Komputer for Alle 2001 #16

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LetterBox v4.1.1 1. Introduction 2. Registration 3. Installation 4. Usage 5. Preview Window 6. AutoDelete 7. FAQ 8. History 9. The Future 10. Legal Stuff 11. Acknowledgements 12. Cultural Note 1. Introduction LetterBox is a POP3 e-mail notification program that sits quietly in your System Tray (apart from on the first run, when it asks for the essential settings it needs) and, at a pre-set interval, checks to see whether any e-mail has arrived for you. Why the need for another such program? I found that none of the other notification programs I tried worked in quite the way I wanted, so I wrote one that did. In particular, all the other ones I tried had the annoying habit of dialling-up to the internet when I didn't want them to. LetterBox can be set not to do that. LetterBox runs under Windows 9x/Me/NT/2000. If you use LetterBox, I recommend you sign up to the LetterBox e-mail list to be kept up to date with future developments and enhancements. To do so, send an e-mail to : letterbox-subscribe@egroups.com You can unsubscribe at any time. If you do sign up you won't be bombarded with e-mails about LetterBox (far from it) but you will hear about any enhancements or bug fixes that may appear in the future. Meanwhile, bug reports and suggestions are always welcome, to : ultima.thule@bigfoot.com Finally, the latest version of this program can always be obtained at : www.ultima-thule.co.uk 2. Registration LetterBox is either freeware or shareware - it's up to you which. Having spent a lot more time than I ever intended developing and supporting the program, I've taken the decision (at v4.0.0) to allow people to contribute a small registration fee (as a number of users have encouraged me to do) if they so wish and if they feel LetterBox is worth it. As I say it's up to you - there is no "full" or enhanced version available if you do so. But there is the increased likelihood of me continuing to develop (and offer support for) the program. If you decide not to register, it's still worth signing up to the e-mail list as described above - I'm not going to hound you for money. Details of how to register are on the web page at : www.ultima-thule.co.uk I've set the registration fee at a paltry, a trifling, US$15. Support the shareware principle! 3. Installation The LetterBox installation comes in two forms - letterboxfiles.zip and letterbox.zip. The former contains just the program's files without any sort of installation routine. This is for upgraders and people who know what they are doing. If you're one of these people then you probably don't need to read this section. If, on the other hand, you've downloaded letterbox.zip and want to use the set up routine, read on. Extract all files contained in the LetterBox.zip archive to a directory somewhere (C:\Temp is good) and run the Setup.exe program therein. You will then be taken through the usual routine of selecting directories etc. A shortcut to LetterBox may now be found on your Start button under Programs. Note that no shortcut is placed in your Start Up group by the installation. When you're ready to set up Letterbox, just run it. The first time you do so, it will request the name(s) of your POP3 e-mail server(s), the user ID(s) and the password(s) you use to access them. If you don't know any of these, contact your Service Provider. All other options may be left as they are, or changed as required (see below). Note that the default Start Up option is for LetterBox to run automatically when Windows starts up - ie. a shortcut will now (unless you've overridden the default) be in your Start Up group. LetterBox is now configured to run. Note that whilst all of the details you enter are stored in the Windows Registry, your password is encrypted so that prying eyes or other applications won't be able to work out what it is. Note also that the LetterBox archive does not contain the Visual Basic run-time files, which are essential for its operation. They are omitted because they are fairly large and most people should already have them, but if you do not (eg. you receive messages about missing DLLs), you will need to acquire them separately and install them onto your machine before installing LetterBox. It's worth doing anyway as these are generally useful files to have. All of them can be downloaded from Microsoft and a link to them can be found on the Ultima Thule web site - just download the file and run it. 4. Usage The default options for LetterBox are for it to : - Run automatically on Windows start-up - Use Dial-Up (RAS) to access e-mail servers - Check for e-mail automatically - Check for new e-mail every 10 minutes - Wait 20 seconds for POP3 servers to timeout - Stay off-line if you are off-line when it tries to check (the last thing you want when you're at a critical point in a good game is for Windows to suddenly start dialling up to the internet) - Notify you of new messages found, not all waiting messages - Display System Tray icon tool-tips detailing the number of waiting e-mails - Display the Settings window when the System Tray icon is double-clicked - Play the default sample when new e-mail is found - Not automatically show the Preview window when new mail is found - Download and show 10 lines of the body of each found message - Run nothing external when new e-mail is found - Not dismiss the Settings/Preview windows when Run External is clicked - Start up minimised - Not perform an immediate check on start-up - Wait 30 seconds before doing a check once on-line is detected (this is to give your system time to complete the connection) - Apply no AutoDelete rules - Log any AutoDeleted messages - Not be in paused mode All of these can be configured through the Settings box - to bring this up, just right-click on the System Tray icon and select Settings from the pop-up menu. If you want to run a separate application when new e-mail is found (such as your actual e-mail client), just use the Run On New Mail option on the Notification tab. There are test buttons for both the Sound On New Mail and Run On New Mail options here. If you find your POP3 server is not responding quickly enough when you do a check (LetterBox reports a server timeout), try increasing the server timeout period. This defaults to 20 seconds but can be set to as high as 999 seconds (and if your ISP's server doesn't respond in this time - over 16 minutes - I'd change ISPs.) There's no particular problem with having a higher timeout period than 20 seconds - make it, say, 60 if you are having problems - but a lower period makes LetterBox that bit more responsive. As with much in life, it's a matter of finding a balance. Check Now (on the pop-up menu, the Settings window etc.) can be used at any time to check for new e-mail. Checking can also be initiated by left-clicking on the System Tray icon. There are various other options, controls and short-cuts here and there throughout LetterBox. You can, for example, cancel a current check for mail by clicking on the System Tray icon (or by selecting Cancel Check from the icon's pop-up menu). Or you can select Pause from the icon's pop-up menu and temporarily prevent LetterBox from automatically checking for mail. Best approach is to have a play ... 5. Preview Window The Preview window displays summary details of each e-mail found in the last check. This is typically used to see whether it's worth firing up your full e-mail client to collect your mail. Messages newly found by the last check are displayed first (in bold) followed by any other messages found previously but still waiting to be downloaded. The text and background colour used to display messages for a particular server can be set by amending the details of that server from the Settings window. E-mails can also be deleted from the POP3 server from this window, if they are ones you don't wish to download (eg. spam). Just select one or more messages (ie. by clicking on them) and click Delete. If you want to delete AND set up some corresponding AutoDelete rules, click AutoDelete instead - this will allow you to create a new rule based on each message to be deleted, and then it will delete each message. To just set up rules for future checks based on the currently selected messages, click on Create Rule. By default, LetterBox will ask for confirmation when you delete one or more e-mails. It will also give you confirmation that the deletion has been successful (or an error message if it has not). All of these prompts can be switched off by unchecking Confirm Deletions. But be very careful if you use this facility - deleted e-mails are NOT recoverable. You can also refresh the Preview list by, well, clicking on Refresh and you can also run whatever you set up in your "Run On New Mail" box by clicking "Run ...". You can force this window to float over all other windows by checking the "Always On Top" box. If you want to see the first few lines of the body of a message, just hover the mouse pointer over that message, or click upon it (depending on your settings), and the text will appear underneath the message list. If you can't see all the lines, resize the window. The number of lines displayed here is set on the Notification tab on the Settings screen. The more lines you display, the slower the checking process will be. For optimum speed, the facility can be switched off completely from the Settings screen. The Preview window will also remember its size and position between sessions. 6. AutoDelete This facility allows e-mail messages to be deleted off your POP3 server(s) without you ever even seeing them. You define the rules for deletion. If any e-mails match one or more of the rules, they are deleted. This facility can be used to combat spam, to filter out e-mail viruses, to block messages from someone you don't want to hear from and so on. AutoDelete rules can be defined in any one of three ways. You can go to the AutoDelete tab of the Settings screen and create and maintain them from there. Or you can create them via the Preview screen - clicking AutoDelete rather than Delete will both delete the selected message(s) and create rules based on those messages so that they are automatically deleted in the future. Or you can manually edit the KillRules.txt file, which is where LetterBox stores its AutoDelete rules. This file must be in the same directory as LetterBox.exe. Rules within it must follow the following format : field qualifier value where field can be (case insensitive) : From To Subject Header qualifier can be (case insensitive) : = contains begins ends doesn't = doesn't contain doesn't begin doesn't end and value can be anything (case sensitive). Note that the Header field encapsulates everything in the e-mail header - the sender, the recipient, the subject and all the other things that can be placed there by e-mail servers. It is highly likely that you would only ever use the Header field in conjunction with the "contains" qualifier. Note also that each rule must start in column 1 and that there must be a single space between field and qualifier and between qualifier and value. Any lines not following this format are ignored by LetterBox. To save having to write rules that cater for combinations of lower and upper case, (eg. From = Spammer and From = spammer), you can check the "Rules Case Insensitive" box in Settings. This makes all your rules case-insensitive. Although you never see messages removed via AutoDelete from the LetterBox front-end, you can see what has been removed by looking in the KilLog.txt file, which LetterBox maintains. This file is in the LetterBox.exe directory. Note that it is only maintained if the Log AutoDeleted Messages check box is checked on the Settings screen, and that it only contains header information about deleted e-mails, not the entire messages. Be warned - use this facility with care. Make VERY sure you're not going to delete messages that you might actually want to read. Compose your rules carefully. As with everything in LetterBox, you use this facility entirely at your own risk. 7. FAQ Q. I can't get LetterBox to install/run. I get strange error messages about missing files or processes failing to start. Help! A. You probably don't have the Visual Basic 6 run-time files installed. See "Installation", above, for details. Also, make sure you're extracting all files out of the letterbox.zip archive file and then running setup. Just running setup.exe from within your zip application probably will not work. Q. I set up all my e-mail details but nothing happens. LetterBox doesn't find any messages. A. The most likely explanation is that the details of your POP3 accounts are set up incorrectly. Try checking Display Errors under Settings/Servers and seeing what error messages you get back. You might be able to copy the account details from out of your existing e-mail client. Q. My password is being rejected even though I've definitely entered it correctly into LetterBox. A. Certain characters (ie. those outside the "normal" range of western letters, numbers and punctuation marks - oops, my apologies to most of the world for the cultural bias here) seem to upset my password encryption and decryption routine. A "solution" is to restrict your passwords to these sorts of characters. Sorry. Q. I get some strange error messages about UIDL not being supported. What does it all mean? A. UIDL is an optional command that POP3 servers are "strongly encouraged" to implement but which they do not have to in order to function as POP3 servers. Nearly all servers, in my experience, do support the command. LetterBox will not function on POP3 servers that do not support UIDL. This is because LetterBox needs the command in order to allow messages to be deleted via the Preview window. Use of UIDL is the *only* guaranteed way of uniquely identifying e-mail messages - its perfectly possible to have two with the same subject, message body, sender and recipient for example. Using UIDL means that there is no chance of the wrong message getting removed. If your e-mail server doesn't support UIDL, ask your provider why. Q. Alphabetic characters other than the western A-Z letters (eg. Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese characters) don't get displayed properly on the Preview screen. Why? A. Presumably this is something to do with the locale of MSFLXGRD.OCX (the control used by Preview). Any ideas or suggestions? Q. The LetterBox pop-up menu refuses to disappear when I click elsewhere on the screen, and the System Tray icon doesn't look quite right (kind of the wrong colours). What gives? A. This happens under Windows NT but I have absolutely no idea why - it's all lovely under Windows 9x. Microsoft eh? Q. I want to back up all my LetterBox settings. Where are they in the Registry? A. LetterBox stores all its settings under the following Registry key : HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VB and VBA Program Settings\LetterBox So if you want to transport all your settings (or just save them before Windows melts down again), RegEdit can be used to export this branch of the Registry. You do this at your own risk though - be warned, meddling with the Registry can be dangerous! Q. When I preview a message I just see some incomprehensible stuff about MIME or something, rather than my message. Pourquoi? A. LetterBox only correctly previews messages that are in plain text. When e-mail is sent in, say, HTML format, then you will, indeed, see all this stuff that normally goes on behind the scenes. In its current incarnation, I've made no attempt to interpret encoded e-mail messages. One reason is that it would be a lot of work (see "The Future", below). Another is that it would make LetterBox too much like a full e-mail client. Another is that LetterBox would have to scan in whole messages to interpret them, slowing everything down. Also LetterBox would become a fair bit larger if it handled encoded messages. And it might also then be prone to e-mail viruses. So, on the whole, I don't bother. Q. I'm trying to use LetterBox to access my Web Mail account (eg. HotMail, Yahoo) but getting nowhere. How do I do this? A. You can't. LetterBox is a POP3 e-mail checker and unless your provider gives you a POP3 interface as well as the Web one (sometimes they do but you have to pay), LetterBox in its current incarnation can't access that mail account. See "The Future", below, though. Q. So, erm, what's POP3? A. It stands for "Post Office Protocol - Version 3" - the standard system for delivering e-mail. Q. I definitely have waiting e-mail but LetterBox isn't notifying me of it. A. Assuming you have LetterBox configured properly, it may be because you have set the program to only notify you once of waiting mail (ie. when it is first found rather than each time it is found). This is the default behaviour. You can alter this behaviour via the "Only Newly Found Messages" check-box under Settings/Notification. Unchecking this tells LetterBox to always notify you of all waiting e-mail. Q. I keep getting POP3 server timeouts! A. Make sure LetterBox isn't conflicting with another e-mail program. Then, try increasing the server timeout period under Settings/Servers. This defaults to 20 seconds but can be set to as high as 999 seconds (and if your ISP's server doesn't respond in this time - over 16 minutes - I'd change ISPs.) There's no particular problem with having a higher timeout period than 20 seconds - make it, say, 60 if you are having problems - but a lower period makes LetterBox that bit more responsive (eg. in responding to check cancellations). As with much in life, it's a matter of finding a balance. 8. History 1.0.0 - First version. 1.1.0 - Checks for new e-mail as soon as you go on-line, not just after the check interval. 1.1.1 - System Tray icon animates when mail is being checked for. 1.1.2 - Check interval bug fix. 2.0.0 - Added the mail preview option. - Added support for Windows NT. - Added support for multiple mailboxes. - Added Test buttons for "Run On New Mail" and "Sound On New Mail". - Changed "Run On New Mail" so it doesn't always run things maximised. - Added the "Display/Suppress Server Error Messages" option. - Clicking the System Tray icon now brings up the Preview window if any e-mails have previously been found, and checks for new e-mail if they haven't. 2.0.1 - Minor bug fixes. 2.0.2 - Added option to override the default server timeout period. 2.1.0 - Fixed a few bugs (a timing problem on fast POP3 servers; a mysterious refusal to run the external application on some machines). - Added the server name to the Preview display. 2.2.0 - Added the server name to server-related error messages. - Added the automatic Preview pop-up option. - Clicking the System Tray icon now always does a check. - Added option to run the configured "Run On New Mail" command line from the pop-up menu and Preview window. - Added an "Always On Top" option to the Preview window. - Added a Refresh button to the Preview window. - The Preview window now remembers its position. - Added Check Immediate option. - Made the on-line delay period (the interval between on-line being detected and LetterBox doing a check) configurable. - LetterBox now only notifies you (ie. via sound, running any configured command line and displaying the Preview) if new, previously un-notified e-mail is found. In other words, it won't keep warning you about the same messages over and over. 2.3.0 - Bug fix : messages removed from the server now don't persist in the Preview window. - Added the Pause/Resume automatic check options to the System Tray menu - this actually does the same as toggling "Check Servers Automatically" on the Settings screen. - Amended LetterBox to work on machines that don't have RAS installed. - Added the message body preview facility. - Changed the default server timeout period to 20 seconds. 3.0.0 - Added AutoDelete stuff for automatically killing spam etc. without ever even needing to see it. That'll learn them. - Added the "Stay Online" options. - Added the "Use Dial Up" override. - Added the double-click configuration option. - General improvements here and there - changed the oil, that sort of thing. - Minor bug fixes. 3.0.1 - More minor bug fix gubbins. 3.1.0 - Preview window now resizable. - Accounts may now be enabled and disabled from the New/Amend Account window. - Maximum timeout period now 999, not 99. - Added option to the Preview window to allow the deletion confirmation and deletion results prompts to be switched off. 3.2.0 - Added option to choose Hover or Click to preview message body text. - Add the Last/Next check time options to the Tool Tip. - New messages now appear at the top of the list in the Preview, in bold text, to distinguish them from messages found in an earlier check. - Preview window now remembers any changes to the column sizes. - Each server can now be assigned a text and background colour - these are used when displaying messages found on that server on the Preview window (and also on the server list on Settings). - An error log is now maintained of all POP3 server communication errors - see ErrorLog.txt in the LetterBox directory (or just click Error Log on Settings). - A few bug fixes here and there. - The System Tray icon now only shows you there is mail if new, previously un-notified e-mail is found. The icon Tool-Tip now displays both the "new" waiting e-mail count and the total (ie. "old" and "new") waiting e-mail count. 3.3.0 - A few tweaks here and there. 4.0.0 - LetterBox prevents multiple instances of itself from running. - Added the View Read Me button in Settings. - Added the "Only Newly Found Messages" option under Notification - ie. you can be informed of all waiting messages or just the ones you haven't previously been told about. Reworked the Notification screen a little to fit it all in. - Added the Check Cancel option - during a check, clicking the tray icon (or menu item) cancels the check. - AutoDelete rule values can now be an empty string. - Added the new AutoDelete field of "Header" - Added the new AutoDelete qualifiers of "doesn't =", "doesn't contain", "doesn't begin" and "doesn't end". - Added correct handling for Start Up folders not called "StartUp" - Added the Dismiss Dialogs on Run External option - checking this tells LetterBox to close the Settings or Preview window after running an external application via the Run button 4.0.1 - Fix to allow the Preview window to work with screen resolutions of 640*480. - Run External item can now be any file with a program association. 4.1.0 - Added the "Rules Case Insensitive" option. 4.1.1 - Fixed a bug in the Run External option. 9. The Future Well, we'll see. Several people have suggested support for non-POP3 e-mail services such as HotMail or Yahoo. Perhaps some sort of handling of MIME and/or HTML e-mail could be added. Both are possibilities. It does occur to me, however, that deliberately not handling MIME e-mails might be a good idea as this will absolutely guarantee that LetterBox cannot be affected by e-mail viruses ... I also really should internationalise LetterBox so that we can have non-English language versions of it. Thanks to everyone who has offered to do translations! 10. Legal Stuff LetterBox may be distributed and used freely so long as all files contained in its archive file are distributed together and none are modified in any way. LetterBox is used entirely at your own risk and the author is in no way responsible for any damage, corruption, cataclysm, environmental destruction or rift in the space-time continuum it causes. LetterBox is copyright Simon Kewin, 1998-2000 for Ultima Thule Ltd. 11. Acknowledgements Thanks to all the people, too numerous to list, who have taken the time to contribute suggestions, report on bugs or offer to help with improving LetterBox. The program has become a lot better as a result of all this. My apologies if your suggestion hasn't make it in. 12. Cultural Note In case you were wondering, a letter box is a slot in your front door through which, in some countries, letters are posted by the person who delivers your mail.