Jpilot-Mail User Manual

Version 1.3 Updated Sunday 31st August 2003, for jpilot-Mail-0.1.5


License

Copyright © 2003 Sarah George.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

Credits

The jpilot-Mail software is by Oliver Kurth and is currently being maintained by Ludovic Rousseau.

This manual was written by Sarah George (slgeo1@bigpond.com).


Introduction

This is a first attempt at a user manual for jpilot-Mail. I don't expect it to be anything like complete at this stage.

This manual assumes you already have jpilot-Mail installed and just want to know how to configure and use it.

jpilot-Mail is included as a standard part of many linux distributions, so installing it could be fairly automatic. If not, there's some hints about downloading, installing etc on the project web page at http://ludovic.rousseau.free.fr/softwares/jpilot-Mail/index.html. There are also various README files and such like included in the download that provide information about installing jpilot-Mail.

No liability is accepted for this manual being incomplete, misleading, or even just plain wrong. It is provided for free in the genuine hope that people will find it useful.


What jpilot-Mail Does

jpilot-Mail is a plugin for jpilot (http://www.jpilot.org), which I believe to be the best palm pilot desktop software available for the linux platform.

jpilot-Mail allows you to:

Limitations

Jpilot-Mail only knows the old "MailDB.pdb" database format. Several newer palms, eg. the Zire 71, don't use that any more. At present there are two options for these newer palms:

More technical limitations of the jpilot-Mail software are described in the various documentation files that come with jpilot-Mail.


Usage

Click plugins->Mail from jpilot to get to the jpilot-Mail screen.

On this screen you will find the following:

Main jpilot-Mail screen

"Get" button
Clicking this button instructs jpilot-Mail to fetch mail now from the inbox file you have specified.
Hint: There is an option in the "Sync" tab in the preferences menu to make this "get" operation occur automatically before each hot-sync.
"Send" button
Send any messages that are queued for sending (ie anything in the "outbox" folder).
Hint:There is an option in the "Sync" tab in the preferences menu to make this "send" operation occur automatically after each hot-sync.
"Prefs" button
Brings up the Preferences window so you can configure jpilot-Mail. See the "Configuration" section for more information about options in the preferences window.
"Category" drop-down menu
This lets you select which category/folder you wish to view emails from. You usually want this set to "Inbox".
Message Index table
This table shows a list of the messages in the current folder/category. For each message it shows the date, who the message is from, and the subject. Click on a message to select it. This also displays the body of the message in the Quick View area.
Quick View Area
This displays the currently selected message so you can read it.
Delete button
This deletes the currently selected message from the jpilot-Mail desktop. Next time you hot-sync the palm pilot, the message you have deleted here will also be deleted from the palm pilot.

Configuration

From jpilot, click "Plugins->Mail", then click the "Prefs" button on the left to set up email preferences. (Myself and many programmers use the words "preferences" and "configuration" interchangeably).

This should bring up a preferences window, which has options spread over several tabs. I will explain the options from each tab in the order they appear in the current version.

Mail Delivery Tab

Mail Delivery Configuration

Mail Server
Where the SMTP server is. Your ISP's email configuration web page should have this information.
Hint: If you run your own email server, like sendmail, you might want to set this to "localhost". Most people should look up the configuration information for their ISP though.
eg: mail.bigpond.com
Port
Which port to connect to on that server. Your ISP's email configuration web page may have this information, but it is nearly always "25".
eg: 25
Default domain
Whatever appears after the "@" in your email address.
eg: bigpond.com
Pilot charset
This is the character set you use on your palm pilot. For English text, you want the default value, iso-8859-1. According to Joo-won Jung, who added this feature, the euc-kr character set works for Korean and Shift_jis "should" work for Japanese. The web site http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets lists all character sets; I haven't found a short list of "just what the palm pilot uses" yet (let me know if you find one!)
eg: iso-8859-1
Header Encoding
This is the encoding used to write non-plain-text characters into email headers. Options are "quoted-printable" and "base64". If you chose "iso-8859-1" or some other English-centric character set then you probably want "quoted-printable". If you chose a character set that uses few English characters, like a Korean or Japanese one, you probably want "base64".
eg: quoted-printable

Identity Tab

Identity Configuration

Your Name
Just what it says. This appears with your email address in the "From" field of emails you send.
eg: Sarah
From address
Your full email address.
eg: user@bigpond.com

Folders Tab

Folders Configuration

Path to Inbox folder
This option expects a file name. You can type in the file name or click the "Path to Inbox folder" button to select the file from menus.
jpilot-Mail assumes you are already using a desktop email program that you are happy with (eg. Evolution, kmail, pine). It will let that application do the hard work of fetching email, and simply read the file where your email program saves its "inbox" when it wants to check for new mail.
Find out where your email application stores its inbox, an enter that filename (with the full path) into this field.
Hint: I use a separate "palm" folder from my email application and copy messages to there that I want on the palm pilot. So, I have told jpilot-Mail to treat this "palm" folder as its inbox (see the example).
eg: /home/sarahg/Mail/palm
Path to Sent Mail folder
This option expects a file name. You can type in the file name or click the "Path to Inbox folder" button to select the file from menus.
If this field has a file name in it, a copy all emails you send will be appended to this file. To avoid the possibility of two applications trying to write to a file at once, I recommend you give jpilot-Mail its own "sent mail" folder and don't mix the folder with other email software.
eg: /home/sarahg/Mail/sent-mail-palm
Get Read Mail
If checked, jpilot-Mail will copy ALL the mail from the inbox you've selected to the palm. If un-checked, it will only copy un-read mail. My advice for this is "[X]" if you use a separate "palm" folder like me, and "[ ]" if you use it on your normal inbox.
eg: [X]

Sync Tab

Sync Configuration

Before sync, get mail from folder
The "Get" button tells jpilot-Mail to check your inbox for messages it hasn't seen before. If you check this option then when you do a sync, jpilot-Mail will automatically perform this same check just before the sync starts, so that new mail will end up on the palm pilot without you having to remember it. I recommend you check this.
eg: [X]
After sync, send mail from Outbox
If checked, mail in the "Outbox" folder will be sent automatically after each sync. I recommend you only check this if you have a permanent internet connection, as it will fail if you're not connected to the internet. eg: [ ]
Truncate to size (bytes)
To stop big email messages filling up all your palm pilot memory, you can tell jpilot-Mail to only send the first part of long messages. The palm pilot email program has a similar configuration option, I suggest you make the two match. This way jpilot-Mail doesn't bother to send more than the palm pilot will read.
eg: 4000

Signature Tab

Signature Configuration

This is just space to write a signature.

This is the same as, and is synced with, the "signature" field in the email configuration on your palm pilot.


To Do

Things that I should add to this manual:


GNU Free Documentation License

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