MailFaces - FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

Index

If you send me more questions, I will add more answers!.

Question - Why does the proper icon not show up?

Almost all of the questions that I get are some variation of this question.

You have just added a PIcon to the Indiana database but it does not appear when you send mail to yourself.
This very likely because of the caching that MailFaces does. When MailFaces gets a negative response back from the PIcon database, it remembers that fact so it can avoid a query to the Picon Database for other mail from the same address. So if a PIcon is subsequently added to the database, it will never access it.
The solution is to use the "File->Verify Icon Selection" menu item. This will allow you to build a simulated mail message with the From: header set to whatever you want. By default, it will not first look in the cache, but it will use the results to update the cache.
Another solution is to completely clear the cache by deleting all of the files in the "CacheDirectory". Use the Cache->Clear item on the menubar.

You only get icons for domain names even though you are sure that some people have personal icons.
This is probably because your .opt file has the default settings:
PiconDomainOnly true
This is done for efficiency. If you have mail from 5 different people at Stanford University, it only has to look up Stanford once. And currently there are so few personal icons relative to the population of e-mail users, it is often not worth looking up Personal icons. But if you don't mind the extra overhead, you can change the option to "false" but at that time you may want to clear out your cache by using the cache->clear menubar item.

Question - MailFaces works fine at home but not on my computer at work. Why?

The network where you work is very likely behind some type of "firewall" that is designed to protect against hackers. Unfortunately it sometimes gets in your way also. There are some possible solutions depending on your firewall configuration. You may need the help of a system administrator to make any sense of the following.

If your mailbox is at your work location, then the only problem that you have is accessing the PIcon database which is outside your firewall. If your firewall has an HTTP Proxy server then you can use the PROXY operand on the PIconDB statement in the options file.
If you want to access your personal mailbox on your ISP server from your work location then it depends on the type of firewall that is in use. If your work location uses what is known as a SOCKS server then you probably can use the following technique. Edit the mf.bat or mf.sh file to invoke MailFaces and specify the -DsocksProxyHost and -DsocksProxyPort options as in the following statement:
```
  java -DsocksProxyHost=9.100.200.40 -DsocksProxyPort=1080 com.jthomas.mailfaces.MailFaces   
```
The actual address and port to use instead of "9.100.200.40" and "1080" can be obtained from your network administrator. You may already have them since you would have needed them to get Netscape or Internet Explorer to work. Using this method, you will not need the Proxy statement on the PIconDB statement.
If you are using the Microsoft Internet Explorer version of java via the jview command then the SOCKS firewall settings are controlled by the properties for Internet Explorer. So to set the SOCKS address for MailFaces, you access the properties for Internet Explorer (via the desktop icon) and select the "connection" tab.

Question - Why doesn't SelectAfter work with my "something.de" addresses?

The Picon Database has "Flag" icons for almost all of the "contry" hostnames like .de, .ch etc. So if you are residing in Germany, for example, then all of your mail from other German locations will be found in the PIcon Database and show the German flag and the SelectAfter modes will never be found. The PIconDefer statement can be used to solve this problem. "PiconDefer de" will cause it to search and retreive the "de" icon but it will not be used unless the search of the SelectAfter statements fails to find a match.

Question - Can I have MailFaces show the user/node instead of the "?" icon when it does not find any other match?

Yes, this feature was added in Version 2.0. You need to uncomment the "BuildImageURL" statement in the .opt file so that it will specify a blank icon that is used to contain the userid and the last 2 quaifiers of the host name. Then any mail that does not find a match using the Select statements or the Picon database, will result in the display of icon with from: header information. For example, mail from dogbert@cubicle.dilbert.com would look like this:

As is the case in FAQ 3, you don't want it to pick up the default icons for commonly occuring nodes such as *.net so you would want to suppress these using one or more "PiconDefer" statements.

Question - What are the known problems with the current version of MailFaces - 2.1.5

Error message when e-Mail is from the MailFaces mailing list.
The distributed faces.opt file contains the following example statement:

// Example of a Mailing List entry
//   - The "Reply-To" header is used to check for the mailing list server   
//   - Icon is a local file in MailFaces image sub directory
Select reply-to  "mailfaces@topica.com"  "file:./images/MailFaces.gif"

Unfortunately, the MailFaces.gif file was not included in the distribution. The easiest fix is to comment out the statement or change it to:

Select reply-to  "mailfaces@topica.com"  "file:./images/topica.gif"