then my replies to that are in red. And finally their responses to my reply are in black. Any text that isn't relevant to the topic your talking about in your reply should be omitted from your response, to keep the email breif and to the point.

Forwarding a message typically means sending an email on to someone other than the original author. In this case you may or may not want to retain the attachments to the original email, Scribe will ask you whether to copy the attachments across to the new email when you forward a email with attachments.

Bounce

Bouncing a message is useful when you aren't the right person to respond to the email. It's like forwarding a message but it has the extra behaviour of removing you as the source of the message so that when the next recipient of the message replies to the bounced email it goes to the original sender instead of you. Bounce also maintains more of the message's formatting than forwarding does, which is a shortcomming of the current architecture of Scribe.

Managing Email

Each folder in the main view contains object of one type only. So if you create more folders you have to decide what they contain up front. When you drag and drop email/contacts between folders only items that match the destination folders type will be moved.

To move an email into another folder, drag it from the main list onto the destination folder on the left. You can select multiple email and move them in one hit.

Right clicking on an email shows a list of actions and properties that you can use. The mark colour allows grouping of similar email by catagory by setting them all to the same colour. The mark colour can be set automatically by filters. By using the Select Marked submenu you can select all the email of a certain colour for furthur processing.

The main toolbar menu has a filter icon that once activated adds a filter field above every column in the list view. You can use this to narrow down the list using various criteria. Items are matched against criteria using a sub-string search, but the wildcards '*' and '?' are supported as well. e.g:

Criteria:
  "ma"
Matches:
  "matthew"
  "armagedon"
  "Mills, Martin"

This is less useful on dates, but I will improve on that later.

Also on the main window's toolbar there is a button to thread the messages in the list. This is useful for following conversations. Once the view is in threaded mode you can choose to ignore a whole thread by right clicking on it and setting the thread mode to "ignore". Then any incoming mail that joins that thread is automatically marked as "read". So that it doesn't show up as new mail. This is handy for mailing lists where you don't want to follow certain threads.

Sending and Receiving

You can receive mail using Scribe using several methods. Manually by clicking receive mail on the toolbar or Mail -> Receive mail and it's shortcut keys. Or automatically by going into the account options and on the receive tab set the "check every <field> minutes". Also in the main window's status panel you can right click on an account and tell it to receive now.

New mail appears in the "/Inbox" folder by default and a "New mail" icon appears in the system tray. Clicking on this icon opens the first new mail in the /Inbox folder (or sub-folders). You can specify a non-default destination folder in the receive account options.

To send mail using Scribe can be done from the mail message by clicking send, by clicking send on the toolbar or clicking Mail -> Send Mail. Sending sends all unsent mail in the /Outbox folder. Once a mail is sent successfully it is marked as sent and placed in the sent mail folder. To resend a mail, open it up and click "send" again. It's that simple (try doing that in Outlook).

The status panel in the main window has a wealth of information about the state of the send(s) and receive(s) in progress. To view this information click on the account in the list and the most recent send or receive will display in the Progress tab. The progress through the items being processed is shown and the current number of KB's sent or received with a data rate is also shown. The close connection button will stop the transfer, the email currently being transmitted will be sent or received on the next connection.

The "log" tab next to the process has a history of commands and responses going between the client and the server. In the case that you are having trouble connecting to the server, this log usually has a readable error message and is invaluable in troubleshooting. If you don't understand the messages and you want to email the author about it please right click on the log messages and "Copy to clipboard" so that you can include it in any corraspondance.

Preview Mail on Server

To view the messages while still on the server click Mail -> Preview Mail on Server.

The client will attach to the server, query the server for the size and number of email still on the server and then present a list of items to you. Then by selecting the items and clicking "delete" or "download" you can decide how to process each email individually before you receive them. This allows you to skip large messages or delete them when they get in the way. The selected delete or download action is carried out when you click Ok. If an item hasn't been assign an action (delete or download) then it is ignored and left on the server. Beware that if you have the leave mail on server option set to on then you will see all the mail currently on the server not just the "new" mail.

Multiple accounts can be previewed at the same time by selecting them in the status panel (using Ctrl+Left Click), right clicking and selecting preview. The 'to' field shows which account the email came from.

If you cancel the preview (or the connection is dropped) while still connected to the server, all the remaining email that hasn't been loaded will appear as entries missing all their fields except their size. This allows you to process large messages without loading the entire list. The message "(Not Loaded)" appears in the subject field in this case.

An opened envelope icon shows you which email have already been downloaded and have been left on the server. An unopened icon represents new email that hasn't been downloaded yet. You can from this window download mail that has already been downloaded. This is handy if you have leave mail on server switched on and you deleted a email by accident and would like to download it again.

If your downloading mail and you notice a really huge email that you don't really want to download, cancel the download (the bottom "request abort" button on the status panel) and then open up the preview mail on server window to either download the email either side of the large one and leave it for later or delete the large email altogether.

There are buttons for the following functions:

Refresh
Fetchs the current contents of the server.
Undelete
Scribe can mark message for deletion during the next connection with the server. In the case that a message has been marked for deletion the "delete" flag will automatically be selected in when previewing mail on the server. If you don't want to delete the message clicking "Undelete" will remove it from the "delete on next connect" list.
Set Unread
Marks the selected messages as unread, which changes the envelope icons to closed. These messages will be fetched again during the next normal receive.
Set Read
Marks the selected messages as read, causing these messages to be skipped during a normal mail receive connection.

Mail Merge

If you would like to create customized email messages to a mailing list then Scribe has a mail merge feature. To use the mail merge, firstly select the contacts you want to send to by placing or copying them into a single folder. All the contacts in the source folder will receive the merged email. Then prepare the email itself, either by creating a new email in the templates folder or creating a .EML file in Scribe or a 3rd party application. To create an email in a particular folder (in this case the /Templates folder), right click on the folder and select "New Mail". When editing the body of the message you can insert fields that will be substituted with the relevant data when being sent. These fields are based on the Scribe DOM. The objects available during mail merge are:

Object::Scribe Scribe
Object::Contact Contact

Scribe points to the application object, and Contact points to the current recipient Contact. So what this looks like in practice is:

Dear <? contact.FirstName ?> <? contact.SurName ?>,

We would like to let you know that the address we have on file for you is:
	Street: <? contact.Street ?>, <? contact.Suburb ?> <? contact.PostCode ?>
		<? contact.State ?> <? contact.Country ?>
	Phone: <? contact.Home ?> <? contact.Mobile ?>

This email was generated on <? scribe.now ?> for <? contact.email ?>

Regards

The custom data fields in the contact records could be used here to extend the types of data available for mail merging. You could name one of the custom fields 'CustNum' and put your customer's number in there. Then when you merge you can use that field like this:

<? contact.CustNum ?>

If any of the contacts don't have that custom field the value returned is just a empty string.

Once you have a email template for the mail merge, select the folder of contacts to send to and right click. Select either 'Mail Merge with Template...' or 'Mail Merge with File'. Select the template email and a question dialog will pop up. One of the options allows you to preview the first merged email to test the results before you send. When your happy with the result, go online, repeat and select 'Send'. The mail will be merged against all the source contacts and sent immediatedly. These mail don't go via the outbox they are just sent straight to the SMTP server.

You can create file templates by editing the email in Scribe and then exporting it to file by dragging it to the desktop or file manager. Then you can edit it in a text editor, allowing you to make changes beyond what Scribe editor is capable of. If you change the MIME type from text/plain to text/html you could create a HTML based mail merge email. All the parameters for editing .eml files directly is beyond the scope of this document, but this comment was to explain the possibilities. I suggest if you want to edit .eml files in a graphical editor you use Outlook Express and then export the email from there, then add the custom fields in a text editor. And then merge using Scribe.