Added a page on Mail and a little workshop so people can have a look and suggest improvements before putting it into the online tool. Which still has the problem of broken image upload and export of all pages...

git-svn-id: file:///srv/svn/repos/haiku/haiku/trunk@42603 a95241bf-73f2-0310-859d-f6bbb57e9c96
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Joachim Seemer 2011-08-09 16:40:03 +00:00
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<head> <head>
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<div id="content"> <div id="content">
<div> <div>
<table class="index" id="index" summary="index">
<tr class="heading"><td>Index</td></tr>
<tr class="index"><td><a href="#reading">Reading messages</a><br />
<a href="#creating">Creating new messages</a><br />
<a href="#preferences">Preferences</a></td></tr>
</table>
<h2><img src="../../images/apps-images/mail-icon_64.png" alt="mail-icon_64.png" width="64" height="64" />Mail</h2> <h2><img src="../../images/apps-images/mail-icon_64.png" alt="mail-icon_64.png" width="64" height="64" />Mail</h2>
<table summary="layout" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"> <table summary="layout" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2">
<tr><td>Deskbar:</td><td style="width:15px;"></td><td><span class="menu">Applications</span></td></tr> <tr><td>Deskbar:</td><td style="width:15px;"></td><td><span class="menu">Applications</span></td></tr>
<tr><td>Location:</td><td></td><td><span class="path">/boot/system/apps/Mail</span></td></tr> <tr><td>Location:</td><td></td><td><span class="path">/boot/system/apps/Mail</span></td></tr>
<tr><td>Settings:</td><td></td><td><span class="path">~/config/settings/Mail/BeMail Settings</span></td></tr> <tr><td>Settings:</td><td></td><td><span class="path">~/config/settings/Mail/</span><br />
<span class="path">~/config/settings/Mail/Menu Links/</span> - Objects put here appear in the mailbox' context menu<br />
<span class="path">~/config/settings/Mail/signatures/</span> - Location to store signatures<br />
<span class="path">~/config/settings/Mail/status/</span> - Location to store custom statuses</td></tr>
</table> </table>
<p><br /></p> <p><br /></p>
<p>Documentation is still missing. If you want to work on it, please announce it on the <a href="http://www.freelists.org/list/haiku-doc">Documentation mailing list</a> to avoid duplication.</p> <p>Mail is Haiku's default viewer and editor of emails. It has nothing to do with the actual fetching and sending of mails, which is done by the mail_daemon and can be configured via the <a href="../preferences/e-mail.html">E-mail</a> preferences.</p>
<p>This page is a general overview of the application Mail. For more information how email in Haiku works, refer to the <a href="../workshop-email.html">Workshop on managing email</a>.</p>
<h2>
<a href="#"><img src="../../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>
<a id="reading" name="reading">Reading messages</a></h2>
<p>You double-click an email file to open it in Mail. The interface is quite simple:</p>
<img src="../images/apps-images/mail-read.png" alt="email-read.png" />
<p>A menu and optional tool bar on top, with an area of the interesting attributes of a mail (to, from, subject, date) below that, and then the actual body of the mail. If the mail appears with strange characters or empty, try to change the <span class="menu">Decoding</span> from the pop-up menu.</p>
<p>If there are files attached to an email, they are listed at the end of the message. A right-click on one opens a context menu to <span class="menu">Save attachment...</span> or <span class="menu">Open attachment</span>. You can also drag & drop directly to the Desktop or another Tracker window.</p>
<p>Most of the menu and tool bar items are pretty self-explaining, so we'll concentrate just on the highlights.</p>
<h3>
<a href="#"><img src="../../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>File</h3>
<p>When you close the window of a new mail, its status is normally switched from "New" to "Read". But you can set other statuses as well, by choosing from the <span class="menu">Close and...</span> submenu. There you'll also find the option <span class="menu">Set to...</span> to create your own custom statuses, which are saved under <span class="path">~/config/settings/Mail/status/</span>.</p>
<h3>
<a href="#"><img src="../../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>Edit</h3>
<p>Here you'll find an item to open Mail's <span class="menu">Preferences...</span> (<a href="#preferences">see below</a>) and a shortcut to managing your <span class="menu">Accounts...</span>, which will open the <a href="../preferences/e-mail.html">E-mail</a> preference panel.</p>
<h3>
<a href="#"><img src="../../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>View</h3>
<p>You'll only seldomly need these two items, if at all:</p>
<table summary="layout" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2">
<tr><td><span class="menu">Show header</span></td><td class="onelinetop"><span class="key">ALT</span> <span class="key">H</span></td><td style="width:10px;"></td><td>Shows the complete header of a mail, in case you need to track down the path of your mail, for example.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="onelinetop"><span class="menu">Show raw message</span></td><td></td><td></td><td>Displays a mail in its raw state, i.e. with all its control characters and without Mail's coloring of quotes or URLs, for example..</td></tr>
</table>
<h3>
<a href="#"><img src="../../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>Message</h3>
<p>The different options to reply to a mail may need a bit of explanation.</p>
<table summary="layout" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2">
<tr><td><span class="menu">Reply</span></td><td><span class="key">ALT</span> <span class="key">R</span></td><td style="width:10px;"></td><td>The standard reply to the server that has sent the mail to you. NOTE: In case of a mailing list post, this normally replies back to the mailing list, <i>not</i> just the person that wrote the post!</td></tr>
<tr><td class="onelinetop"><span class="menu">Reply to sender</span></td><td><span class="key">OPT</span> <span class="key">ALT</span> <span class="key">R</span></td><td></td><td>This on the other hand, sends directly and only to the person listed in the "From" attribute.</td></tr>
<tr><td><span class="menu">Reply to all</span></td><td class="onelinetop"><span class="key">SHIFT</span> <span class="key">ALT</span> <span class="key">R</span></td><td></td><td>Replies to the original sender plus all other (cc'ed) recipients of the original mail.</td></tr>
</table>
<div class="box-info">If you mark a passage in the email before replying to it, only the marked text will be quoted in your answering mail. A nice way to cut down on excessive quoting, which is frowned upon by pretty much everybody...</div>
<p>The items to <span class="menu">Forward</span>, <span class="menu">Resend</span> and <span class="menu">Copy to new</span> are again pretty self-explaining.</p>
<p>When you've opened an email from a Tracker or query result window, <span class="menu">Previous message</span> and <span class="menu">Next message</span> will move to the previous/next email in the list.</p>
<p><span class="menu">Save address</span> collects all email addresses from the header and the actual email body in a submenu. Choosing an address will open the <a href="people.html">People</a> application in order to save the contact information.</p>
<h3>
<a href="#"><img src="../../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>Queries</h3>
<p>This doesn't work yet, but is intended to hold queries that would show all mail related to the currently open mail, like all from the same sender or same subject/thread.</p>
<h2>
<a href="#"><img src="../../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>
<a id="creating" name="creating">Creating new messages</a></h2>
<p>A new email is created by invoking the <span class="menu">New mail message</span> menu or the corresponding icon from the tool bar of an open email. Or you just start the Mail application or choose <span class="menu">Create new message...</span> from the context menu of the mailbox icon in the Deskbar.</p>
<img src="../images/apps-images/mail-write.png" alt="email-write.png" />
<p>The window is pretty similar to the one when reading mails. The menu and tool bar items are slightly different and the text boxes have to be filled with the recipient's email address, subject and so on, of course.</p>
<p><span class="menu">Cc</span> is short for the anachronistic term "<i>carbon copy</i>" and results in copies of your mail being sent to the listed people. The difference to just listing a buch of addresses in the "To" field is, that you don't directly address the cc'ed people, thereby signaling that you probably don't expect an answer of them.<br />
<span class="menu">Bcc</span> means "<i>blind carbon copy</i>" which does practically the same as "Cc", but hides the recipients from each other.</p>
<p>You can enter several recipients by separating their addresses with a comma.
<span class="menu">To</span>, <span class="menu">CC</span>, and <span class="menu">BCC</span> are pop-up menus. They contain all email addresses on your system found by a query for <a href="people.html">People</a> files. Their "Group" attribute will sort them in corresponding submenus.</p>
<p>Again, we'll focus on the more interesting features in the menus.</p>
<h3>
<a href="#"><img src="../../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>File</h3>
<p>With <span class="menu">Save as draft</span> you can store your work so far and come back to it later. To load it again, choose it from the <span class="menu">Open draft</span> submenu that will list the result of a query for all mails with the status "Draft".</p>
<h3>
<a href="#"><img src="../../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>Edit</h3>
<p><span class="menu">Quote</span> and <span class="menu">Remove quote</span> or their respective shortcuts <span class="key">ALT</span> <span class="key"></span> / <span class="key"></span> are used to add/remove a level of quoting by adjusting the number of ">" symbols in front of quoted lines. Just select some text in all the lines you want un/quoted and invoke the menu item.</p>
<img src="../images/apps-images/mail-spellcheck.png" alt="email-spellcheck.png" />
<p><span class="menu">Check spelling</span> currently only offers corrections of English texts by marking wrong or unknown words red and showing them in italic.
Right-clicking such a word opens a context menu offering suggestions to correct the word or to <span class="menu">Add</span> it to the accepted vocabulary.</p>
<p>Then, there are again the items to open Mail's <span class="menu">Preferences...</span> (<a href="#preferences">see below</a>) and a shortcut to managing your <span class="menu">Accounts...</span>, which will open the <a href="../preferences/e-mail.html">E-mail</a> preference panel.</p>
<h3>
<a href="#"><img src="../../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>Message</h3>
<p>With <span class="menu">Add signature</span> you can add predefined texts to the end of your mail. From its submenu you can choose a specific or <span class="menu">Random</span> one.</p>
<img src="../images/apps-images/mail-signature.png" alt="email-signature.png" />
<p>You create new or edit existing signatures with <span class="menu">Edit signatures...</span>, which will open a window where you enter the text itself and the title of your new sig. Signatures should be saved in <span class="path">~/config/settings/Mail/sigantures</span>.</p>
<p>Use <span class="menu">Add enclosure...</span> and <span class="menu">Remove enclosure</span> to add/remove files as attachments. You can also drag & drop files from a Tracker window. Be careful though to drop those in the header section (To/From/Subject area at the top) or they'll get pasted into the email body if they are text files.</p>
<img src="../images/apps-images/mail-attachments.png" alt="email-attachments.png" />
<p>File attachments are listed below the header section. You can remove a file by invoking a context menu or by selecting it and pressing <span class="key">DEL</span>.</p>
<h3>
<a href="#"><img src="../../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>Queries</h3>
<p>This doesn't work yet, but is intended to hold queries that would show all mail related to the currently open mail, like all to the same recipient or same subject/thread.</p>
<h2>
<a href="#"><img src="../../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>
<a id="preferences" name="preferences">Preferences</a></h2>
<img src="../images/apps-images/mail-preferences.png" alt="email-preferences.png" />
<p>Mail's preferences come in two parts:</p>
<h3>
<a href="#"><img src="../../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>User interface</h3>
<table summary="layout" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2">
<tr><td><span class="menu">Button bar</span></td><td style="width:10px;"></td><td>Options to show labels under the icons or hide the tool bar completely.</td></tr>
<tr><td><span class="menu">Font</span></td><td></td><td>Sets the type of font used for the email text.</td></tr>
<tr><td><span class="menu">Size</span></td><td></td><td>Sets the font size.</td></tr>
<tr><td><span class="menu">Colored quotes</span></td><td></td><td>Colors different levels of quotation.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="onelinetop"><span class="menu">Initial spell check mode</span></td><td></td><td>Turns the spell checker on/off on startup.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="onelinetop"><span class="menu">Automatically mark mail as read</span></td><td></td><td>If you close an email with the Status "New", you can have it automatically marked as "Read".</td></tr>
</table>
<h3>
<a href="#"><img src="../../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>Mailing</h3>
<table summary="layout" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2">
<tr><td><span class="menu">Default account</span></td><td style="width:10px;"></td><td>If you have several email accounts, this specifies which to use by default when creating a new message.</td></tr>
<tr><td><span class="menu">Reply account</span></td><td></td><td>When you reply to a mail, you can either always <span class="menu">Use default account</span> set in the pop-up menu above, or use the <span class="menu">Account from mail</span>, which will send the mail from the same account that received the original message.</td></tr>
<tr><td><span class="menu">Reply preamble</span></td><td></td><td>This is inserted before the quoted text in your reply. You can use various variables from the pop-up menu next to the text field. Example: "<i>Hello %n!\n\nOn %d you wrote:\n</i>" produces this:
<pre>Hello Dr. Hawking!
On Mon, 18 Jan 1998 02:55:16 +0800 you wrote:
&gt; so thanks again for the inspiration concerning the cosmological constant.
&gt; ...and the rest of the quoted text following...</pre></td></tr>
<tr><td><span class="menu">Auto signature</span></td><td></td><td>Adds a signature automatically to the end of the mail.</td></tr>
<tr><td><span class="menu">Encoding</span></td><td></td><td>Sets the default encoding.</td></tr>
<tr><td class="onelinetop"><span class="menu">Warn unencodable</span></td><td></td><td>If your mail contains characters that can't be encoded with the currently set encoding method, you can turn on being warned about that. That gives you the opportunity to change the encoding before sending. Otherwise unencodable characters are replaced by rectangle symbols.</td></tr>
<tr><td><span class="menu">Text wrapping</span></td><td></td><td>Inserts line-breaks every 76 characters which makes mails easier to read.</td></tr>
<tr><td><span class="menu">Attach attributes</span></td><td></td><td>You can choose to send BFS' attributes of a file alongside the attachments. This is nice for other Haiku users, as they'll get a "complete" file (think artist, album, title attributes of MP3 files), but may cause confusion (or even suspicion) with others, who will wonder what the additional "BeOS Attributes" attachment might be...<br />
Should you opt not to send attributes with your attachments, remember zip up your files before you send them or you'll strip away BFS attributes.</td></tr>
</table>
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<div><span>User guide</span></div>
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<table class="index" id="index" summary="index">
<tr class="heading"><td>Index</td></tr>
<tr class="index"><td>
<a href="#mailsystem">Haiku's mail system</a><br />
<a href="#statuses">Using custom statuses</a><br />
<a href="#queries">Using queries</a><br />
<a href="#tips">More tips</a>
</td></tr>
</table>
<h1>Workshop: Managing Email</h1>
<p>This workshop takes a look on how to manage email under Haiku. It assumes that the email services are correctly configured with the <a href="preferences/e-mail.html">E-Mail</a> preferences and you're familiar with the basic features of the <a href="applications/mail.html">Mail</a> application.</p>
<h2>
<a href="#"><img src="../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>
<a id="mailsystem" name="mailsystem">Haiku's mail system</a></h2>
<p>If you come to Haiku from other operating systems, you're probably used to big applications like MS Outlook or Mozilla's Thunderbird. You have to configure them by entering all the info on mail server addresses etc. and they use their own contacts database. They take care of sending and fetching email and store them in some big special file.<br />
Changing you email client can be a hassle with quite some ex/importing and converting going on. Using more than one client in parallel to check out what else is available is also not without the occasional kerfuffle.</p>
<p>Haiku's mail system is different. It breaks down into smaller separate modules.</p>
<p>There's the <span class="app">mail_daemon</span> that takes care of the communication with your mail servers. The <a href="preferences/e-mail.html">E-Mail</a> preferences is the one central point to configure your email accounts and how often they're checked, for example.</p>
<p>Every message that is fetched or sent is saved as one single email file, with its header information (like sender, subject, date) and status (like New, Replied, Sent) in BFS attributes. This enables searching/filtering them with Haiku's fast queries.</p>
<img src="images/workshop-email-images/browsing.png" alt="browsing.png" />
<p>With every email being in a separate file, viewing them becomes just as easy as browsing through a folder (or query result) of images with <a href="applications/showimage.html">ShowImage</a>. Leaving the Tracker window open, you'll see the moving selection of the currently viewed file while you use the previous/next button to move through them.<br />
As they are independent files, using a viewer other than Haiku's <a href="applications/mail.html">Mail</a> causes no problems whatsoever.</p>
<p>Similarly, creating a new message results in just another file that is handed to the mail_daemon that takes care of sending it off. Contact management is deferred to the <a href="applications/people.html">People</a> application.</p>
<p>In a nutshell, where other mail clients do everything, from communicating with the mail servers to providing a view with all your mails and tools to search and filter them, Haiku uses a chain of smaller tools and general file management:
<ul>
<li><p>The <span class="app">mail_daemon</span> to fetch/send mail and save them as normal files.</p></li>
<li><p>Tracker windows and queries to find and show email files.</p></li>
<li><p>The <span class="app">Mail</span> application to view email files and create new messages relying on system-wide contact management by the <span class="app">People</span> app.</p></li>
</ul>
Especially using Tracker and queries to manage emails is a powerful idea. The experience you gain can be transferred to any other problem that is dealing with files. Be it images, music, video, contacts or any other documents, using Tracker is at the core of all file managing.<br />
Also, improvements in any of these system areas benefit not just emailing, but all applications that make use of them.</p>
<h2>
<a href="#"><img src="../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>
<a id="status" name="status">Using custom statuses</a></h2>
<p>When you browse through your newly arrived email, you may want to come back to some of them later to think about it in more depth. While you could use Mail's menu <span class="menu">Close and | Leave as New</span> to keep them in your "<i>New messages</i>" query, things tend to pile up that way...</p>
<p>One solution is of course to just start a reply and save it as draft. But if you don't expect to write a reply and just want to re-read the mail later, that isn't ideal.</p>
<img src="images/workshop-email-images/status.png" alt="status.png" />
<p>Better use <span class="menu">Close and | Set to...</span> to create a new status and use that to categorize your mail. For example, you could call the status "<i>Later</i>", and then query for that when you find more time.<br />
Or you use different statuses for specific projects. For example, I created a status "<i>HUG</i>" (for "Haiku user guide") under which I collect every mail that may influence the contents of the user guide, like commit messages about code changes that alter or introduce some feature or anything else I feel could improve the user guide.<br />
In any case, try to keep the status name short. That way it always fits in a normally wide "Status" column in Tracker.</p>
<p>You don't have to open an email with the <span class="app">Mail</span> application to set its status. With the Tracker add-ons <span class="app">Mark as Read </span> and <span class="app">Mark as...</span> you can select some email files and set their status in one go.</p>
<h2>
<a href="#"><img src="../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>
<a id="queries" name="queries">Using queries</a></h2>
<p>Sure, you specify a folder to store all your email, you can open it et voilà, there's all you mail. But over time the folder becomes crowded and showing all will take longer and longer as thousands of files and their attributes have to be parsed and sorted. Also, most of the time you don't really care about two year old emails of Nigerian princes and their inheritory trouble ...</p>
<div class="box-info">A lot of time when populating a folder is spent on putting files read from disk into the correct sorting order and displaying that in the window. If you do have to open a folder with a huge number of files, you can shorten the wait by making the Tracker window "invisible", i.e. either minimize it or change to another workspace. Watch <a href="applications/processcontroller.html">ProcessController</a> to see how it affects CPU usage.</div>
<p><a href="queries.html">Queries</a>, to the rescue!</p>
<p>By using queries, you can narrow down the view of your mails. Actually, the mailbox icon in the Deskbar uses queries.</p>
<img src="images/workshop-email-images/daemon-in-deskbar.png" alt="daemon-in-deskbar.png" />
<p>The <span class="menu">Open Draft</span> submenu does a query for the status "<i>Draft</i>", which is set by <span class="app">Mail</span> when you save a message.</p>
<p><span class="menu">Open Inbox Folder</span> and <span class="menu">Open Mail Folder</span> are just links to regular folders (and not very useful in my opinion).</p>
<p>The <span class="menu"># new messages</span> submenu is populated by a query for email with the status "<i>New</i>" (that same query is used to change the mailbox icon to show some letters in it, by the way).</p>
<p>You can add your own queries (and links to folders) in that context menu too, by putting them into <span class="path">~/config/settings/Mail/Menu Links</span>.</p>
<div class="box-info">The query <span class="path">~/config/settings/Mail/mailbox</span> is a special case: It is executed when left-clicking the mailbox icon in the Deskbar. If you want to change that behavior, you can replace it with any other file (or link to a file), just name it "<i>mailbox</i>". It doesn't have to be a query, a link to a folder of queries or a script or application works just as well.</div>
<h3>
<a href="#"><img src="../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>
<a id="query-examples" name="query-examples">Query examples</a></h3>
<p>Here are a few examples of useful queries:</p>
<table summary="layout" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10">
<tr align="center"><td><img src="images/workshop-email-images/query-1.png" alt="query-1.png" /><br />
This finds all mails with the custom status "<i>Later</i>".</td>
<td><img src="images/workshop-email-images/query-2.png" alt="query-2.png" /><br />
This finds all mails of the past 2 days.</td></tr>
<tr align="center"><td><img src="images/workshop-email-images/query-3.png" alt="query-3.png" /><br />
This finds all mails by Ingo Weinhold of the past 2 weeks.</td>
<td><img src="images/workshop-email-images/query-4.png" alt="query-4.png" /><br />
This finds all posts from the Haiku commit list of the past 12 hours.</td></tr>
</table>
<h2>
<a href="#"><img src="../images/up.png" style="border:none;float:right" alt="index" /></a>
<a id="tips" name="tips">More tips</a></h2>
<ul>
<li><p>If you don't save a query as "<i>Query</i>" but as "<i>Query template</i>", invoking it won't show the result window, but the Find... window instead. That way you can easily exchange the search string for the subject or sender, for example, or change a "<i>2 days</i>" time limit to "<i>3 days</i>".</p></li>
<li><p>Activating "type-ahead filtering" in <a href="tracker.html#tracker-preferences">Tracker's preferences</a> allows you to very quickly filter a query result even further. Often it's enough to query for all mails of the last 3 days and go with type-ahead filtering from there. The big advantage is, that you don't have to exactly specify which attribute to search for, as all displayed are considered when filtering.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://haikuware.com/directory/view-details/utilities/desktop-accessories/relatedmail">RelatedMail</a> is a nifty little application that will query for all mails with the same subject/sender/time-frame etc. of a dropped email. Kind of what the <span class="menu">Queries</span> menu in the <span class="app">Mail</span> app is supposed to do.</p></li>
</ul>
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