E-mail

Haiku provides a system that retrieves e-mail regularly via a Mail Service (also known as mail_daemon) and saves each mail as a single text file. It parses the mail and fills its attributes with all necessary header information, like from, to, subject and its unread status. Now it can be queried by you or any application. This system also makes switching e-mail clients easy as all the data and your configuration stays the same.
The configuration is done in the E-Mail preference panel.

Creating a new e-mail account

Let's go through the process of setting up an e-mail account.
You start by clicking the Add button to create a new, unnamed account. This opens a panel where you fill in your account info:

First, you set how you get your mail, via POP3 or IMAP.

Now you enter your E-mail address, Login name and Password, give an Account name under which it will be known under Haiku and your Real name.

If your account is from a major e-mail provider, Haiku already knows all technical details like server IP addresses. If that is not the case, clicking Next will open another window to enter this information by hand:

Account settings

By selecting the name of an account in the left list, you can change some general settings:

The Account name is the name that's shown for example in the list of accounts in the E-mail preferences. Real name is the name someone sees when she gets mail from you. Return address is the email address that is used when someone replies to your mail. Normally that is the same address you've sent your email from.

If you'd like to use an email account to only send or only receive email, you can de/activate that usage by right-clicking the account's name in the leftside list to set the checkmarks accordingly.

More on setting up incoming e-mail

Click on Incoming under your account's name to set up how e-mails are received.

First is the Mail server address for incoming mails. If your provider needs you to log into a specific port, you add that to the address, separated by a colon. For example, pop.your-provider.org:1400.

Then you enter your login information, Username and Password, and if necessary change Connection type from No encryption to SSL and the Login type from the default Plain text to APOP for authentication.

If you use POP3 and retrieve mails of this account from different computers, you may want to activate the option to Leave mail on server and only Remove mail from server when deleted locally.

If you use IMAP instead, you have the option to Remove mail from server when deleted locally. You can specify IMAP folders to only synchronize with a specific folder and its subfolders.

Also, you can opt to only Partially download messages larger than a certain size. This will only get the header and you can decide if you want to download the rest of the message plus possible attachments after seeing the subject and who sent it. Useful if you have a slow connection.

You can change the Destination of your inbox (default: /boot/home/mail/in/), which is useful if you'd like to separate the mails from different accounts into their own folders. However, queries let you sort things out just as well.

More on setting up outgoing e-mail

Click on Outgoing under your account's name to set up how e-mails are sent.

First is the SMTP server address for outgoing mails. As with the incoming server before, you can use a specific port if needed, e.g. mail.your-provider.org:1200 and change Username, Password and Connection type.

If you need to login, you change the Login Type to ESMTP and enter username and password above. The other type is used for providers that need you to check for mail with POP3 before SMTP for identification.

As with incoming mail, you can also change the Destination of your outbox (default: /boot/home/mail/out/).

Notifications and other e-mail filters

Notifications for newly arrived email and methods to sort and filter emails are found in E-Mail filters under an account's name. You can add any number of filters that are applied one after the other and rearrange them by drag & dropping them to their new position.
Currently there are three Incoming mail filters you can add. After adding a filter, you have to select it to see its options.

Spam filter (AGMS Bayesian)

The spam filter uses statistical methods to classify a mail as unwanted spam. It assigns a value between 0 and 1 to it and you can decide what are the limits for a genuine mail and what will be considered spam.
You can have that spam rating added to the start of the subject.
Also, the spam filter can learn from all incoming e-mail. Of course, you'll have to teach it by sorting out the false positives, mails that were mistakenly marked as spam. You'll find more on that when we discuss the application Mail.

Together with the following Rule filter, you're able to automatically sort out detected spam mails.

Rule filter

This filter compares the mail header to a search pattern and performs some action according to the rules you set up.
With the first text field you specify which header to check against. These are available:

The second text field holds your search pattern. It accepts regular expressions which gives it great flexibility, while unfortunately complicating things a bit. Read up on it a bit, it's well worth it and simple search patterns aren't that complicated at all.

With the pop-up menu below it, you assign an action when the pattern matches. You can move or delete a mail, set the status to "Read" or anything else or set the e-mail account you'll reply with.

New mails notification

There are several ways you can choose to be notified of newly arrived email. Under Method you find a number of options that can be combined as well:

Outgoing Mail Filters

At this moment, there's only one filter that deals with outgoing mail: fortune.
It will attach a randomly chosen funny or wise "fortune cookie" to the end of every mail before it's sent out. You can do a dry run by issuing the command fortune in a Terminal.

Setting up the Mail Service

Now that your incoming and outgoing mail servers (and maybe some filters, too), are configured, the Mail Service that does all the actual checking and fetching needs to know how to do its job.

After ticking the checkmark, you can configure the interval at which the account's mail server is probed for new mail.

The Mail Service can trigger notifications that can be set to show up Never, While sending or While sending and receiving.

Edit mailbox menu… will open the folder /boot/home/config/Mail/Menu Links/. All folders or queries (!) or their links put into this folder will appear in the context menu of the mailbox icon of the Mail Services in the Deskbar tray.

From that context menu, you can also Create new message…, Check for mail now or edit Settings…:

If you hold down SHIFT when invoking the context menu, you'll get additional commands:

The mailbox icon itself shows if there are unread messages (status "New") when there are envelopes inside.