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The Main Window

The main program window of the J Street Mailer has several sections. At the very top, of course, is the title bar, which says "J Street Mailer" followed by the name of the currently open account. Then comes the menu bar, which allows you to access all of the program's functions.

The Toolbar

Below that, unless you turn it off using the Toolbar option on the Windows menu, is the toolbar which gives you speedier access to some of the program's most-used functions. If you leave your mouse pointer over one of the toolbar buttons for one second, it will display a bit of text (called "bubble help") which tells you what that button does, in case you don't find the icon to be self-explanatory. You can control many aspects of the toolbar via the ToolBar Customization dialog, which is accessed by clicking on a non-button portion of the toolbar using your right mouse button. This dialog lets you change the border styles of the buttons, turn off the ability to rearrange the buttons via drag and drop, and turn off the bubble help, on the left side of the dialog. The right side of the dialog lets you do various things to each individual button on the toolbar. When you select a button name, you can then use the Up and Down buttons below to move the selected toolbar button to a different position on the toolbar (or you can move them by dragging them from one place to another on the toolbar, using your left mouse button). You can Disable a button, which makes it inactive even though it's still visible. Or you can Hide a button so that it doesn't appear on the toolbar at all. And finally, you can Change the text which appears in a button's bubble help. (Note: This toolbar component is the InnoBar, which can be purchased by Java developers via InnoVal's home page, http://www.innoval.com.)

There are four buttons on the toolbar which provide functions that are not available on the menu bar: Next Message, Previous Message, Next Unread Message, and Previous Unread Message. They display, in the browser window at the bottom of the screen, whatever message (or unread message) follows (or preceeds) the one you currently have selected in the message list panel of the screen (the upper right). If no message is currently selected, then these buttons will display the first (or last) message (or unread message) instead.

The functions of these four buttons can also be performed when the system focus is on the browser portion of the window (the bottom half), by using the keystrokes Ctrl-PageDown and Ctrl-PageUp for Next and Previous Message, and Ctrl-N and Ctrl-B (think Next and Back) for Next and Previous Unread Message. Like other J Street Mailer keystroke combinations, those can be changed to anything you like, using the customized keystrokes feature.

The Folder Tree

The upper left panel of the J Street Mailer main window is the folder tree view area. This shows all of the folders which belong to the currently open account. Every account has INBOX, OUTBOX, and TRASH folders, for mail that has arrived, mail you've created to be sent, and mail that you have "deleted" from other folders. The program will not let you delete these three folders. If you try, it will only delete their contents and subfolders instead. You can create whatever other folders, subfolders, and sub-subfolders (etc.) you like.

If you create a folder named Print Queue, it will be treated in a special way: At the end of every mail retrieval, and each time you close the program, the program will look to see if there are any messages in that folder. If there are, it will ask you if you want to print them now. If you say yes, the program will print and delete the messages in that folder.

A folder which has subfolders has a different icon, from the folders which do not have any children. To see a folder's children, you can doubleclick on the folder's title or its icon, or singleclick on the little plus sign to the left of its icon.

To see the messages in a folder, singleclick on the folder's title or icon, and after a moment they will appear in the message list panel, in the upper right corner of the window.

The right mouse button menu of each item in the folder tree contains most of the same options as the Folder menu on the program's main menu bar.

The Message List

The upper right panel of the main J Street Mailer window is the message list view. To view a message in the browser window at the bottom of the screen, just singleclick on it in the message list. If you want to select a message in the list without opening it in the browser window, just hold down the space bar on your keyboard while you select the message with the mouse. If you select multiple messages at the same time with your mouse, by swipe marking, the program will also neglect to open any of them in the browser window.

Clicking on the button at the top of each column (which also serves as the column heading) will sort the entries in the list according to the contents of that column. If you want to sort by two criteria, sort by the second column first. For example, to sort the messages by Subject, in chronological order within groups of messages that have the same subject, sort first by the Date column and then by the Subject column. To reverse a sort--that is, to sort from highest to lowest--click on the button a second time. When sorting by subject, the program ignores the words "Re:" and "Fwd:" when they appear at the beginning of a message's Subject line, so that replies to a message will fall together with that message in the sort order.

You can change the width of a column with your mouse, by dragging the border between one column and the next, up on the row of buttons at the tops of the columns.

The leftmost column in the message list panel displays a closed envelope or an opened envelope, to let you know whether or not you've ever opened the message. (The Virtual Folders feature will let you quickly find all of your unopened mail at any time.) The second column is where color coding "flags" will show up, on messages to which you've applied one.

Next comes the Subject column. This displays the Subject: header of each message. It will also display a pushpin icon for messages to which you've applied a sticky note, a diskette icon for messages which came with attachments, or a diskette with a pushpin for messages which have both a sticky note and an attachment. (The fact that a message came with an attachment doesn't mean that it will still have an attachment by the time it is shown in the browser window, though. If the attachment is all text, it will be displayed as part of the message instead of being split off the way a binary attachment would be. You might also see a message that doesn't have the diskette icon in its Subject column until the first time you display the message in the browser window, even though it did come in with an attachment. This will happen in the case of UUencoded attachments, as opposed to MIME encoded ones). The pushpin and diskette icons are, of course, ignored when you have the program sort the entries according to the contents of the Subject column.

The next columns are the From name and address, the To name and address, the contents of the Date: header of the message, the Date Received field which tells the date and time when the J Street Mailer first received each message, the Size of the file which holds the message, and the POP File Name of the file which holds the message (in case you should need to look at it outside the program with a special editor, or access it with some utility for any reason).

The right mouse button menu of each item in the message list contains most of the same options that are available on the Message menu of the program's main menu bar.

The Browser Window

The main portion of the bottom half of the J Street Mailer's main window is the browser, where your messages are displayed. There are three styles of browser window: The default one is an HTML browser (which means it can read web pages as well as plain text) component named ICE, the second one is Sun's HotJava HTML browser, and the other is a plain text browser. The text style operates faster, and also allows you to select text so that you can copy it to the clipboard, if you're using an operating system which has a clipboard. The HotJava one does that also, but it does not have a right mouse button menu nor keystroke activation of the Message menu options that the other browser styles have. An option near the top of the Message menu allows you to switch among the browser styles whenever you like.

The top right corner of the HTML styles of browser window contains a tiny pushpin icon which is red if the message has a sticky note, or gray if it does not. You can click on this icon to create, modify, or delete the message's sticky note. You can also use the corresponding option on the Message menu.

The right mouse button menu of the browser window styles other than HotJava, provides most of the same options as the Message menu of the program's main menu bar.

When the ICE HTML style browser window has focus, you can use the space bar on your keyboard to read from the beginning to the end of a folder's messages. That is, when the browser is showing the bottom of a message, the space bar will advance to the next message; otherwise it will just act the same as the Page Down key.

If the program encounters a message or MIME body part with a "Content-type: text/html" header line while one of the HTML browser styles is in use, it will treat that message or body part as HTML code (a web page). The same is true of any message text which is encountered between the string "<HTML>" at the beginning of any line of a message, and the string "</HTML>" at the beginning of any later line in that message.

If there is a URL (web page or file name) in such an HTML message that is not formatted as an HTML link (HTML links are generally displayed as blue, in most web browsers, and clicking on such a blue link will view that URL in the same browser window), or a URL in any non-HTML message, you can doubleclick on it or use the Open browser using selected text option on the Message menu, to view that URL in the browser of your choice, according to the Web Browser page of your Advanced Settings notebook. Each such operation will open a new browser window, rather than using a previously opened one. Doubleclicking on the URL in the J Street Mailer main window's browser panel will only open a browser window if the URL is one word long (no spaces in it) and it begins with either www. or http://. If the word you doubleclick on does not start with one of those strings, the program will not try to assume that you deliberately wanted to open a browser window with that string. So if you do want to open a browser with a URL that begins with something else, then use the Open browser using selected text menu item. Also when you select a URL by doubleclicking, the program is going to strip leading and trailing parentheses, commas, etc. for you, before sending the URL to the browser program. If there's ever a time when such leading and trailing characters are actually supposed to be part of the URL, you will need to use the menu item instead of doubleclicking, then, as well.

Depending on which browser style you are using for your main J Street Mailer window's browser panel, there are various limitations of this feature because of the capabilities of the various browser style components. The HotJava HTML browser does not respond at all to doubleclicks, so you must use only the menu item when you use that browser style. The ICE HTML browser will highlight the entire line instead of only one word, if you have word wrap turned off and you doubleclick on a word, so this function won't work at all with that browser and word wrap off. You can't work around that problem by using the menu item, because in that browser there is no text cursor. So you can't select text, so you can't use the Open browser using selected text menu item.

The Attachment Toolbar

When you display a message that has one or more attachments, the attachment toolbar will appear at the bottom of the browser window. The attachment toolbar contains one button for each attachment in the message (unless there are more than ten, in which case there will be ten buttons and then one more button for all the ones beyond the tenth). If you rest your mouse pointer over one of these buttons for one second, the program will tell you the filename under which this attachment is stored (which is, temporarily, in the atchmnts subdirectory of your Mailer directory, during the time while you have the message open in the browser window). If the attachment was sent with its filename, that filename will be used; otherwise the program will make up a name like "(1)".

If you singleclick on one of the attachment toolbar buttons, the Attachment Processor dialog will come up. This dialog shows you the filename and size of the attachment file, lets you Store the file anywhere on your hard drive or other file storage medium, and if appropriate based on the filename extension (BMP, GIF, JPEG, JPG, MET, TIF, and AU), also lets you View, Print, or Play the file. (The Print button does not become enabled until after you've used the View button.)

If you have a message with more than one attachment, or more than one message with attachments, and you want to deal with them all at once rather than each one separately, you'll find a useful option on the Utilities submenu of the Message menu.

The icon which is displayed on each attachment's button on the attachment toolbar, depends upon the filename extension of the filename that was sent along with the file. BMP, GIF, JPEG, JPG, MET, and TIF are picture files; ZIP, JAR, TAR, GTAR, and GZ files are compressed files; AU and WAV are audio files, HTM, HTML, and SHTML files are web pages; and DOC, TXT, TEXT, LOG, and PRN files are text files. Files with other extensions, and files that were sent without a filename, are displayed with a generic icon.

The Status Line

The bottom line of the window is the status line, which tells you on the right how many messages are in the currently open folder, and on the left tells you various types of information that the program needs to give you at various times, such as status information during mail retrieval, etc.

The Panel Dividers

You can change the sizes of the folder tree, message list, and browser portions of the window with your mouse, by dragging the horizontal boundary above the browser and the vertical boundary between the folder tree and message list. The positions of these boundaries will be saved when you close the program and recalled when you restart it.