Option Settings Help with "Option Settings" --------------------------- Numeric Options: ---------------- The following options are all numeric. If you type anything besides numbers into these fields, it will be discarded, and the value will revert to the orginal default. The numbers must all be positive integral values. (No exponents, decimal points, or negative values). Many of these will also not accept a value of '0'. Exceptions to this will be noted. New Mail Check (Seconds) How often, in seconds, to check for new mail. This depends on personal taste, but generally a couple of minutes (120 seconds) or more will prevent constant disruption of your display with newly arriving messages. Notebook Save (Seconds) How often, in seconds, to automatically save the contents of your note book (if it is open). A value of 0 disables the autosave and you will need to save the contents manually when you make changes. Five minutes or so (300 seconds) is probably adequate for most needs. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Background Fetch Parameters: ---------------------------- For large mailboxes and newsgroups, the time it takes to load the initial messages can be substantial. There are two sets of options, one for mailboxes, and the other for newsgroups, which allow you to tailor the loading parameters to your needs. The "Initial Fetch Count" is the number of messages to load initially; (when the mailbox is first opened. All other messages after this are loaded in the "background". The messages which are most recent will always be loaded first. Thereafter, blocks of "Background Fetch Count" messages at a time are loaded every "Fetch Interval (Seconds)" until the mailbox is completely loaded. You will be able to work with your mailbox as soon as the initial messages are loaded. Note that the background fetch will interfere with your normal activities (a "watch" cursor is displayed, and keyboard entry and mouse selections will be delayed) for the length of time it takes to load "Background Fetch Count" messages. During the times when the background fecth isn't actively fetching messages, you are free to work with any messages which have been loaded. Messages which are not yet loaded will be displayed in the view window as "". Whether or not you may apply operations on these messages is indeterminate. Any operations which cannot be performed will be ignored. If you supply '0' as a Prefetch Count, the entire mailbox or newsgroup will be loaded and no background fetching will occur. Two buttons are also available from within the View Window's "Mailbox" menu which allow you to manually stop and resume the background fetch. You may, for instance, wish to view your new messages immediately after opening the mailbox, and work undisturbed, and load your older messages when you take a coffee break. Background Fetching and Filters: -------------------------------- Since messages which haven't been loaded aren't available to be evaluated by filters, any filters which are applied to a mailbox will be evaluated once when the "prefetch" is complete, and again when the entire mailbox load is complete. If you perform operations in between these times which causes the filters to be re-evaluated, the filters will be updated to reflect any messages which have been loaded at that point. The same holds true for the "subject" and "sender" sort methods. Sorting is generally only performed during filter evaluation. The "normal" and "reverse" sort methods aren't affected, because even though the message info isn't available, the messages will have been assigned a message sequence number. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Default Sort Modes ------------------ These settings define what sort mode is the default for any newly opened mailbox or newsgroup. A different setting is allowed for each. The allowable definitions of this field are "normal", "reverse", "subject", and "sender". Any un-recognized values will revert to "normal". ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Toggle options: --------------- The following items may be set to "true" or "false". Any other setting will revert to "false". Open Mailbox on Startup This specifies whether or not to proceed to open your default mailbox when the program first starts. Use 'ispell' Spell Checker By default, the spell checker used is "/bin/spell", which is available on most (not all) systems. An alternative program, "ispell", provides better interactive functionality and better language support on systems which have it. If this field is set to "true", ispell (which must be in your default search path) is run in an interactive terminal, and the Compose Window contents overwritten with the results of the interactive process. It is not as tightly integrated as "/bin/spell", but is offered for your convenience. Since this program runs completely on its own, and replaces the current message contents, you are advised to save a draft of your message before running the spell checker. Enable 'Tear Off' Menus The Motif window toolkit allows for you to have the ability to "tear off" a frequently used pull-down menu, and "drag" it to a place on the screen where you may access it at any time. If this is in effect, you will see a dashed line at the top of the menu in question. Usually the middle mouse button will perform a "drag" operation. This is not defined 'true' by default, since these menus may cause undesirable interactions with a few window managers. Motif based window managers will probably work fine. Open Look based window managers may report several errors when a parent window is closed, but otherwise, will allow this operation. Other window managers may not allow the operation at all. Verify Attachment Viewers This specifies whether or not the program should confirm (and allow you to change) the external command which is run to process/view a mail attachment. If this is set to "false", only attachments for which external handlers are defined will be able to be processed automatically. You will in any event be provided an opportunity to save the attachment to a separate file if the attachment either cannot be processed, or if you cancel the operation. Decode All Charsets If true, and your default character set is something other than US-ASCII, the Read Window will display the decoded headers from any message, even if that message wasn't encoded in your character set. This has no effect on other windows. This is mostly for use in German language countries, where several different variants of the ISO-8859 character sets may be in use, since the German language is represented in several of them without significant differences. New Message Alert If true, you are notified through an ALERT message in the main status window that new messages have arrived. This will popup the main window. If this is distracting to you, you may wish to set this option to false. In that case, you will only be notified with a BEEP (see more on this in the next paragraph). The new message information will still be displayed in the main window, but not at an alert level. Beep on New Messages If true, produces an audible beep when new messages arrive in an open mailbox. Setting to false will disable this audible indicator. Hold POP Mail on Server If true, do not delete from the server messages retrieved via the POP3 protocol. By default, the messages are downloaded to the local system and removed from the mail server. Setting to true may have adverse side effects if your service provider enforces disk usage quotas. Auto Position Windows If true, ML will attempt to center all of its popup windows on the current cursor location and allow them to popup automatically. This sometimes has undesirable interactions with window managers which interactively allow you to position windows. Setting to false will remove any position constraints from the program's "major" windows and allow you to place them either interactively or via resource settings. Minor dialogs and the authentication window will always use automatic placement, regardless of this setting. Show System Messages Window If set to false, the System Messages Window will go away after the program starts. It will only popup in the case of a serious error. The default is to leave it open (displaying informational messages as well as error text). Hide Empty Filters This option sets the default for displaying entries in the View Window's "List Window" (the one labelled "Logical Views"). By default, all attached views and open mailboxes are displayed in this window. If this preference is set to 'true', only those mailboxes or views which have one or messages will be displayed on the list. You may also toggle this manually from the "Option" menu of that window.