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General Settings

This notebook is accessed via the toolbar button by the same name, the General submenu option of the Settings option on the program's main window's File menu, or the OK-Goto General button in the Advanced Settings notebook. These two settings notebooks hold most of the program's settings, but many others are found instead in the location where you use them. For example, the main window's Message menu remembers things such as your Word wrap, Decode attachments, Headers, and font settings; the compose window remembers your word wrap and font settings; etc.

The Mail Servers Page

The first option lets you specify whether your mail server is a POP3 server or an IMAP4 server. If you select IMAP4, two extra settings, Mail Folder and Mailbox Name will appear; see Preview IMAP4 Mail for their explanations as well as information about the other ways in which the program will act differently based on whether an account is configured for POP3 or IMAP4.

If you leave blank any of the next three fields here, the program will prompt you for all of this information each time you try to retrieve mail from the server. This can be useful if you don't want your password to be stored on your hard drive (even though the program does encrypt it before storing it), or if you often like to retrieve mail from other mail accounts into one J Street Mailer account. (However, you probably don't want to leave the User Name field blank, because unless you have the Personal Post Office feature enabled, the program will open the General Settings notebook automatically each time you start it if there's no User Name filled in here, and that would be annoying.)

Server
  The address of the POP3 or IMAP4 server from which this account gets its mail.
User Name
  The userid by which your POP3 or IMAP4 server knows this account. Very often, the piece of information that goes here is the part of your email address before the @ sign.
Password
  The password used to make your POP3 or IMAP4 server provide access to this account's mail.
Connection Timeout
  How many seconds the program should wait for a connection. Of course, it will stop waiting sooner than this if TCP/IP returns an error or if the connection is made.
Port
  Usually 110, the port number to which the POP3 server will respond. Or for an IMAP4 server, this setting is normally 143.
Use SMTP instead of POP3 to send messages
  If you turn off this checkbox, the program will attempt to send your mail via your POP3 server. Of course, this will only work if your Internet Service Provider's POP3 server supports the XTND XMIT command. Many POP3 servers do not; and many of the ones which do support it do not support it very well! Most ISPs and most users prefer to send via an SMTP server instead, even when they have access to a POP3 server which does have a proper XTND XMIT implementation.
SMTP Server
  The address of the SMTP server to which this account should send its mail, if the Use SMTP instead of POP3 to send messages checkbox is turned on.
Port
  Usually 25, the port number to which the SMTP server will respond.
Alternate
  A second SMTP server which the program can try to use, any time there is no response to an attempt to connect to the first one.
Port
  The port number for the Alternate SMTP server.
Connection Timeout
  How many seconds the program should wait for a connection. Of course, it will stop waiting sooner than this if TCP/IP returns an error or if the connection is made.

The Retrieving Page

Retrieve new mail only
  This setting applies only when mail is being retrieved from a POP3 or IMAP4 server, not from the Personal Post Office directory. When this checkbox is turned on, the program will only retrieve messages that it thinks you haven't already read. You might use this setting if you like to leave your mail on the server for safekeeping or for future reference. The way in which the program will decide which messages you have and have not read, depends upon the state of the Mail server supports the UIDL command setting, below. Unless the account is configured for an IMAP4 server, in which case the UIDL method will be used since it is unquestionably better and all IMAP4 servers support it. The only reason for the existence of the high message counter method, is for those few POP3 servers which don't support UIDL.

  If that setting is turned off, so that the UIDL identifiers can't be used, then the program will only retrieve messages whose message number is higher than that specified in the Last message number setting, and it will update that setting each time it retrieves a message. (This applies to normal mail retrieval, not anything done by the Preview Mail feature.) Do not use this setting if you use another program or the Preview Mail feature to retrieve mail from the same server on the same account, unless you manually adjust the Last message number setting accordingly.

  If the Mail server supports the UIDL command setting is turned on, then the Last message number setting will be ignored, and the program will instead determine whether or not to retrieve a message based on whether or not the server's Unique IDentification Listing for that message is already stored in the account's UIDL.IDS file or not.

Last message number
  When the Retrieve new mail only setting is in use but the Mail server supports the UIDL command setting is not, this number is what tells the program which messages to retrieve from the server. For example, when this setting says 6, the program will retrieve message 7 and anything thereafter. If the program finds that there are only 6 messages in the account on the mail server, it will think there are no new messages to retrieve. If it finds that there are 5 or fewer messages on the server (for example, if you have used Preview Mail or another program to delete some), then it will retrieve all of the mail since it obviously can't rely on a high message counter that's higher than the last message in the server! However, if you use Preview Mail or another program to delete some mail but some other new mail arrives too, so that the number of messages in the server is still as high or higher than this high message counter, the program will not retrieve all of your new mail. For example, if the setting says 6, you've deleted 2, and 3 new ones have arrived, so the server now contains 7, then messages 5 through 7 are new, but the program will only download message number 7 since that's the only one that's higher than the high message counter. If you remembered to reset this setting to 4 after you deleted the two messages from the server, though, then everything would be fine and the program would download all of the right messages.
Mail server supports the UIDL command
  The program will automatically turn this checkbox off, if your server returns an error code in response to the program's attempt at using the UIDL command (see Retrieve new mail only, above). If your Internet Service Provider installs new server software that does support UIDL, or you change to an ISP whose server does, turn this checkbox back on. You can also turn this checkbox off even if your server does support the UIDL command, if you think you will not be wanting to use the UIDL feature any time soon, and you don't want the program to waste time retrieving the UIDL identifiers if you're not going to be using them. If this checkbox is on, the program will retrieve the UIDLs even when Retrieve new mail only is turned off, so that once you do turn it on, the program will already know which of the messages on your server you've read up to that point. The program keeps the UIDL records of all the messages that are currently in your POP3/IMAP4 server account each time you retrieve mail, in the UIDL.IDS file in your account subdirectory.
Delete retrieved messages from server
  With this checkbox turned on, the program will delete messages from the server after successfully retrieving them.
Retrieve mail automatically every [ ] minutes
  With this checkbox turned on and a number of minutes specified, the program will automatically retrieve new mail whenever the account is open, after each time the specified number of minutes elapses. To temporarily turn it off, or to make automatic mail retrieval occur on all accounts so configured instead of only the open account, see Popper.
Provide a warning for messages larger than [ ] kilobytes
  With this checkbox turned on and a number of kilobytes specified, the program will not retrieve a message larger than that size. Instead, it will retrieve only its headers. The message that ends up in your INBOX folder will contain a notice from the program, to the effect that you need to use the Preview Mail feature to retrieve the entire message. This way, you know the sender and the subject line of the message, so that you can decide when to retrieve the message at your own convenience rather than having your system tied up by a large download when you weren't expecting it.
Play an audio file when new mail is received
  With this checkbox turned on and a valid audio (.AU) file selected via the Find button to the right, the program will play that audio file instead of making the normal beep sound, when a mail retrieval action results in new mail being received.

The Messages Page

Prompt before deleting messages
  With this checkbox turned on, the program will ask you for confirmation each time you delete a message from a folder.
Prompt before permitting addresses without domains
  With this checkbox turned on, the program will ask you whether you're sure you haven't made a mistake, each time you try to leave the compose window with an addressee which is not formatted like a legal internet address and is also not found as a nickname in one of your address books. Turn this setting off, if you need to be able to address messages to other users on your own network without having to specify the domain name as part of the address, often enough that the prompt would irritate you.
Include message headers when forwarding
  If you turn this setting on, then when you forward a message, its header lines will be included instead of only its message body text.
Default word wrapping ON/OFF for all composed messages
  This setting lets you specify whether you want the Word wrap setting on the Edit menu of the compose window to be on or off by default.
Default MIME/UUENCODE as the method of encoding attached files
  This setting lets you specify whether you want the compose window's Attachments menu setting to default to Mime or UUencode.

The Cleanup Page

Maintain the Transaction Log
  With this checkbox turned on, the program will monitor the size of the message transaction log file, and remove the oldest entries in order to make it adhere to the Maximum Number of Log Items setting. This action is taken each time you close an account, either by switching to another account or by closing the program.
Maximum Number of Log Items
  If the Maintain the Transaction Log setting is turned on, the program will remove the oldest entries from the message transaction log file in order to keep only this number of entries in the file.
Maintain the Trash Folder
  With this checkbox turned on, the program will monitor the size of the TRASH folder, and delete the messages that have been in it the longest, in order to make its size adhere to the Maximum Number of Trash Messages setting. This action is taken each time you close an account, either by switching to another account or by closing the program.
Maximum Number of Trash Messages
  If the Maintain the Trash Folder setting is turned on, the program will delete, from the TRASH folder, the messages which have been in it the longest, in order to keep only this number of messages in the folder.
Do Not Copy Discarded Messages to the Trash Folder
  With this setting turned on, the program will actually delete all messages you tell it to delete, immediately, instead of ever moving them to the TRASH folder as it would normally do.

The News Page

If your only use of internet newsgroups is by web sites such as http://www.dejanews.com or http://www.hotbot.com, you don't need a news reader application. Those web sites let you read all the newsgroup postings you want, and they even let you write a reply, but not easily. The J Street Mailer provides an easy way to write newsgroup postings and replies, so you can interact with such web sites in both directions, without using a full-fledged news reader. To write an original posting, just type NEWS: and the newsgroup name as the addressee, in the compose window. To reply to a posting on a newsgroup web site, see Paste quoted.

News Server
  The address of your news server.
Port Number
  Usually 119, the port number to which the news server will respond.
Interpret addresses containing a period (.) but no (@) as newsgroups
  If you leave this setting on, then you don't have to type NEWS: before a newsgroup name in the Addresses: field of the compose window. The program will assume that any address that has a period without an @ sign is a newsgroup and will send the message using your news server. (If the message also has other addressees that don't look like newsgroup names, the program will send the message to those addressees using the SMTP or POP3 server; it will only send the message to the news server for those addressees that look like newsgroup names.)

  Note: This setting applies to you even if you never want to use the J Street Mailer for newsgroup postings or replies. If you need to be able to send an email message to an address which does not contain an @ sign but does contain a period (for example, another user at your own domain so that you want to leave off the @ sign and the domain name, but his username has a period in it), then you have to turn this setting off or else the program will always try to send that message to your news server (and if you don't have your news server setting filled in, the program is going to prompt you for it at send time). With this settings turned off, the program will never try to send anything to the news server unless you type NEWS: in front of the address in the compose window.