Preferences

Display

Various options control how the messages are shown and how the display is organized.

Show tags panel: The default value for the Display/Tags menu entry. When set to "Yes", a panel with a button for each tag is shown, each button being set when the corresponding tag is assigned to the message currently selected.

Show headers: The default value for the Display/Headers menu entry. "None" means not to display any message header at all, "Most" means the most useful (From, To, Cc, Date...), and "All" means the full headers text.

Display sender as: Tells what should displayed in the "From" column of message lists: either the name of the sender (when known), or the email address.

Clickable URLs in body: when set to Yes, URLs in the body panel appear as clickable links. The browser may need to be configured in the Paths sections.

Threaded display: The default value for the Display/Threaded menu entry. When set to "Yes", the messages that belong to a same thread are shown in tree-like representation, and the threads can be opened and closed.

Date format: How the dates are displayed in the message lists. Choose DD/MM/YYYY HH:MI or YYYY/MM/DD HH:MI depending on what you find the more easy to read.

N in 'last N messages': The contextual popup menu of a message on display has a command fetching the last messages of the same sender than the mail currently shown. This setting tells how much of these messages this command should retrieve in one go.

Style: The Qt library has several builtin styles (the actual list depends on the platform the interface is running on). The style controls the overall look of the interface as well as some usability tips, such as the function of the middle mouse button. Just try different styles and keep the one you like the most.

Identities

User-specific settings

Email address: Fill in only the email, without any additional comment (ex: john.doe@company.com). That field is required to be able to send mail messages with manitou-mail.

Name: The full name of the user that goes along the email address. (ex: John Doe)

Use as default: The identity to use by default when new outgoing message is composed (menu command: Message/New).

X-Face: An optional string consisting of ASCII characters that are supposed to represent the face of the user, encoded in a black and white 48x48 bitmap. Manitou-mail can decode this string and display it graphically along the headers; other mail programs such as XEmacs VM or Sylpheed do this as well. To encode a picture in X-Face format, you may want to check out http://www.dairiki.org/xface

Signature: Some lines of text that will be appended to all outgoing messages before editing takes place.

Paths

The paths used by the user interface

Attachments (temporary): the directory where attachments are written just before launching the application that is associated with their MIME type.

Bitmaps: the directory where manitou icons files are to be found. The path set at install time is used by default, but it can be changed later, if for example, icons should be read from a shared network drive.

Help files: the directory where help files reside. The default value is empty and means that they're looked up in a location depending on the installation and the current language defined by the OS environment.

Browser: A command that will be launched when an URL is clicked. If it contains $1, that will be replaced by the URL to be opened, otherwise the URL will be appended at the end of the command.
Examples:
mozilla-xremote-client 'openurl($1,new-window)'
kfmclient openURL
Note that it can be different from the program used to open 'text/html' attachments.

Fetching

Options about database fetch.

Max fetch ahead: when a list of messages is displayed, the program can pre-fetch to memory the bodies of messages not yet read and that are immediately below in the list. That may save some time when later going through, especially when connected remotely through a slow network link.

Max database connexions: the program may use more than one connexion to perform simultaneous tasks. This number is the maximum number of such connexions.

Check new mail every X minutes: The interval of time between two refreshs of a message list. Only message lists corresponding to "New mail" or "Current mail" queries are subject to automatic refresh.

MIME viewers

The list of programs that should be used to view attachments, each corresponding to a MIME type (a MIME type is a string like 'image/jpeg', 'application/x-tar' that defines the type of data contained in an attached file).