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<html>  <head> <title>Poco Help: Working with Poco</title> </head> <body> <a name="top">Back to</a> <a href="index.html">Poco Help</a> Working with Poco <a name="customizing">Customizing Poco</a> You can customize many aspects of Poco's operation. Most of these settings are located in Program Settings, under Tools, Options menu, or by pressing F7. Here is a brief description of each settings pane. Settings: the top-most item, allows you to register Poco with Windows as the default mailer. By doing this, you will enable Poco to launch when you click on a mail link in a web browser. Program: here you can toggle fast reading on or off, change mailbox selection to single-click or double-click and setup the default dialing properties allowing Poco to dial and hang-up the modem as needed. Default SMTP server is used for all accounts that don't have individual servers specified. You can also change the default X-Url header if you registered your copy of Poco. Miscellaneous: set up Poco to send any queued mail right after checking for new mail; "Hide application on close" causes Poco to hide when you click on the top right close button. To unhide Poco, simply double-click on its tray icon which will remain visible. Unchecking "Open last message when changing mailbox" will prevent Poco from automatically loading mail while switching mailboxes. You can also toggle in-line display of attached images and text/html files; toggle tool tips on or off; show the privacy sheet along the bottom of the main window for quick access, and optionally setup a privacy password when the privacy sheet is active. Finally, select a custom sound alert for new mail alert. To disable or enable the mail alert sounds completely, use the settings for individual account in Accounts Setup. Automation: turn automatic mail checking on or off; automatically spell-check mail before it is sent; empty trash when exiting; and initiate automatic backup when Poco is run a certain number of times. To prevent virus-infected files from getting onto your computer, enable automatic virus protection. This will launch your virus scanning software, if files of certain type are received (simply separate the file extensions to scan with a space). If you would rather scan all attachments regardless of their file type, leave this box empty. Optional command line parameters that your virus scanner may need can be entered in the field provided. Drag and Drop: lets you customize drag and drop settings. First part of this pane will affect auto-creation of filtering scripts. These scripts are created when you drag and drop an address onto the mailboxes pane. This action will create a script that will route all mail from that correspondent to the new or dropped mailbox. You can completely disable Auto Scripts, or alter the way they affect messages. COPY mail will create a script that will route an incoming or outgoing message to a specific folder, while allowing the message to reach its intended mailbox. For instance, if run on Incoming messages, script will still allow incoming mail that's been filtered to show up in the In mailbox. If you decide to MOVE the messages while filtering, any mail filtered for a specific recipient will be moved to the new mailbox, and will not show up in the In box. Same applies for scripts that are run on Outgoing messages, except the default destination is the Sent mailbox. As mentioned, these scripts can run on Incoming or Outgoing mail, or both; simply place a checkmark to indicate which. It is important to note that this affect the defaults, but you are still free to alter the script behaviour after it's been created through the Filters and Scripts window. Second part of this pane configures what happens to messages dropped on the mini address list, whether they are forwarded or bounced to the recipient. Directories: override the default directory settings for Mail, Attachments, Address Books, Scripts, Signatures and Templates. Changing these settings is not recommended for novice users, but can be used to move your data folder to a different drive, to a removable volume or to a shared network drive. Defaults: setup default colours when starting a new message, or replying to a message. Place a checkmark next to any style you would like to override the default settings. For more details, see the <a href="sending.html#styled">Styled and plain messages</a>. Quoting: allows you to customize quoting of replied/forwarded and to a degree bounced messages. To find out more, see <a href="sending.html#replying">Replying, Forwarding and Bouncing message</a>. Style Quoted: quoted messages can be styled depending on the how many times the message text has been bounced between correspondents (discussion thread). Here you can customize the colours used to style the thread, or turn it off altogether.</a>. Fonts: set up fonts to use for message index and message view pane. The latter is also used as default font when sending new mail and for the script editing window. If you need to increase or decrease the size of the message preview font outside the settings, use the tool buttons just above the message preview pane. Colours: set up custom colours for message index, message view, mailboxes, address list and new message windows. There are also several presets you can use, by clicking on the drop box in the upper right corner. These options work best for system that support more than 256 colours. If your system only supports 256 colours best results are achieved by choosing the Windows preset, or picking colours that show as solid (as opposed to dithered) in the colour dialog box. Index shading: allows you to change the shading options for message index. Again, these options are best used for systems supporting more than 256 colours. For systems supporting only 256 colours, these options can negatively affect legibility of your message index, so they are often better left turned off. Address Books: use this pane to define your address books. See <a href="reading.html#addressbook">Adding contacts to the address book</a> for more details. Address Lookup: allows you to tweak the way addresses are looked up in New Message window, for To, CC and BCC fields. Simply place a checkmark next to the type of lookup you would like to perform for each address. Back to <a href="index.html">Poco Help</a> : <a href="#top">Top</a> <a name="backingup">Backing up and restoring mail</a> Poco has built-in support for backing up and restoring mail. To backup all your mailboxes, go to E-mail, Backup and Restore menu, then select Backup Mailboxes.... You will be prompted for a location - if you already entered one in the Options (F7) in the Automation section, then that location will be already filled in. Hit OK button to start the backup. To restore your mailboxes, go to E-mail, Backup and Restore menu, then select Restore Mailboxes.... Enter the location from which to restore and hit OK button to start. A small warning: restore function will overwrite any mailboxes with identical names already present in Poco directory. One of Poco's unique features is ability to switch to your backed up mailboxes without restoring them. Simply click on E-mail, Backup and Restore menu and choose Switch to Backed Up... Enter the path to your backed up mailbox and Poco will initialize your backed up mailboxes in your current session, without even restarting. You can browse your backed up mailboxes, as you would normally, and operate on them in any way you see fit. To get back to your current mailboxes, simply go back to the E-mail, Backup and Restore menu, and choose Exit Backed Up. Back to <a href="index.html">Poco Help</a> : <a href="#top">Top</a> <a name="mailboxes">Managing your mailboxes</a> Poco supports additional mailboxes and nested folders to help you organize your mail. Mailboxes window is usually docked to the side of the main application, and if it isn't you can bring it back by pressing F8. Use the buttons underneath the mailboxes to create new mailboxes, create folders or delete any of them. You can nest mailboxes inside folders. Folders can contain only other mailboxes, they cannot contain messages. This is why if you drop a message on top of a folder, nothing will happen. To move messages to a mailbox, you simply open the mailbox they are currently in (by clicking on it), select the messages you want to copy, and drag them over to the destination mailbox. To copy a message to another mailbox, use the same process, except hold the CTRL key when dropping the message - this will copy the dropped message or messages to that mailbox. To delete messages simply select messages you want deleted and press the Delete key - deleted messages will be placed into the Trash mailbox. To empty trash, just right click on the Trash mailbox and choose Empty Trash. Even though messages will be deleted from the mailbox, they will still be physically present in the mailbox until it is compressed. Compressing the mailbox clears out any deleted messages and updates the index - this is done for better performance. For those interested in more details, mailboxes are actually plain text files, with filenames ending with ".mbx", located in Poco's Mail directory. Folders are simply directories within the mail directory containing other mailbox files. There is no other designators that Poco uses to track mailboxes - on start-up, Poco simply scans the Mail directory, and all the MBX files and folders are added to the mailboxes tree. This open system gives great power to the end user. Scripts can simply write a message to the file ending in ".mbx", and it will automatically be recognized by Poco as a mailbox. You can also move or delete your mailboxes outside Poco, in Explorer, and Poco will pick up all the changes. To refresh mailboxes without restarting Poco, just right click on Mailboxes pane and choose Refresh. You can also use RefreshMailboxes script command to do the same. Mailboxes also use ancillary files to speed up operation: ".idx" and ".d" files. IDX files are the index files, used to track messages and status changes, until you compress the mailbox. D files keep track of deleted messages for compress mailbox operation. If you make any changes to the mailbox outside Poco, Poco will automatically invalidate the Index file and rebuild a new one, while at the same time using the information from the old Index file and the Deleted messages file to retain any status information. Back to <a href="index.html">Poco Help</a> : <a href="#top">Top</a> <a name="searching">Searching mail</a> The Show Only toolbar is great for quickly finding messages you need. If you need to perform a more exhaustive search, you should use Find Messages, CTRL+F or go to Message, Find Messages menu. Find Messages can operate on all or some mailboxes at the time, and will find text you are looking for within message headers or message body. You can choose to ignore letter case, or you can perform a case sensitive search. Optionally, you can specify an ignore text, which if found, will not return that message, even if the word you are looking for is in the message. The Find Messages power lies in the fact that once found, you are not simply taken to the message, one at a time - Find Messages actually saves all the found messages to the new mailbox (defaults to "Found", but you can override it with any mailbox name), so the search results are saved until you delete them. Once the search is completed, you are taken to the mailbox with found messages. When you just open the Find Messages window, it will use a new mailbox name for the found messages so only the found messages will be present when the search is finished. But for advanced use, you can specify an already existing folder instead - in this case, the messages will be appended to the mailbox. This allows you to do incremental searches and have all results present in a single form. To search only within a certain mail folder, open any mailbox directly within that folder and open the search window. You can then select to perform search within the current folder. If you need to know where a particular message was found, i.e. in what mailbox, that information is saved with each found message, inside message headers. Just click on Show Headers, and look for "X-Found:" header for message origin. Back to <a href="index.html">Poco Help</a> : <a href="#top">Top</a> <a name="progress">Error and progress messages</a> Clicking on the progress indicator at the bottom of Poco's main window, or by selecting View, Progress Messages menu item (F12) will bring up the Progress Window. Here, you can follow any error or progress messages reported in the current session. Copy button will copy all of the messages to the clipboard, while Save button will save them to a file. Back to <a href="index.html">Poco Help</a> : <a href="#top">Top</a> <a name="privacy">Protecting your privacy</a> When used in office environment, Privacy Sheet can be used to temporarily block your screen form prying eyes. You can quickly access Privacy Sheet by pressing Shift+F12. Once activated (it takes 3 seconds to fully activate in case you change your mind), it can be password protected from Program Options, or if no password is set, can be deactivated by simply pressing Enter or clicking the mouse on it (make sure you leave the password field blank). Back to <a href="index.html">Poco Help</a> : <a href="#top">Top</a> <a name="junkmail">Dealing with junk mail</a> Poco can help you deal with junk mail by using built-in Junk Mail scripts. To access them, simply right-click on the message you consider junk mail in the message index pane and go to Junk Mail - In the Future... menu item. To trash mail in the future from the same sender, choose Trash messages FROM same sender. Or to trash messages with a similar subject line, select Trash messages with similar SUBJECT. Poco will add a script to run on all incoming mail that will monitor incoming messages and trash them if they meet your criteria. Trashed messages will be sent directly to the trash mailbox, which will show a red flag to notify you that some of your new mail was deleted. If you want to see what you received, just open the trash mailbox to get to the message. Back to <a href="index.html">Poco Help</a> : <a href="#top">Top</a> <a name="importing">Importing information into Poco</a> Address Books: To import an address book into Poco, use the E-mail, Import, Address Book menu. The imported information will be added to the currently selected address book. If you would rather place the imported information into a new address book, create one just before importing (see <a href="reading.html#addressbook">Address Book</a>). Poco can import two standard formats of address books, LDIF and CSV. LDIF format has a fixed structure, so importing it is very straight-forward. CSV (Comma Separated Values) can be ordered in different ways - before importing a CSV file make sure that it is ordered correctly. You can re-order a CSV file by simply opening it in a spreadsheet program and re-arranging the order of columns. Poco requires the CSV file to have the nicknames in the first column (field), full names in the second, e-mail addresses in the third and notes in the fourth (optional). Poco will ignore fields beyond the fourth one. So, for instance, a sample CSV file would look like this: <pre>"Sheila", "Sheila Smith", ssmith@provider.com Bort, Bort Jones, bjones@elsewhere.com Vincenzo, , vini@com.com, "Web site: http://..." Friends, , "sheila, bjones@elsewhere.com, vini@com.com"</pre> All of these entries are valid. When exporting from Netscape, the recommended format is LDIF, while when exporting from Outlook, recommended format is CSV. Make sure before exporting with Outlook to correctly order the CSV fields as described above - delete all the fields mapped by default by Outlook, and drag and drop First name, Last name and E-mail address (in that order) on the mapping pane. Mailboxes: Poco can also import mailboxes from Netscape, Eudora or other RFC 822 compliant mail clients. Outlook unfortunately uses a proprietary mailbox format, so you will need to export your mailbox into one of the supported formats before being able to import it into Poco. To import the mailbox simply go to E-mail, Import, Mailbox menu and choose what format you want to import. You will be prompted for the name and location of the mailbox to import, and then for the Poco name of the imported mailbox. A note on importing Netscape mailboxes: Netscape stores attachments within the mailbox, rather than saving them to a file. This results in much larger mailbox sizes. Poco will not delete the attached file information from those mailboxes, but currently Poco will not be able to give you access to those attachments. Back to <a href="index.html">Poco Help</a> : <a href="#top">Top</a> <a name="exporting">Exporting information from Poco</a> Poco will allow you to export the address books and mailboxes to the same formats that you can import with. Exported formatting requirements are identical to the ones described above. To export a specific address book make sure it is currently selected, go to the E-mail, Export, Address Book menu and select the format you wish to use. To export a mailbox, first open the mailbox, then click on E-mail, Export, Mailbox menu and choose the format. Back to <a href="index.html">Poco Help</a> : <a href="#top">Top</a> <a name="scripting">Scripting basics</a> Scripting is implemented through PocoScript, an interpreted language created for Poco that focuses on mail processing and handling. Even though it has a narrow focus, PocoScript can act as a conduit between Poco and other applications to implement more sophisticated mail processing, such as mail encryption. PocoScript is manipulated through Filters and Scripts window, under Tools menu, or by pressing F4. You will see four buttons along the top: Settings - here you can manipulate more general script settings. You don't need to know how to write PocoScript to take advantage of this feature. There are only two ways a script can run automatically without you starting it: if it's selected to run on all incoming mail or if it's selected to run on all outgoing mail. This means that any time a message is sent out or received, the script will be run and have a chance to process that message. To add or remove script from being executed automatically, simply add or remove it from the list in the Settings part of Filters and Scripts window. To execute a script manually, use the options along the bottom of the window, select a script and press Now button. Some scripts have user customizable options that you can set without ever touching the script: to setup a particular script, you can either double-click on it if it's added to Incoming or Outgoing scripts, or select it and click on Setup button on either pane. You will be taken to the Setup tab of the Filters and Scripts window, see below. Setup - If the script uses user interface extensions, you will be able to set up the script here. You can select which script you want to setup from the drop-box along the top. If the script can be setup, you will see the fields with values and descriptions for that particular script. If the script cannot be setup or it doesn't have any values to setup, you will see a message informing you of this. To setup scripts, you still don't need any direct knowledge of PocoScript. If you do know a little bit about PocoScript, and would like to get up close and personal with the actual script, you can click on Edit Script button. It will load the selected script and take you to Script tab, see below. Script - to actually edit script, use the Script tab. While writing the script, F1 will take you to the Help window, which will try to locate the command you were writing for additional information. Dry Run button will execute the script, but the %message variable, which normally is always present and represents the message to process, will not be initialized, so there is less chance for losing messages. Consider this a debugging function, that allows you to test your scripts. Finally, the Debug tab shows you all the variables and their values as they are initialized by the script and the values they had when the script stopped, but only when using Dry Run. This is a great way to familiarize yourself with PocoScript and test your scripts. Buttons - the final tab lets you customize the quick-run buttons for scripts, that appear on toolbar just right of the main toolbar. There are 10 buttons you can setup, and each is also accessible with key shortcut CTRL-1, CTRL-2, ..., CTRL-0. Pick the script to run on the left, and type the description of the script in the right field. The first 11 letters of the description will show up on the button itself, while the rest will show in the tool-tip window that appears if you hover your mouse over the button. You can also access the buttons through the Tools menu. To find out more about PocoScript itself, please see <a href="aboutpocoscript.html">PocoScript help</a>. Back to <a href="index.html">Poco Help</a> : <a href="#top">Top</a> <a name="commandline">Command line parameters</a> Poco supports several command line parameters which you can use to launch Poco in different ways. These are: poco.exe /m "mailto:address" Starts Poco and starts a new message addressed to the address provided. poco.exe /c Checks mail upon start-up. poco.exe /s Sends queued messages upon start-up. poco.exe /c /s Upon start-up, first check mail, then send queued messages. poco.exe /s /c Upon start-up, first send queued messages, then check mail. An additional /q parameter can be used to quit Poco immediately once the desired operation was completed. This parameter cannot be applied together with /m parameter. Allowed combinations are: poco.exe /c /q poco.exe /s /q poco.exe /c /s /q poco.exe /s /c /q If the Automatic Timed Mail Check is turned on, mail check will be performed on start up even without /c parameter. If the /s parameter is present on the command line, then the order of execution will be as following: poco.exe /s Send Queued will be performed before checking mail. poco.exe /c /s Checking mail will be performed before sending queued messages. The mail will not be checked twice in the latter case. Back to <a href="index.html">Poco Help</a> : <a href="#top">Top</a> </body> </html>