Polarbar Mailer version 1.20 has been released

October 05, 2001 by www.os2.com

Polarbar Mailer version 1.20 has been released.

This Java e-mail program came from the source code release of JStreet Mailer.

The following is new or has been fixed in 1.20

Accounts:

When switching accounts or closing Polarbar any and all compose windows are autosaved and closed and the current address book is also closed.
Fixed bug where after switching accounts the account name would sometimes be highlighted instead of the inbox folder.
Address Book:

The Address Book Import has some bug fixes: Addresses can now be imported from exported PMMail address books. Blank fields are (once again) treated as blank fields (a bug in 1.19 caused them to be discarded, which resulted in the fields not lining up properly for some records).
The Address Book Import feature has some new features: A small dialog is displayed while Polarbar analyzes the delimited import file. There is no limit on the number of imported fields. Combining multiple fields for Notes and Postal addresses inserts a newline between each imported field (instead of a space).
Moved the Sent Folder and Persona selections to a new tabbed page.
Because of the Compose/Reply change that allows both space and comma as email address separators, the @ character is not allowed in the Full Name.
The nickname, email address and full name fields on pages 2 and 3 are now updated when the save button is pressed.
Addressing Approach:

There is a new addressing approach, "bcc-multiple", that sends a single message to all non-bcc addressees, but for bcc addressess, sends multiple messages, one for each bcc addressee. This addressing approach is the new default for new accounts.
There is a new addressing approach, "undisclosed", that sends a single message to all addressees and substitutes all to, cc, and bcc headers with a single "To: Undisclosed Recipients " header. Note that servers that are RFC-compliant will change the localhost part to the mail server address, (e.g., smtp.parrett.net).
Attachments:

Detect attachment filename when specified on Content-Description and Content-Disposition header.
A method of launching external programs for attachments has been added. A user interface for setting it up will be added in a future release. For now, you must create a text file named 'launch.dat' in your Polarbar Mailer/Maildata/{account} directory. On each line, first put a filename extension, then a space, and finally the fully qualified pathname to the program that is to be launched for this filename extension. If you click on the attachment icon for a file that matches one of the extensions in the 'launch.dat' file, then that program will be launched, with the fully qualified name of the attachment appended to it (with a space separator). If the attachment extension isn't in the 'launch.dat' file, then the View/ Store Attachment dialog appears.
The attachment toolbar now has a context menu for each attachment icon. The menu has the following items: Examine, Launch, and Store. The Examine menu item opens a text window with the contents of the attachment. Please note that despite the text window having a "Save as" dialog, saving it to a file will not necessarily give you an exact copy of the attachment. To do that, you'll want to use the Store menu item. The Launch menu item will either launch the attachment with the external program associated with the file extension (see above) or bring up the View/Store Attachment dialog. The Store menu item brings up the View/Store Attachment dialog, even if an external program is associated with the file extension.
Attachments of type application/applefile have their file extension set to ".bin", which replaces the specified file extension on short file name installations, but gets appended to the specified file name for long file name installations. (See RFC 1740 for the details about this MIME type.)
If an image file attachment is zero bytes, it will not be displayed.
When storing an attachment, directory paths are stripped from the file name.
Added a file overwrite confirmation dialog for environments that do not support this at the operating system level (e.g., non-Microsoft Windows). This confirmation dialog shows up when saving to a file name chosen using a file chooser dialog.
Character Sets:

Alter, Bounce, Draft, and Route now properly decode the message based on the Advanced Character Set Options.
Character set decoding is finally working properly on OS/2 and Linux. The recommended advanced character set settings for all platforms are now:
Character Set for OUTBOUND High ASCII Characters:
ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15 (-15 supports the Euro symbol)
Encoding style for high ASCII characters:
Quoted-printable, only when high ASCII characters present.
Display of incoming messages:
Decode according to each messages header lines.
All character sets that are supported by your system's Java platform are available to be selected as your default character set. This is primarily to allow maximum flexibility when importing text files into a compose/reply message. For maximum compatibility with non-Polarbar email programs, use of an ISO character set is highly recommended.
Compose/Reply:

The Auto-BCC address, if any, will not be duplicated if it is already specified as a regular BCC address or after altering the message.
Multiple addresses, whether manually keyed in or expanded from a group list, are now formatted correctly when using the Address Tool.
Changed the Compose dialog nickname expansion handling of bad nicknames to use the [Yes] [No] [Cancel] dialog (instead of the [OK] [Cancel] dialog). [Yes] means to accept the bad nickname as-is, [No] means to remove the bad nickname, and [Cancel] means to stop the nickname expansion and leave the Addresses field unchanged.
Several addressing headers that are typically found only in mailing list messages will now trigger the Reply Address dialog. If you choose one of these additional addresses, it will be sent as a To address.
Polarbar can now deal with RFC 822 addresses that use a comment to attach a name to an email address (e.g., dgh@acm.org (David, ACM)) by converting them to RFC 2822-compliant addresses (e.g., "David, ACM" ).
With one exception, Polarbar no longer requires commas between addresses or nicknames entered into the Addresses field in the compose window. The exception is that if a nickname is followed by an email address, then a comma is required, or else the nickname will be combined with the name part of the email address. For example, if "gina" is a nickname that expands to 'Gina Gershon ', then Polarbar will convert 'gina David G. Holm dgh@acm.org' to 'To: "gina David G. Holm" ', but will convert 'gina, David G. Holm dgh@acm.org' to "To: Gina Gershon , To: "David G. Holm" l;'.
If you type or paste a "mailto:" address into the compose/reply address field, it will be converted into a "to:" address when the address field is validated.
New ComposeSettings window for overriding the Sent Folder, Persona, and CharacterSet. Activate using the "Settings" button, where the Sent Folder "Select" button used to be.
If you choose an addressing approach from the Edit menu, changing or adding addresses will not change your selection. (But when the message is sent, any Bcc addresses will force the multiple addressing approach.)
When you import a text file, the chosen CharacterSet is used to translate the content of the file to the Unicode character set that Java uses. For example, Windows users will want to select the appropriate "Cp12xx" set, most Japanese users will want to select SJIS, and most OS/2 users will want to select "CP850". After importing the text file(s), you should change the character set back to your default outbound character set.
Filters:

You can now use nicknames in filters that send email. All nicknames are validated when you create or edit a filter, but they're not expanded until the filter is executed. So, for example, if you use a filter to send email to a group nickname, you don't need to edit the filter when you make changes to the group. When you click on the [OK] button to save the filter, the address field is validated, much like it is for the Compose dialog. If click on the [...] button to the right of the address field, then a modal dialog pops up with the expanded email addresses and their addressing types (e.g., To:, Cc:, etc.). Bad nicknames are omitted from this dialog.
Mail filters can now specify "Route Now" or "Route Later" as actions. The Route action sends the message as an attachment, and must follow a move or copy action that moves the message to a folder.
Regular filters that use the expression "Headers" will now search the header tags as well as the header contents, allowing such expressions as "Headers" "Contains" "Junkmail: Yes" or "Headers" "Contains" "X-Mailer:".
Added tool tips to the [...] buttons in the Mail Filter Detail dialog for regular filters, because their function can vary by filter action.
Folder Tree:

The old folder tree has been replaced with a completely new one. Not only does it look better, but the stability of Polarbar has improved as well.
The new folder tree icons can be replaced by icons of your own choosing. You do this by collecting them into a two row by twenty column array of icons named treebar.gif. Place this file into a directory named "image" that is directly under your Polarbar directory. You need to place ".;" as the first component of your classpath environment variable or the -cp or -classpath command line argument list.
The size of the icons in the collection must be even, but is not limited to any particular set of even numbers (the default set is 16 by 16 pixels). The first row in the set is for closed icons and the second row is for open icons. The column positions are as follows: Plus or Minus, account, normal folder, remote folder, compressed folder (planned enhancement), trash folder, inbox folder, and outbox folder. The remaining slots are currently unused.
The new folder tree automatically detects the icon size as being one half of the image height of the treebar.gif icon collection. The plus and minus icons, while fitting in the same size cell as the other icons, must be an odd number of pixels in size, with the size determined by dividing the icon cell size by two and then adding one. For example, if the icon size is 16 by 16 pixels, then the plus/minus icon size is 9 by 9 pixels.
Folders:

A new Folder menu option has been added to "Maintain Trash Folder". This option will trim the Trash Folder and the Transaction log, if those options are enabled in the General Settings.
Fixed the bug where after moving a message, the next message in the list would get highlighted but would not get displayed.
Fixed the bug where a remote inbox folder could end up being treated as if it were the inbox folder for the current account.
Autosaved messages now appear in the drafts folder. This replaces the old autorestore feature that forced you to choose between either restoring or deleting all autosaved messages at Polarbar startup. Autosaved messages can be distinguished from regular drafts by their POP File Names, which start with "AUTO" and have the "POP" file extension (regular drafts have either the file extension "Draft" or "DRA").
There is a new menu item to select all messages in the current folder: Edit / Select / All messages.
Reindexing a folder (and it's subfolders, if any) now reindexes the existing folder items in addition to removing deleted items from the index and adding new items to the index.
When a new folder is created, an empty folder index is also created, so that moving messages into the new folder won't cause them to get marked as unread.
Added new Message menu and popup options to "Delete Message - Do not copy to trash". This option will always prompt to confirm delete, and then deletes the messages without copying them to trash.
Keyboard Navigation:

Various problems where the spacebar and Enter keys were being double- recognized have been fixed.
In the new folder tree, successively pressing a letter key cycles through all of the non-collapsed folders that start with that letter. Note: In order to activate keyboard navigation of the folder tree when viewing a message, press the Tab key twice.
Message Browser:

View / Word Wrap now works when using the Text Browser, but switching the word wrap mode operates slowly, because of the need to switch to the ICE HTML Browser, prevent the message from loading, and then switch back to the Text Browser in order to reload the message in the correct word wrap mode.
There is a new message viewing mode where messages are shown in a separate frame window. Switching to or from this viewing mode requires a Polarbar restart for the change to take effect.
Message Headers:

A message date with a year in the range 100 through 199 is now converted to the range 2000 to 2099.
Polarbar no longer treats a blank header continuation line as the empty line that signals the end of the message headers.
The "References:" header is now generated in compliance with RFC 2822.
Spaces within Q-encoded header text are now converted to underscores in compliance with RFC 1522.
Outbound Mail Servers

The outbound mail server settings have been moved to a separate General Settings dialog tab and multiple outbound mail servers can be configured.
Each server can be configured for restricted usage based on IP address or for general use, regardless of IP address.
Server usage is prioritized from top to bottom. If the top-most server is accessible and not restricted, then it will be used. If it is restricted or can't be connected to, then the next server will be used, etc.
If you set up an AuthSMTP server configuration for a server that doesn't support AuthSMTP, Polarbar will fall back to a standard SMTP connection when using that server configuration to send messages.
Note: Your previous server settings are automatically converted the first time you run Polarbar 1.20, but the old settings are not removed, so that you can switch back and forth between Polarbar 1.19a and Polarbar 1.20.
Persona:

The two new addressing approaches make the "Send Options" tab page taller than either of the other two tabs, which is likely to require resizing the dialog in order for the "Send Options" tab page to display correctly.
If the default persona has a tagline and you switch to a persona that doesn't have a tagline, the default persona tagline is no longer used.
When altering a composed message, the persona specified by the X-Persona header will stick, as if it were user selected, because it is possible that it was user selected. (It can be changed using the new Compose Settings dialog.)
Prevent the loss of a persona from a shared address book if the persona is not part of the current account.
When bouncing a message, the tag line field is no longer populated.
POP File Names:

Modified the generation of POP file names so that in any given Polarbar session, only the first name is based entirely on the current date and time. Subsequent file names have their last four digits incremented sequentially from the previous file name, but still have their first four digits based on the current date and time (year, month, day, and hour). This significantly reduces the amount of duplicate file name avoidance that used to be needed when moving, copying, or creating thousands of email messages in a single batch.
Quoting:

When quoting text into a new message, unformatted text lines will be wrapped to your word wrap limit, if word wrapping is enabled. For now, unformatted text is defined as any text line that is 40% longer than your word wrap limit. For example, if your word wrap limit is 72, then text lines longer than 100 characters will be word wrapped. The quoting is done after the word wrapping, so the quote characters do not contribute to word wrapping. (Text that is already quoted will still not be word wrapped.)
Sent Folder:

Changes to Sent Folder processing for consistency between Persona, Address Book, and Compose windows.
Fixed bug where a remote folder could not be used as a SentFolder. (If a remote folder was used, the sent message would be lost after the message was sent.)
Settings:

When Polarbar starts up, it will automatically rename backup copies of the Account Settings, Help Settings, Platform Settings, and/or System Settings files back to the original file name if the original file does not exist.
There is a new system setting that will make Polarbar open in the drafts folder if Polarbar was closed (or crashed) with any autosaved compose windows open. It is the "Start in drafts folder when it has new autosaved messages" option under Tools / Options / General / Messages.
Fixed bug that caused third external browser settings to not get saved.
A new menu item, Tools / Fonts / Menu font... lets you change the font for all menus (including pop-up menus provided by Polarbar, but not pop- up menus provided by the operating system). All menu fonts for the main window change immediately, but menu fonts for other windows only change after you close and reopen those windows. The default menu font is Helvetica 11 point normal (other Polarbar default fonts are Helvetica 12 point normal).
When using the advanced option time zone override with daylight savings time (DST), the correct time zone offset will be reported during DST.
Reworded General Settings Cleanup option. "Do Not Copy Discarded ..." is now "Copy Discarded Messages to the Trash Folder". (The negative logic that was used by this setting could be difficult to follow.)
Changed "Decode messages and attachments" to "Decode messages", changed "Only decode first attachment" to "Decode attachments" (which also applies to UU encoded attachments), and removed all attachment debug messages.
The lists of available character sets for encoding and decoding are now shown in alphabetical order.
New printer settings have been added to the Advanced Settings Printer tab to allow users of Un*x and/or Un*x-derivative operating systems to assign default values for the Java print dialog. NOTE: If you have any problems with assigning default values, please be sure to enable both of the extra X-Mailer headers in your persona before submitting your problem report, so that we can see which OS and JVM you are using.
Added a Tools / Option / Platform dialog that allows the platform test for the file overwrite confirmation dialog to be changed. (In case you have a Windows JVM that doesn't use the native file save dialog or a non-Windows JVM that provides its own file overwrite confirmation dialog.)
Status Line:

The "Looked in the mailbox {time} ago" status message now has a dedicated field in the status bar using the format 'd h:mm', along with a tooltip.
Sending and receiving mail progress indicators are now consistent between various server types and send/receive methods.
Unread Messages:

Fixed bug where choosing Next Unread with "Scan unread messages across folders" enabled caused an infinite loop if started in the outbox or drafts folders when there were no unread messages in any folders.
Allow Next Unread to work in trash folder if the trash folder is already highlighted (just like in the outbox and drafts folders).
Next Unread automatically expands the folder tree to reveal the folder with the next unread message and then collapses the tree if another folder is chosen or if the next unread message is in another branch of the tree.
The unread message count is displayed in the title bar and the title bar icon is set based upon whether or not there are any unread messages, but not all system platforms support title bar icons. When there are no unread messages, the icon file 'images/pbmdef.gif' is displayed (Polarbar provides a default icon with this name in the Polarbar ZIP file). When there are unread messages, the icon file 'images/pbmunr.gif' is displayed, unless it does not exist (Polarbar does not provide a default icon with this name), in which case Polarbar adds a red tint to the 'images/pbmdef.gif' icon.
The default title bar position for the unread message count is after the "Polarbar Mailer" text. The position can be moved to in front of the text by enabling the "Move unread message count to start of title bar" option on the Tools / Options / General / Messages tab page.
Virtual Folders:

In the Virtual Folder dialog, the OK button and various selection criteria controls are now grayed out when they're not accessible.
The Virtual Folder date calendars can be closed without changing the date.
Known bugs, problems, and/or issues in this release:

Many visual display problems that you may encounter with Polarbar can be eliminated by upgrading to a new version of Java. For example, if you are using Java 1.1.8 and you are having strange display problems, upgrading to a newer build of Java 1.1.8 is likely to solve most of the problems. If you are using Java 1.2, you need to upgrade to Java 1.3.
When adding enough addresses to cause the Compose window to display the Address Tool button rather than the text entry field, sometimes the button isn't displayed. Resizing the window or other actions causing a redraw will display the button.
Address book is initially searched by nickname, however all subsequent access during the compose process is by Email Address. If there are multiple entries with the same email address, only the first one found will be used for sent folder / persona resolution. This can make it appear that sent folder assignment is not working properly.
Changing the main font in Compose doesn't always reflect it right away. Closing the compose window and starting another one reflects the change however.
Keeping sort order is global across all folders (with the exception of the trash folder).
If you run Polarbar on a Windows system with Stardock's Object Desktop Network installed on it and you have the WindowFX child window animation enabled, then you may find that saved pop-up window position is ignored when the window size and position are restored. If you want the windows (such as the Select A Folder window) to always come up in their saved positions, you will need to add the Java VM program that you use to run Polarbar to the WindowFX exclusion list. And if you have WindowBlinds, windows may not redraw properly when you resize them and you may wish to add the Java VM to the WindowBlinds exclusion list. Also, WindowBlinds interferes with the new Polarbar feature of changing the title bar icon to show when there are unread messages. You must exclude the Java VM in order for the Polarbar icons to show up in the title bar. And you must unload WindowBlinds in order for the Polarbar icons to show up on the Windows task bar.
If you run Polarbar on a Linux system and settings changes are not being saved, this can be caused by not having the correct permissions set on the settings files. If the file is set with root permissions only, then you cannot write to the settings file when Polarbar exits. The settings files are /Mailer/jstreet.ini (or JSTREET.INI if using short file names) and /Mailer/Maildata//Account.Settings (or, if you are using short file names, ACCOUNT.SET).
If you use JDK 1.3 on a Win32 platform, you cannot correctly copy data from the message text window to the system clipboard by using Ctrl-C. Pasting within Polarbar with Ctrl-V will work fine but external applications will get data from the start of the message. This is a bug in Sun's code.

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