GNUMail.app User's Guide

by Martin Brecher <martin@mb-itconsulting.com>


Contents

Setting up GNUMail.app

Preferences
Personal
Viewing
Sending
Receiving
Compose
Quoting
MIME Types
Filtering

Preferences [top of page]

As told before, GNUMail.app will launch its Preferences Panel the first time it's started. The panel consists of an icon column on the left side and a page view on the right side. Clicking an icon will bring the related page to the front.

Personal [top of page]

At first we see the Personal preferences page where we can define personal profiles which contain our name and email address, as well as a different reply-to address if needed.

At the beginning only one profile is present, the General profile. You should use it for the personal information you use most times.

The usage of additional profiles is especially useful for example if you use your work address as well as your private email address on the same system.

New profiles can be created by clicking the "Add" button. You are prompted to enter a name for the profile and click OK. Now you can enter the data for that profile, which will be saved by GNUMail.app automatically if you change the profile (using the popupmenu), change the preferences tab or generally close the preferences dialog.

You can remove the currently selected profile by clicking the "Delete" button. But you have to keep at least one profile, of course.

Setting personal options
(Click the image for a full size view)

Additionally we can specify the organisation we work for, set the timezone and enter the path of our signature file (clicking the Choose-Button will bring up an 'Open dialog' where you can easily specify the file that contains your signature).

Selecting a signature file using the Open Panel
(Click the image for a full size view)

After you have entered your personal information we proceed with the Viewing options. NOTE: Versions prior to 0.6.0 require you to click 'Apply' to save the settings before you change the page! With version 0.6.0 and up we can just go on and save at the end using the OK button.

Viewing [top of page]

Latest versions of GNUMail.app support coloured URL Highlighting (those starting with http:, https:, ftp:, file:). Just check/uncheck the box beneath "Highlight URLs in message content" to activate/deactivate this useful feature.

Also we can choose which message headers should be shown when viewing a mail or if just all headers should be shown. You can simply add headers using the text field and the 'Add' button. Removing is as simple: just select a header from the list and click the 'Delete' button. Using the arrow buttons you can change the order in which headers are displayed when reading a message. The 'Defaults' button will restore the original state that you find after a fresh install of GNUMail.app.


(Click the image for a full size view)

Sending [top of page]

On this page we can specify transport agebts, either mailer programs (like sendmail) or smtp servers.

You can very easily add, remove or edit transport agents, as well as assign them to personal profiles.

Additionally you can specify headers which GNUMail.app should add to your mail during delivery. As an example, the X-Mailer variable is set to GNUMail in the screenshot below. If you want to edit a header entry in the list, just double click on it.

Sending options
(Click the image for a full size view)

Receiving [top of page]

After we have defined the way we want our out going mail to be delivered, we have to set the sources where we get our incoming mail from. Currently GNUMail.app supports three types of receiving messages: via POP3 or IMAP and through your local mail spool file. Additionally GNUMail.app can retrieve your mail automatically for you. You can set a time span after which GNUMail.app checks your POP3 mail servers and the mail directory for new mail.

If you already have a local mail system up and running, you should have GNUMail.app use your mail spool file. Just enter the path in the text field. If you are not sure where your mail spool file is located, by clicking the 'Choose' button you can use the open panel to browse your file hierarchy. Usually the mail spool file is locate in the /var/mail/ or /var/spool/mail/ folder and has the name of it's owner (as seen in the picture).

Receiving options
(Click the image for a full size view)

If you want to have GNUMail.app fetch your mail directly from POP3 or IMAP servers, you can click 'Add' to specify a POP3 or a IMAP server (as much as you like by repeating this step). The added servers will appear in the server list at the top of the Receiving page. Using the buttons beneath you can edit or delete them.

Adding or editing a POP3 Account is really easy
(Click the image for a full size view)


Note!
GNUMail includes all sources when getting new mail
GNUMail.app will check all pop3 servers and your local mail spool file for new mail when you press the 'Get' button of the Inbox window or invoke the 'Get New Mail' menu entry! Having GNUMail.app and your local mail system (e.g. fetchmail) poll the same POP3 server may lead to duplicate or lost mail!
Well, because GNUMail.app works this way, it is easily possible to poll addional POP3 servers which are not checked by your local fetchmail configuration.


Compose [top of page]

On the Compose tab you currently can only set whether your signature shall be put in at the beginning or the end of the message of replies or forwarded mail.

Composing options
(Click the image for a full size view)


Quoting [top of page]

On the Quoting tab you find one option that lets you define how long lines should be in your messages. Since some other email clients don't autowrap lines on reading its recommend to set this value to 80.

Setting the number of characters in one line
(Click the image for a full size view)


MIME Types [top of page]

Since version 0.7.0pre1, GNUMail.app has support for MIME type attachments. Below you can see the related preferences page where you can tell GNUMail.app about MIME type attachments and how to handle them.

Telling GNUMail.app how to handle MIME type attachments
(Click the image for a full size view)

The following picture shows the Editing panel (the Add panel looks the same) editing the definition of PDF documents.

Editing a MIME type
(Click the image for a full size view)


Filtering [top of page]

Since version 0.9.0 GNUMail.app has built-in support for regular expressions. That allowed the author to implement mail filtering when fetching messages from POP3 servers (so you don't have to deal with procmail anymore ;-) ).

The Filtering Preferences tab shows a list of filters. Of course, on your first run, there will not be any single filter. So let's create a dummy one...

The Filtering page
(Click the image for a full size view)

To create a filter just click the "Add..." button; a window will pop up where you can set the propterties of your new filter.

Adding a filter
(Click the image for a full size view)

Description: This will show up in the list of filters

Active: Check this to activate your filter or uncheck it to deactivate it.

Citeria: Here you can define a string (including regular expressions) that GNUMail.app will react on. This string can be contained by the headers which you can select from the popup menu: "To", "Cc", "To or Cc", "Subject" or "From" can be directly selected. To specify additional headers you can employ the "Expert..." option:

Adding a filter
(Click the image for a full size view)

Action: GNUMail.app allows you to choose from several options which action it should apply to messages matching the filter. You can either have your message marked with a special colour (e.g. set security annoucements to red), moved to another mailbox (useful for mailinglists), bounced (vacations information) or deleted (SPAM...).

Click the OK button to finish editing the new filter. It should now occur in the Rules list.

Apart from adding new filters you can perfom some actions on existing filters. If a filter is no longer used you can delete it by clicking the appropiate button or - if you only want to disable it temporarily - deactivate it by unchecking the box in the "Active" column beneath the filter name. Since filters are applied in the order in which they are listed here, you can change that order by employing the up and down arrow buttons on the right to move filters up and down step by step. Of course you can also edit existing filters, just click the Edit button. Another very useful feature is the Duplicate button: for example, if you want to add several similar filters, you do not have to set all the attributes from scratch every time. Just create one filter from scratch the first time; then duplicate that filter as many times as you need similar filters and just edit these copies to make them fullfill their unique tasks.

An in depth description of GNUMail.app's great filtering capabilities will be given in the "Filtering mail" chapter (which is yet to be written).





For now, that's all we can do, the remaing setting pages are all empty and have yet to be created.

After we have entered all neccessary information we can close the Preferences Panel by clicking the OK button at the bottom.

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