This is how it works: After the message is loaded the following messages from the same thread are shown:

1. parent message
2. message being read message (will be colored differently)
3. messages on the same level as message being read
4. messages one level lower (deeper into the conversation) as message being read

Update 10.01.2010: The implementation in today’s development version actually works, but it’s still a bit rough around the edges.

Well in a few days this will be in the past. As I’ve decided to add notifications at the top when such an error happens.

There will be at most one bar per account displayed. And the text will change depending on when the error happened (send, receive, send and receive). Right now I don’t think that I should limit the number of displayed bars as most users have a small number of accounts.

If anyone would like to play with the colors e.g make it reddish,  please let me know and I’ll give out the current ones.

Update 08.01.2010: This is now implemented in latest 1.2.x development builds.

I had been planining on releasing a bugfix version but it was not tested enough. I really hope that I can deliver it this weekend.

SourceForge, began accepting nominations for their fourth annual Community Choice Awards last week, they’ll be accepting nominations till May 29th. And then they are going to pick up 10 projects in each category for the final round.

If you like si.Mail a at least a bit please vote for si.Mail nomination in the Best Project category. Even coming into the upper 10 project list would be a great success and brought greater visibility for si.Mail. You can give your vote by clicking on the picture.

Main features of 1.2.x:

• Advanced auto configuration feature I was talking about in September of 2008. It is mostly working and it takes under two seconds to configure. Adding a little teaser.
  
• To Do list management, which is in planing stages.
• I also had to implement a breaking change for Profiles folder.  This change will effect only users who have si.Mail installed in Program Files folder. This is a result of more and more users using Vista, and Vista completely forbidding to write anything inside Program Files.  So now if si.Mail is installed inside Program Files, Profiles are located in si.Mail folder inside your Documents folder e.g by Vista defaults C:\Users\<User Name>\Documents\si.Mail\. Below is the error message you get.
  si.Mail no longer supports having Profiles in sub folder when run from Program Files. Here is what you can do:
  * You can force old behavior by creating an empty file named ‘profiles.force’ inside ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\si.Mail\’.
  However this means that you will most probably have to run application with Administrative privileges.
  * You can simply move all files and folders from ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\si.Mail\Profiles\’ to ‘C:\Users\Miha Vrhovnik\Documents\si.Mail\’.

- IMPR: Message preview/view window now shows CC headers if they are present.
- IMPR: Right click menu in edit window should display Cut,Copy, Paste items.
- FIX: carret not shown when editing e-mail address.
- FIX: When editor in plain text mode, you could paste formated text into it.
- FIX: On Vista all open file dialogs were shown as Save dialogs.
- FIX: Fixed crash when refreshing View indexes, and message was supposed to be removed from index.

Finally it came to me. Why not do it like DomainKeys, and spf records are implemented. Use DNS TXT record.  So In layman’s terms, we add new TXT record. Something along example.com. IN TXT “mailAC=http[s]://path_to_AC_file”. You are probably asking why AC couldn’t be put directly into the TXT record the main reason is, it’s too big and thus it would be hard to edit.

So how would this work? si.Mail extracts domain part of e-mail address and fetches TXT records from nameserver for that domain. If it founds correct TXT record it downloads the file and auto configures everything that’s needed to send and receive e-mail messages.

Now imagine that you are a hosting provider using Plesk, CPanel or any other software. (Usually all domains you host have the same type of e-mail access) You just add to your DNS template url to one AC file and all e-mail accounts for all domains you are hosting can be configured from a SINGLE file. Also you have complete control of AC file so if anything changes you can modify AC yourself without bugging anyone. This is also ideal for small companies where users can configure e-mail client by themselves.

With current automatic account configuration you still have to go through entire wizard although that wouldn’t be necessary. At the moment there are some fields that could be auto configured but they are not.

As you can see at the mock up above in reality for auto configuration usually only first 3 fields are necessary and sometimes the 4th one, in cases where user name doesn’t equal any part of e-mail address (user name field would be hidden by default and would be displayed only if necessary). If there won’t be any data for auto configuration, user will automatically get the same window as if it would have clicked on Advanced settings.

So what is your opinion on this?

Without going into technical details, if you ever got “Message IDs (from index file = xx and from message file = xy) does not match” then you probably encountered the bug I’m talking about. There are only two cases for this to happen: not enough disk space when downloading new messages, (this was my case) and  unexpected application shutdown e.g power failure, BSOD….  If you are getting message above please Pack messages file (Right click to one mailbox and select Pack from the menu), Modified Pack procedure should be smart enough to found and “restore” those messages. Other improvements and fixes in this release are below.

- IMPR: Added ruler so you can easily indent message parts
– IMPR: We should bail out if attachment file doesn’t exist anymore
– FIX: Some parts of forms are not translated
– FIX: Print preview, print setup were not implemented.
– FIX: Copy/cut and paste in same document resulted in corrupted view of message in editor.
– FIX: Canceling address input tries to close Compose window.
– FIX: if message is at the end of file it should always be at the correct offset. (Offset might be wrong if si.Mail or system crashed before all data was written to HDD or if there was not enough free diskspace).

- FIX: left and right keys in Compose window not working in address input field.
- FIX: priority combo box in Compose window is without icons.

- NEW: Hungarian translation thanks to Széll Zsolt
- IMPR: Build static versions (no external dependencies)of new spellcheck and libssl libraries
- IMPR: Message Subject is now stored in text box so you can copy it into clipboard if needed
- IMPR: made embedded plug-ins unicode aware
- IMPR: upgraded gui components (SpTBX) to their latest version. This also fixed startup exception.
- IMPR: moved some form creation to the step they are actually needed (fAddressBook, fMessageReceivers, fPreview, fFolderProperties)
- FIX: Fixed exception when opening rss item from search mailbox.
- FIX: After creating 1st profile RSS tab is not visible.

For those who would like to know more about that can read IPV4 article on Wikipedia (Addresses ending in 0 or 255 part of article, you can also paste this to message when you’ll be bugging your router company)

What needs to be checked as result of component upgrade (1st one to report bugs should open a topic in bug section of the forum), for Items with exceptions could occur comment, please use Send bug functionality built in si.Mail:

• all forms – components not in menus and/or toolbars must use windows theming
• tabs in message/rss view behave a bit differently, some background code is changed (exceptions could occur)
• embedded import/export message/address book plug-ins are now Unicode aware (exceptions could occur)
• compose window e-mail input text box is Unicode aware (exceptions could occur)
• Forms (windows) which were moved (Address Book, Message Receivers, Server preview, Folder Properties) (exceptions could occur)

Good things to this upgrade are that si.Mail executable file (siMail.exe) is about 700KiB lighter . As a result to upgrade also startup crash is now gone.

Another thing new components will brought is, that now you’ll be able to create external theme for skinning menus and toolbars.

Site changes:
- updated to latest Wordpress
- enabled comment posting for guest users

I’m also getting bug reports of crash that can be repeated on some occasions way back to the si.Mail 0.7.x. I’m getting them mostly from people who are using their displays in portrait mode, or they accidentally minimized main application window to smallest size (640×480), that at startup si.Mail uses 100% of one CPU core and then it just shuts down. I did manage to recreate this issue and it is in process of fixing. There are three things you can do. Wait for next development version with updated GUI controls, which are to blame for the stack overflow, try to downgrade to 1.0.0.1510, or try to manually edit .\Profiles\config.xml . Utf-8 capable editor must be used to edit this file, please find frmMain section, it should look something like this:

<frmMain>
<online>1</online>
<width>1027</width>
<height>1285</height>
<top>-1</top>
<left>-1</left>
<minimizeToTray>1</minimizeToTray>
<feedToolbar>1</feedToolbar>
<msgReceiveToolbar>1</msgReceiveToolbar>
<msgReceivePPToolbar>0</msgReceivePPToolbar>
<msgSendToolbar>1</msgSendToolbar>
</frmMain>

and set value in width and height parts to your maximum screen resolution.

-IMPR: Attachment view skips creating of mailboxes with ? or * in extension part. Please rebuild attachment view for changes to take effect
-IMPR: Improved speed of parsing messages sent via MAPI.
-FIX: Fixed division by zero in images attachment preview plug-in
-FIX: Send at least 1 byte for total mailbox size so in case we are unable to parse server’s response we don’t get division by zero error.
-FIX: Reset countdown for next server message check, if we’ve done it manually.
-FIX: si.Mail not adding attachments to message if they were sent via MAPI.
-FIX: Wrong urlEncode function used, so some characters were not encoded this resulted in si.Mail hanging in rare cases.
-FIX: Fixed exception when sending message and connection to server failed
-FIX: exception division by zero if only one item was in the mailbox and group by was used.

For now the archives are available here.