Mail

Mail is Haiku's default viewer and editor of emails. It has nothing to do with the actual fetching and sending of mails, which is done by the mail_daemon and can be configured via the E-mail preferences.

This page is a general overview of the application Mail. For more information how email in Haiku works, refer to the Workshop on managing email.

Reading messages

You double-click an email file to open it in Mail. The interface is quite simple:

A menu and optional tool bar on top, with an area of the interesting attributes of a mail (to, from, subject, date) below that, and then the actual body of the mail. If the mail appears with strange characters or empty, try to change the Encoding in the Message menu.

If there are files attached to an email, they are listed at the end of the message. A right-click on one opens a context menu to Save attachment… or Open attachment. You can also drag & drop directly to the Desktop or another Tracker window.

Most of the menu and tool bar items are pretty self-explaining, so we'll concentrate just on the highlights.

File

When you close the window of a new mail, its status is normally switched from "New" to "Read". But you can set other statuses as well, by choosing from the Close and submenu. There you'll also find the option Set to… to create your own custom statuses, which are saved under ~/config/settings/Mail/status/.

Edit

Here you'll find an item to open Mail's Settings… (see below) and a shortcut to manage your Accounts…, which will open the E-mail preference panel.

View

You'll only seldomly need these two items, if at all:

Message

The different options to reply to a mail may need a bit of explanation.

The items to Forward, Resend and Copy to new are again pretty self-explaining.

When you've opened an email from a Tracker or query result window, Previous message and Next message will move to the previous/next email in the list.

Save address collects all email addresses from the header and the actual email body in a submenu. Choosing an address will open the People application in order to complete and save the contact information.

Queries

This menu holds queries that show all mails related to the currently open mail. Selecting Same recipient, Same sender or Same subject opens a query that lists all corresponding mails:

Creating new messages

A new email is created by invoking New mail message of the File menu or the corresponding icon from the tool bar of an open email. Or you just start the Mail application or choose Create new message… from the context menu of the mailbox icon in the Deskbar.

The window is pretty similar to the one when reading mails. The menu and tool bar items are slightly different and the text boxes have to be filled with the recipient's email address, subject and so on, of course.

Cc is short for the anachronistic term "carbon copy" and results in copies of your mail being sent to the listed people. The difference to just listing a buch of addresses in the "To" field is, that you don't directly address the cc'ed people, thereby signaling that you probably don't expect an answer of them.
Bcc means "blind carbon copy" which does practically the same as "Cc", but hides the recipients from each other.

You can enter several recipients by separating their addresses with a comma. To, CC, and BCC are pop-up menus. They contain all email addresses on your system found by a query for People files. Their "Group" attribute will sort them in corresponding submenus.

Again, we'll focus on the more interesting features in the menus.

File

With Save as draft you can store your work so far and come back to it later. To load it again, choose it from the Open draft submenu that will list the result of a query for all mails with the status "Draft".

Edit

Increase and Decrease quote level or their respective shortcuts ALT / - are used to add/remove a level of quoting by adjusting the number of ">" symbols in front of quoted lines. Just select some text in all the lines you want un/quoted and invoke the menu item.

Check spelling currently only offers corrections of English texts by marking wrong or unknown words red and showing them in italic. Right-clicking such a word opens a context menu offering suggestions to correct the word or to Add it to the accepted vocabulary.

Then, there are again the items to open Mail's Settings… (see below) and a shortcut to managing your Accounts…, which will open the E-mail preference panel.

Message

With Add signature you can add predefined texts to the end of your mail. From its submenu you can choose a specific or Random one.

You create new or edit existing signatures with Edit signatures…, which will open a window where you enter the text itself and the title of your new sig. There, in the Signature menu, you find items to Open a specific signature or Save or Delete the currently loaded one, Signatures should be saved in ~/config/settings/Mail/signatures.

Use Add attachment… and Remove attachment to add/remove files as enclosures. You can also drag & drop files from a Tracker window. With text files you have to be careful not to drop them in the email body, or they'll get pasted as text instead.

File attachments are listed below the email body. You can remove a file by invoking a context menu or by selecting it and pressing DEL.

Queries

As when reading mails, this menu holds queries that show all mails related to the one you are currently composing. Selecting Same recipient, Same sender or Same subject opens a query that lists all matching mails.

Settings

Mail's settings come in two parts:

User interface

Mailing

Hello Dr. Hawking!

On Mon, 18 Jan 1998 02:55:16 +0800 you wrote:
> so thanks again for the inspiration concerning the cosmological constant.
> ...and the rest of the quoted text following...