contents
FoxMail version 1.4.2

Copyright (c) 1997, XiaoLong Zhang

E-mail: gzdragon@public1.guangzhou.gd.cn

Acknowledgments

Introduction

System requirements

Installation

Set up your server, account, and other options

Address book

Receive messages

Compose a new message

Reply, forward, or send again a message

Manage your mail boxes

Manage your messages

Mail box assistance

Suggestions and Bug reports


Acknowledgments

I would like to thank many friends for their help on technical or non-technical support on this program..

Thank Fabrice DEVILLE (fdev@tornado.be) for his contribution of TExplorerButton, which you see in the program toolbar.

XiongJian, WuYi, and Mui ShuFan spent much time testing this programs Alpha version carefully, and suggested many useful ideas to make it better. Many people had downloaded FoxMail from the Internet, and given me helpful suggestions, as well as much encouragement. I appreciate all of their help.

Thanks to Sun JianHui, ZhouMin, Cai WeiXiong, ZhangBin(my brother), Li WenJun and many other friends, for their encouragement, and many happy hours we enjoyed together.


Introduction

FoxMail is a MS-Windows Internet mail client, support full Internet mail functions, run under Windows 3.1X/Windows 95/Windows NT environments.

Features:

Fast in sending/receiving/decoding messages.

Although 16 bit, if run under Win95, it has a 95 look.

Preview window, to browse message contents easily

Address book supports many information items.

Attach any size of files in your message.

Customized message label with color.

MIME and UUEncode compatible.

Retrieving mails from Multiple POP3 accounts.

Mailbox Assistance, automatically dispatches the incoming messages to Different boxes according to the custom-defined rules.

Browse HTML format mail with your own browser.

Available in Both English version and Chinese version.

Technical Features:

Winsock Specification 1.1 compatible

Support the following RFC standards:

RFC 821  (SMTP)

RFC 822  (Standards for the Format of ARPA-Internet Text Messages)

RFC 1725 (POP3)

RFC 1521 (MIME)

RFC 1522 (MIME part 2)

Support UUEncode and UUDecode.


System requirements

MS-Windows (version 3.1 or higher), MS Windows for Workgroup (version 3.11 or higher), Windows 95, Windows NT

Winsock Specification 1.1 compliant networking environment

To send/receive messages via Internet/Intranet, you should have an account on an Internet mail server (SMTP, POP3 server). If you are not sure about this account, please ask your network administrator or your Internet Service Provider.


Installation

1.	Make a new directory. Fox example, c:\foxmail;

2.	Copy all of the files extracted from the ZIP file to the created directory;

3.	In Windows Program Manager, make a new icon linked to foxmail.exe;

4.	Double-click this icon to run FoxMail. In FoxMails first time running, it will automatically create a mail directory and other associated files for you.

Upgrading from previous version:

Just copy all of the extracted files to your previous FoxMail directory, overriding the old files.

Important for upgrading from FoxMail 1.2:

As the executable file name of FoxMail 1.2 is netfox.exe instead of foxmail.exe, to use the original ver 1.2 settings, please change the file name of 'netfox.ini' to 'foxmail.ini'. The file netfox.ini is located in the same directory of netfox.exe.

After installation complete, be sure to set up your server and account information before you can send or receive messages.


Set_up
Set up your server, account, and other options

Open the Options Dialog, input the necessary information about your server, account, and many other options.

The followings are some of the major options you can set:

Personal:

Name: Input your name here. This field will be used to identify your name when send out a message.

Organization: Your organization.

Internet Mail Address: Your Internet e-mail address, which should be in format like yourname@mail.server.host.

Mail Server:

SMTP Server: The server that will deliver your messages to the destination hosts.

POP3 Server: The server that store all your incoming messages. You can use this program to download the messages to your PC. Usually the SMTP server and POP3 server are the same host.

Account: Actually the POP3 servers user account that identify your mail box in the POP3 Server. When retrieve messages from the POP3 server, an account and corresponding password is need to open your mail box in the server.

Password: The POP3 password of your account. The password you typed here will be saved to harddisk (encrypted) so that you need not to type password again when you start FoxMail.

Send:

Message Format: You can use either MIME format or UUEncode format when send out a message. MIME format is recommended as it is a standard RFC Internet mail format.

Auto Quoted-Printable encoding: If this option is checked, the composed message will be encoded to printable ASCII characters by Quoted-Printable method if there are non-ASCII characters in the message body.

Allow 8 bit chars in mail head: if this option is checked, the message head such as Subject will not be encoded even it contains non-ASCII characters.

Char Set: You can specify your char set as either us-ascii or ISO-8859. If you are not composing message in English, ISO-8859 is recommended.

Include Original Message when Reply: You can check this box to include the original message body in your replying message.

Receive:

Leave a copy in server: When receive a new message, if you check this option, the original messages are still left in the server, and in next retrieving, the already-retrieved messages will not be download again. To delete the left messages in server, just do not check this option, and the retrieving procedure will delete all the left messages.

Check for mails every <> minutes: Check this box, and type a non-zero number for minutes will let FoxMail to check for new messages automatically.

Play sound when new messages come: You can specify a sound file(.wav) to play when new messages is received.

Other options: Such as Word-wrap will only change the message display format.

Other Connections:

In this section, you can add your additional POP3 account here, so that FoxMail will automatically check mails from multiple servers/accounts.

Font:

You can set up the message font, mail list font, and printing font here.

Signature:

A signature will be appended in your outgoing message.

You can select to use or not use signature when sending messages. Also, you can write your signature in the edit box, or specify a signature from a text file.

Label:

You can customize 7 labels to your favarite label text and color. To change the label of messages, see Manage your messages


Address book

In your Address book Dialog box, you can add, rename, delete, and save an address.

Only Name and Internet Mail Address is needed for an address, and these two items will be used to identify a destination address when sending message.

Note: After having modified the contents of an address, be sure to save the changes by pressing the Save button.

See also: Compose a new message


Receive messages

Before you can receive messages from mail server, be sure that the mail server information has been filled in the Options dialog. See the Set up your server section.

The File menu -> Get new messages command will invoke a progress showing the process of retrieving messages from the mail server. If your password not set in Options dialog or incorrect, a password dialog will pop up asking for the password.

When the retrieving process completed, a dialog will show the total messages received. Generally, The received messages will be stored in the Inbox, however, if you have defined some rules in mail box assistance, the received messages may be dispatched to its corresponding mail boxes automatically.


Compose message
Compose a new message

When composing a new message, you can specify the following envelop information:

To: Identify the recipient(s) address(es) of this message.

Cc: The messages will also be sent to the Cc recipients.

Bcc: Same as Cc, but the recipients(To, Cc, Bcc) will not know the Bcc recipients names from their received message.

From: The sender address. This is your email address, and can not be modified when composing a message.

Reply To: Specify the reply address. By default, the reply address is your email address, however, by specifying Reply To address, you can let the recipients reply to another address.

Subject: The subject of your message.

Attachments: You can attach any file in your message. The file attached can be any format, any size.

After a new message has been composed, you have 3 choices on next step:

Send immediately: The message is saved in the Outbox, and sent out immediately

Saved in send queue: The message is saved in the outgoing queue, but not sent at this time. You can send all of the queued messages as a batch by the command Send queued messages from the File menu.

Save for next edit: Save, but not for sending. So that you can edit this message again next time.

Note: The To, Cc, and Bcc address format can either be the raw internet address such as someone@host.com or the name selected from the address book. You can double-click on an name(address) in the To: or Cc: edit box to look up its Internet format address.

How to send message to multiple recipients: You can type multiple addresses or names in To or Cc or Bcc edit box., each name (address) is seperated by a comma. If there are too many addresses, press the ENTER key to increase the size of edit box, and type the addresses in another line. The contexts of edit box can also be pasted from the clipboard, so you can save your mail list in a text file, and paste them to the composing message.

See also: Reply, Forward, or Send Again a message


Reply, forward message
Reply, forward, or send again a message

You can do these operations by selecting the command from the menu or just clicking on corresponding buttons on the tool bar.

Reply: Reply a message to its sender.

Forward: Forward a message to other recipients.

Send Again: You can re-send a received or sent message again.

See also: Compose a new message


Manage mail boxes
Manage your mail boxes

There are three system-defined mail boxes:

Inbox: By default, the received messages are stored in Inbox

Outbox: The composed messages and sent messages are stored in the Outbox.

Trashbox: Stores the deleted messages. You can restore a deleted message from the Trashbox by transfer it to another mail box.

You can add new mail boxes, and transfer the messages to different boxes.

Tip: You may need to compress the mailboxes to decrease the mailbox data file size. As when a message is deleted or transferred out from a mail box, the mail box data file still contain the contexts of that message. The compress operation will TRULY delete the message from the data file.

See also: Mail box assistance


Manage messages
Manage your messages

Viewing Message: Double-click the selected message to open the message window. You can click on the Previous and Next button to view messages in a mail box. Press the ESC key to close current message window.

Add the sender address to address book: In the message window, double-click the From field to invoke a address dialog, where you can press the Add to address book button to add current address to your address book.

Message Transfer: To transfer message(s) to a mail box, select the messages in the mail list window, then do one of the following operations:

- From the Message menu, select the Transfer command

- Click the Move to button on the tool bar

- Drag and Drop the messages to a mail box.

Read and Unread: You can mark a message as Read or Unread status.

Message Label: Messages can be marked as different labels with different colors. From the menu Message->Change Label command, you can change the message label. The message labels can be set in the Options dialog.

See also: Manage mail boxes


Mail box assistance

Mail box assistance is useful if you have large amounts of received messages, and want to transfer the received messages to different mail boxes automatically.

In the Mail box Assistance dialog box, you can manage the rules applying to the incoming messages. A rule is an action for a specified condition. For example, you can let all of the messages whose subject contains a string test be put in to a user-defined mail box named mytest.


bugreport
Suggestions and Bug Reports

Suggestions and bug reports are always welcome. Also, I want to know how many people will download this program from Internet or copy it from others, so, please send me a feedback if you have used it. Your address will be added to my mail list, so I can notify you the new versions of FoxMail via E-mail.

Please send a message to:

gzdragon@public1.guangzhou.gd.cn