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Preview Mail

The Preview Mail function is activated by the toolbar button or File menu option by that name. This feature lets you examine and selectively retrieve or delete messages from your POP3 server without going through the normal process of retrieving all the mail at once without knowing first what it is. If you have your account configured to work with an IMAP4 server, then this toolbar button and menu option will instead bring up the Preview IMAP4 Mail function, which is quite similar to POP3 Preview Mail in some ways, and very different in others.

When you use this function with a POP3 server, the first thing you'll see is the Preview Mail Setup dialog. Its settings will be filled in using the information in your General Settings, but you can change the POP3 server, userid, password, and port number as desired, if you want to preview the mail in some account other than the J Street Mailer account you have open at the moment. You can select whether you want to see the information about all of the messages, only the oldest 10 messages, only the newest 25 messages, etc.

If you turn off the Retrieve message headers checkbox, then the program won't even attempt to get the message information from the server before displaying the following window. This can be useful if you know exactly what you want to do and exactly what message you want to do it to, and you don't want to waste time retrieving needless information first. Or if there's something wrong with one of the messages on the server, such that the server chokes on it every time it tries to provide the information about that message; you might need to delete the message in question without knowing what it is, and this checkbox will make it possible to do that. However, always try one other thing first, to make sure that the problem is really with the server and not with the J Street Mailer: The Retrieve selected message to a file option (see below). If the problem is caused by the J Street Mailer's reaction to something in the message, this option will bypass the problem because the program will retrieve the message and store it in a file without trying to interpret it in any way. If this method also fails, then indeed the problem must be something that's affecting the server, not the program.

If you press the Count Messages button, the program will just tell you how many messages there are, and that's all it will do.

If you press the List Messages button, then the program will proceed to the main Preview Mail window. If the Retrieve message headers checkbox was not turned off, the program will begin retrieving information from your POP3 server about each of your waiting messages, and will display that information in the Preview Mail window's columns. Like the message list panel in the upper right of the program's main window, you can sort the entries according to the data in any column by pressing the button at the top of that column. The right mouse button menu of each item in the list contains most of the same options as the Preview Mail window's File menu:

View first 50 lines of the selected message
  Also activated by doubleclicking on an entry in the list. This option shows only the first 50 lines of the message, in the "unformatted" window (see below).
View the selected message (unformatted)
  This option shows you the whole message, in the exact format in which it was sent, without tab-to-space translation, without word wrap, with encoded attachments still inside, etc. The File menu of this window has a Print option, and the Edit menu has a Copy option to copy the selected text to the clipboard, if you're using an operating system that has a clipboard.
View the selected message (formatted)
  This option shows you the whole message, in a separate browser window very much like the ICE HTML browser in the program's main window. The Message menu of this window has several of the options from the same menu of the program's main window.
Retrieve selected message to a file
  This option places the message into the file you specify.
Retrieve selected message(s) to inbox
  This option retrieves the selected messages just as a normal mail retrieval would do.
Retrieve marked message(s) to inbox
  This option is just like the one above, except that it acts upon the marked messages rather than the selected ones (see below).
Mark selected message(s)
  This option marks the selected messages. That means it puts a green arrow into the leftmost column of the Preview Mail list window, such that later use of any option which works upon marked messages, will work upon that message. The most obvious use for this option is while you're reading messages, to mark the ones that you will want to delete; then after you've read and/or retrieved the ones you want, you can delete the right messages without having to remember which ones you wanted to delete, because you will have marked them as you went along.
Mark all
  This option marks all of the messages instead of just the selected ones; see above.
Unmark selected message(s)
  This option unmarks the marked ones of the selected messages; see above.
Unmark all
  This option unmarks all of the marked messages; see above.
Delete marked message(s)
  This option, after asking you if you're sure you want to do it, deletes the marked messages (see above) from the POP3 server and closes the Preview Mail window. There will never be any way for you to get any of the messages back, after doing this; that's why the program makes it slightly difficult to do by making you mark the messages first.
Refresh the list of messages
  This option returns you to the Preview Mail Setup dialog so that you can get a new list of the messages in the same POP3 account or a different one.
Stop message refresh
  This option makes the program stop getting new header information from the POP3 server.

As long as the Preview Mail window is open, the program will issue a STAT command to the POP3 server every 60 seconds, so that the POP3 server will not time out for lack of activity. This is good for the J Street Mailer user, but bad for the POP3 server, so please remember not to leave this window open longer than you need to.