Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for non-commercial purposes is hereby granted provided that this copyright notice appears in all copies. Please contact the author if it is desired to use this software in a comercial product.

Credits

• ImageButton Class

Marty Hall:
Java Resource Page.
hall@apl.jhu.edu

• Regexp Class

Starwave Corporation: Jonathan Payne
Starwave Home Page

• MultiLine Label Class

David Flanagan
Java in a Nutshell
O'Reilly & Associates
"A must-have reference book for Java Programmers"

There are many people who have helped test MailFaces and made valuable suggestions. I would like to especially thank the following for their efforts.

• Teruel de Campo - chusty@ibm.net
• Kurt Thams - thams@thams.com
• Duane Chamblee - duanec@indelible-blue.com
• Charles Mims - chmims@ibm.net
• Murray Weismer - weismer@erols.com

Steve Kinzler <kinzler@cs.indiana.edu> is the creator and primary developer of the picons databases, application scripts, and online services.

There are many others who have contributed to picons and various software that makes use of picons.

Restrictions

• You must install either the Java 1.1 or later Runtime Environment or the Java 1.1 or later Development Toolkit on most systems
  Because this is a Java application instead of an applet, you must have Java 1.1 or later installed on your system. Because most Operating Systems are not distributed with Java already installed, you will have to install this yourself. The MailFaces Install procedure has information on how to do this. On Windows95 and WindowsNT 4, having the Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 installed is sufficient.
• MailFaces must run as a Java application instead of an applet.
  Java does not allow an applet to make a network connection to a system other than the system that "served" the applet. This makes the MailFaces application somewhat useless in an applet unless the Mail Server, the applet Server and the PIcon database are all the same system. This is usually not the case.

  Because of the advantages of the browser interface, I am looking at ways of circumventing these restrictions by moving some functions to a Server Servlet program.

• Only POP3, Authorized POP (APOP) and IMAP MailServers are supported.

  When the Sun JavaMail product is enhanced to support the Unix Mail inbox then this support will also be available in MailFaces.

Known Problems and TO-DO List
Updated for Version 2.1 - 02/22/2002

• Sun Java 1.0.2 Support
  This 2.0 version uses Java 1.1 features and will not run on Java 1.0.2.
• Competition for the POP Mailbox
  When you are running MailFaces, you will often have your normal mailreading program (Netscape,Eudora, Pine, etc) open at the same time on the same or different system and they may both try to check the status of your mailbox at the same time. MailFaces expects this and after the initial startup, it will quietly ignore any failures to open the mailbox and it tries to do its job and close the mailbox as soon as it can. But other programs may assume that they are the only mail readers and complain when they find that they can not access it. Netscape will sometimes complain and then ask you to reenter your password ( I guess it assumed that that is why it failed). Netscape and many other Mail clients have options where it will periodically check the mailbox and set a visual flag if mail is present. If you are using MailFaces to notify you of incoming mail, you may want turn off these other mail notification features.
  (Netscape Options->Mail and News Preferences->Servers)
  
• Cntl-C exit from MailFaces
  If an application Opens the POP3 server and exits without closing the server, it can leave the POP3 server unavailable. Most POP servers recover from this after a short time interval, but it is best to avoid this. With the first release of MailFaces it was possible to do a normal File->Exit from MailFaces and terminate while another thread had the POP Server opened. This has been fixed in V1.1 so that normal termination will not bypass the Server Close. However, you should avoid doing a Ctrl-C exit from MailFaces because this is unprotected.
• Image color
  The image on Face Buttons get strange colors when you move to another window. This is unavoidable on a system that uses a 256 color map. I have tried to minimize the problem by repainting the button when the mouse passes over it. So if you want to restore the those handsome faces, just slowly swipe the mouse across the MailFaces images.
• The dialog for editing Options file is only available with Java 2 with the Java Swing classes..
  However, you can edit the faces.opt file with your favorite editor and use the "Options -> Refresh" menu button to have it reread the options.
• Mail Server Support
  This version supports the following types of Mail Servers:
  • POP3 server
  • Authorized POP server.
  • IMAP Server
  Since Mailfaces uses the Sun JavaMail API, as soon as JavaMail supports a new Mail service, I should be able to add the new support very easily. It is my impression that JavaMail will suport Unix mail and Lotus Notes at some future date. I would also like to eventually support Mail services such as HotMail, Yahoo etc. I also plan to support mobile PDA devices at some point.
• Misc To-Do List Summary
  • Support for Palm and PocketPC PDA devices
  • Unix Mail file support.
  • Support for other Server/Mailbox formats
  • Support for x-face header
  • Add options for Color and Font
  • Display name and subject on mouse enter event