MailFaces

Current Version - 2.1.5

Features - Version 2.1.5 - Released July 2002

This release is a new release of 2.1 to add a few new features, fix a number of problems and and improve performance.

New Features

Copy/Move support
Forward E-mail to another Email account.
And, Or and Not support for Email selection.
Option File editing
Ability to edit the MailFaces Options file directly from the MailFaces application. This requires Java 2 with the Java Swing classes.
User Exit capability
Ability to add specialized java code to process selected mail.

Features - Version 2.1.4 - Released April 2002

This release is a new release of 2.1 to add 2 important new features.

New Features

Cellphone Notification
Email notification to your Cellphone using Short Message Service(SMS).
Groups
Select mail from addresses found in your address book.

Features - Version 2.1.3 - Released March 2002

This release is a new release of 2.1 to fix a few problems with running MailFaces and add some new features.

New Features or fixes

New POP3 mailbox support: The Sun JavaMail product is now used to support both POP3 and IMAP mailservers instead of the previous "homegrown" support. This will enable future support for attachments and fixes some problems with processing mail headers. The JavaMail jar files are now distributed with Mailfaces.
New ability to read the Mail message text. One can now select a mail message and view the text contents if it is a text message. If it contains attachments, the list of attachments will be shown.
New ability to display message Headers. One can now select a mail message and view all of the mail Headers. This is useful when you want to add selection statements to filter mail messages.
New selection statement faciities. You can now test if the mail Headers contains an instance of a specific header without testing for the contents. For example:
```
  Select list-subscribe  ""  "file:./images/mailinglist.gif" 
```
Since most messages from mailing list will include a "LIST-SUBSCRIBE" header, the above will cause the specified icon to be used for mail from a mailing list. Also one can now specify "PICONDB" instead of an specified icon so that the icon will be looked up in the PIcon database. For Example:
```
  Select ibm.com  "PICONDB" 
```
The above would cause any mail from ibm.com to be displayed with the IBM logo from the PIcon database. This would be useful so that the subsequent Select or KillSelect statements would not select this message.
Fix: Proxy support This enables the support for an HTTP proxy to interface to the PICon database.
Fix:Multiline Header statement not processed. The previous version was incorrectly processing headers that extended over multiple lines.

Features - Version 2.1.2 - Released February 2002

This release is a new release of 2.1 to fix a few problems with running MailFaces and add some new features.

New Features

Simplified matching: Mailfaces no longer defaults to using "Regular Expressions" for matching. Although Regular Expression matching is very powerful, it is also somewhat complicated and for 90% of the matching that one would like to do, it would be easier to specify a simple matching expression. Mailfaces now supports both matching, by default, with a simple string that will be compared to the Mail header lines and optionally with a Regular expression.
For example:
```
  Select to "yahoogroups.com"     "file:./images/yahoogroups.gif" 
```
will match any occurrence of "yahoogroups.com" within the "To:" mail header regardless of upper or lowercase.
If you do want to use regular expressions you can proceed the matching expression with the string RE
For example:
```
  Select from	RE "joe@.*\\.example\\.net" 		"file:./images/friends.gif"  
```
will match any occurrence of "joe@*.example.net" where * could be any string.
New facility for recognizing SPAM
SPAM is often not addressed directly to the recipient of the email. If you look at most of the SPAM that you find in your inbox, you will not find your email address listed in any of the To: or CC: mail headers. So a Mailfaces has a special format to select mail where the specified address is not found in any of the to: or cc: headers.
So for example, I would add the following statement to my faces.opt file so that any email that is not directly addressed to me would be selected for my SPAM icon.
```
  KillSelect notto "jthomas@cruzio.com"
```
Warning: However you should note that in addition to being the case for most SPAM, this is also true of most email that is being sent because you are on a mailing list and also for email where you are on the "bcc" list (Blind Carbon Copy). So you should be sure if you use this that any mailing list that you are on have specific Select statements earlier in the Options file. If you are likely to be on the bcc: list for email, then you want to be sure to have Select statements for the "from" address. For example: in my case, most of the bcc: mail that I get is from people that I work with so I have a Select statement for the company mail address.

Features - Version 2.1.1 - Released January 2002

This release is a re-release of 2.1 to fix a few problems with running MailFaces on the later releases of Java. Also the few minor problems reported in the last 3+ years have been fixed.

Features - Version 2.1 - Released August 1998

The only major change is that the name has changed from JavaFaces to MailFaces.

The Sun legal department asked that I refrain from using the name JavaFaces because they consider any use of Java as part of the name to be a trademark violation.

A few minor bugs have been fixed and the mailbox address ( userid@host ) is now displayed as the window title.

Features - Version 2.0

Threaded Operation: The application was rewritten to support "Threads" so that the various functions can run simultaneously. While it is reading the next new e-mail message, it can also be searching the Picon Database for a previous e-mail. This has greatly improved how quickly MailFaces can read the mail and display the icons, especially when first starting up.
IMAP Mailbox support: It can now support IMAP Mail Servers in addition to POP3 Mail Servers. This support uses the Sun JavaMail API so as SUN JavaMail supports additional mail servers (like Lotus, Unix mail, etc) this support can be added easily to MailFaces.
Dynamic Icons for unknown users: It now has an option BuildImageURL that specifies a blank icon. When specified, if the search for a matching icon fails, then the blank icon is displayed with the userid and the last 2 host qualifiers superimposed on it.
IgnorePicon Option: You can specify that you do not want to use selected Picons. This can be used in conjunction with the BuildImageURL or SelectAfter option to bypass certain icons that might be always located in the PIconDB. For example: "anything.net" or "anything.de".
Icon Grayed out after viewing: If you click on a Face icon to view the list of mail messsages, the icon then remains "grayed out" and has a "button pushed in" appearance until more mail for that icon arrives. This is intended to help keep track of which icons have new mail.
Reply-To used for searching PIcondDB: If an arriving E-Mail contains both a From: and Reply-to header, both will be used to determine the appropriate icon to display. with the Reply-to having precedence.
Improve handling of invalid From: Mail headers Because SPAM E-mail often arrives with a From: email header or with the user or host missing, MailFaces now converts this to "From: -@-" so that it can easily be matched with a KillSelect statement.
Java 1.1 support: I have upgraded the code to use Java 1.1 AWT features that will hopefully solve some of the cross platform problems with the Graphical User Interfaces and improve the appearance. The scrollbar and status line are markedly more well behaved.
Bug fixes: A number of bugs have been fixed and probably some new ones have been introduced.

Features - Version 1.2

Searching PIcon Databases: The Master PIcon Database at the University of Indiana holds personal images for thousands of individuals and thousands of icons representing companies, organizations and countries from which you might receive mail. Also, multiple PIcon databases can be specified so you can also setup a local database using a distributed version of the Perl image search script.
User Select Statements: Each user can specify a list of mail recipients and specify the image that will be shown for each. The images can either be files on the local system or images that reside anywhere on the net.
Image Cache: The images that are returned from the PIconDB server are cached on the local client. This will minimize the interactions with remote servers and greatly improve the performance of MailFaces.
Kill File Support: You can now specify selection criteria for deleting unwanted mail. This mail can either be deleted automatically or gathered under a "Kill" image where it can be optionally viewed and deleted with the click of the mouse.
Included Option files: You can now have other files be included into your option file processing. This might be used to support a shared select file for a group of users.
Multiple Mailboxes: You can now specify multiple Mail Servers in your Option file and easily switch to view any of the servers.
Scrollbar Support: You can now specify the maximum number of images to be displayed and use a scrollbar to view the other images.
Search Host Domain only support: You can specify that the PIcon database and cache be searched for a match on host name only. Since an average user receives messages from a limited number of hosts, most incoming mail messages will find a matching Picon for the host already in the cache and avoid any remote search.
Log File Support: Important events and errors are written to a log file. Recommended if you are using the AutoDelete facility.
Optional long delay: From the menubar, you can change the delay interval for checking the mailbox to either a short or long interval. The long interval is designed for people with dialup connections that want to leave their workstation unattended and have it redial and check the mail every hour or so.
Remembers option file and window position: The name of the option file used and the window position is now stored when MailFaces terminates so when it is restarted it will use the same option file (unless respecified) and will be in the same position as it was last.
Improved performance of reading from the POP server: Although still slow, the time to read the mail headers from the server has been cut by over 50%.
Proxy Support: If you reside behind a firewall, MailFaces will support the use of a Proxy server to access the PIcon Database.
Verify Icon Selection: You can verify that the correct Icon will be selected for mail from some correspondent, without actually getting any mail. The "Verify Image Selection" menu item will let you enter the From: information and optionally any other mail header line and will then process it just like a received email.