New features in VMail 2.0

Folder Format Changes

The method of storing messages has changed to support direct editing of messages as well as faster access to large folders. A direct result of this has been to dramatically improve the speed of access in SUN environments where the system mail directory (/var/spool/mail) and the user's home directory are NFS mounted to the workstation. The reliance of VMail on the Mail command for message and folder management has been removed. All access to messages is now done with internal code.

Mail messages are now stored in separate files (00000000, 00000001, ...) in a Folders directory in the user's home directory. A file named .index in that directory contains the folder descriptions as well as some header information parsed from each message. Only a single copy of each message exists but there can be multiple links from different folders to it. Message files are only deleted when all links to it have been deleted from all folders.

Conversion to / from the old unix style folders is available through a menu item. An automated option is available to recursively go through an entire directory of mail folders and convert them all into the new format.

Public Folders

A special flag "public" can be added to folders to make them visible to your W EB public directory (~/public_html). In this way, others will then be able to access the folders that you have made available by viewing them through Mosaic.

Folder Management Screen

A folder management screen has been added that provides the ability to create, delete, empty, rename folders. You can also export them to the old unix style folders as well as make them publicly accessible through Mosaic.

Editing Messages

As each message is stored in a separate file, the messages themselves can now be edited. After editing a message, you can view the new contents by opening a different message and then reopening the edited one. Note that the header information listed in the header window is stored separately from the message so anything that you do to the message will not affect the information listed in the header window.

Deleting Messages

When you delete a message from a folder, the pointer to the actual message is simply moved to the +Deleted folder. When a message is deleted out of this special folder, the rest of the folders are searched for the message and if a link to it is not found, then the message file itself is deleted, freeing up the disk space.

Displaying classification of each message

If a classification line is detected in the message header, the classification is output in a label above the top of the message and is visible at all times.

Scrollable address boxes

The To:, Cc:, and Bcc: address fields have been changed to scrollable windows instead of plain text entry fields. As each entry is terminated with a space or comma, the window will reformat the addresses so that the maximum number will be visible. A scrollbar is provided to view the entries when there are more entries than will fit within the window. The height of the window is controllable with a User Preference.

Multi-level .names file

The format of the .names file has been changed to allow the creation of a multi-level menu for selecting addresses in compose windows. If there are three colon (:) separated fields, then the first one becomes the "Group", the second the "Name" and the third the "Address". To remain compatible with previous versions, if there are only 2 fields, then the "Group" field is assumed to not exist. If there is only one field, then the file must be in the original format and the first whitepace separated field is the "Address" and the remainder is treaded as the "Name".

Improved directory lookups

The Directory window that is launched from Compose windows now queries the whois.cse directory server for information. The information is always current, unlike previous versions which looked at the local copy of the databases.

Improved screen for database updates

The Directory Services window now has combined support for the various databases available on the whois.cse directory server.

Automated vacation setup

Vacation setup is now available at the touch of a button. The screen handles the .forward and .vacation.msg files as well as automaticaly initializing the vacation database files (a commonly overlooked problem).

Support for multiple encryption packages

ICARUS encryption is supported (if available) for automatically encrypting and decrypting messages. The pass phrase is retained so that it only has to be entered once during a session.
PGP encryption is supported (if available) for automatically encrypting and decrypting messages. Digital signatures are automatically included with every outgoing message. The pass phrase is retained so that it only has to be entered once during a session.
Support has been added to provide for the future availablility of the ENTRUST encryption package.

Support for quoted-printable message bodies

Any MIME formatted message bodies that have been encoded with the "quoted-printable" method are now automatically decoded and displayed. The ISO-8859-1 international character set is fully supported.

Jumping over the message header information

A message viewing option has been added so that the header information can be automatically skipped over such that the first line displayed is the first line of the actual message body. The header information is still viewable by simply scrolling upwards.

Tagging header lines to make them more readable

An option has been added to allow the tagging of the header fields with a different color and/or font to make them more visible.

Option to wrap long lines when sending

An option has been provided to automatically word wrap long lines in an outgoing message to a given maximum line length (normally 79 characaters). If no wrapping limit has been set, the outgoing messages are still checked against the maximum line length imposed by SMTP (~980 chars) and automatically wrapped to 79 characters if a line exceeds this length.

Improved printer support for sending to postscript

A vprint command has been added to simplify and to improve printing to postscript printers. Simply set the print command to "vprint PRINTERNAME" where PRINTERNAME is the name of a postscript printer.

Attachment type detection by MIME extension mapping (~/.mime.types)

The typing of attachments is now done using extension mapping. If an appropriate match is not found or there is no extension in the filename, then the regular content type detection is done.

Attachment launching by MIME mailcap file (~/.mailcap)

Application launching for viewing attachments is now done through a .mailcap file. Defaults are provided in the distributed $VMAILHOME/etc/mailcap file.

Completed support for French language

VMail now includes support for the French language. It can be started in french mode by setting an environment variable LANGUAGE=french. It can be switched between the two languages through the restart function available under the Other... menu on the main screen. As VMail is actually restarted from scratch, all compose windows must be closed first. The help files will be translated once thay have been completed.

Support for user defined caveats for classifications

Support has now been included for user defined caveats to be added to the classification lines. Commonly used caveats are provided through a menu.

Automatic message filtering

Support has been added so that messages can be filtered along the lines of procmail. Messages can be deleted, moved or copied between folders, appended to unix folder files, or piped to abitrary programs as standard input. Any number of filter sets can be created and run independantly.
HTML tagging for URLs in messages

Any detected URL strings in message bodies are now automatically tagged as a clickable button that will either launch Mosiac with the indicated page or tell an already running Mosaic to "goto" that page.