Author Jonathan Paisley was kind enough to supply Operator Headgap Systems, Inc. with the ability to assign registration numbers for this program. This was the final release for HDS Mail and is still labeled a beta. It is the most stable and trouble free version and I have used this version on several servers for several years. I wish this program would have continued to be updated because there are a few features that it lacks. With that aside however it does enable your TeleFinder System users to access their mail from any "net terminal" anywhere in the world.We are very happy to be able to offer both a trial and permanent version for use with your system. We recommend that you Upgrade to v5.7.3 if you haven't already. With your upgrade you will receive a permanent registration for HDS Mail and Online Assistant (OAT). If you are already running 5.7.3 you can simply register HDS mail and OAT for $9.95 each or $17.95 for both.
With your upgrade or purchase we will gladly assist you in setting up and troubleshooting the programs for your system.
Abstract
The HDS Web Mail for TeleFinder plugin is designed to allow users of TeleFinder to access their email through the Web Server. This means that people can access their email from anywhere, provided there is an internet connection available.
Installation
- Copy the items in the "Put into Plugins folder" into your TeleFinder Web Server Plugins folder
- Copy the folder "mail" found inside the "Put into Web Space folder" into your TeleFinder Web Space folder. It must be at the root level of this folder, so you can access the files inside using the URL /mail/.
- Ensure you have a realm set up for the 'admin' string in your Web Server settings, as follows:
- Choose Server Settings… from the Web menu in TeleFinder Server.
- Select the Realms pane in the settings window
- Click on the Add button.
- Fill in the dialog box as follows:
You can edit the Access Groups settings as you like in order to adjust who can access the plugin administration pages.5. Click OK in the Realm dialog box.
6. Click OK in the Web Settings window.
- Reset the Web Server in order for it to recognise the new plugin. You may find you have to increase TeleFinder's memory partition in order to give the plugin more memory to work with.
Getting Started
Before you can start using the plugin, you must enter the registration code that you have received from Operator Headgap Systems.
To get a trial keycode send a request to headgap@headgap.com with the following information (for example):
Sysop Name Ken Sutherland
BBS Name Highlander BBS
TF Serial Number TF00-32123Don't forget to mention the name "HDS Web Mail" when requesting your code.
Once you have your demo keycode or you have purchased HDS Web Mail you can enter the code by accessing the plugin's administration page:
- Using your web browser, access the URL /mail/pi_admin.mail on your web server
- Fill in your details as they are on the registration information that you have received
- Click on the Register button to update your information
Logging On
- Access the URL /mail/ on your web server
- You will be prompted to enter your user name and password
- Press the "Logon" button
Viewing Mail
To view a mail item, simply click on the hyperlink (the subject line), or check the check box to the left of the item and choose 'View'. You may check more than one mail item in order to view more than one item on a single page (only available in Classic or Tabular browser view).
Downloading Files
If you want to download a file that's listed in the browser as a 'File in Mailbox', then simply click on its name. Depending on the transfer encoding settings you have set in the Preferences page (see the link at the bottom of the browser), the file will be transferred using plain binary, binhex or macbinary.
Deleting Mail
To delete mail, simply check the mail items as desired and select 'Delete'. You can also delete mail while you are reading it by hitting the Delete button next to the mail item. This is only available in Classic or Tabular browser views. Additionally, you can only delete files in your mailbox from Tabular browser view.
Sending Mail
First choose 'New Mail Message' from the main email page. Fill in the necessary fields of the form that appears and select 'Send' to send the mail message. If the New Mail Message button is not present it means that you don't have privileges to send email.
Replying to Mail
In order to reply to mail, simply push the 'Reply' button at the bottom of the mail message. The entire original message will automatically be quoted, and you can edit it as desired. To send the new message, choose 'Send'.
Cool Features (or features we think are cool)
- Attachments that seem to be images (gif or jpeg) will be inlined when you view the mail (this currently only works for TeleFinder mail boxes, not POP3)
- HTML encoded parts (text/html) in POP3 mail are shown formatted in the browser rather than as HTML source
- Text that looks like a URL in mail messages is given a hyperlink
- The flexibility of the template language
- The ability to tell users that they have new mail while they are browsing BBS areas using the dir.spml or topic.spml templates (see the file Template Additions for more info)
Troubleshooting
Make sure that you are using a recent version of the TF Server. We recommend TeleFinder 5.7 release or later, although it should work with 5.5 and 5.6.
Some users have reported that they need to increase the amount of memory allocated to TF Server. This probably depends on the number of users accessing the plugin simultaneously&emdash;however, the plugin does allocate around 50Kb memory for a cache when it loads, so this may be enough to cause a problem in some cases.
Release History
1.01b3
- Fixed bug with concurrent AppleEvents
- Fixed a number of memory leaks
- Thanks to Daryl Hansen at Mauimail.com for his StdLogs!
The following files have changed in this release:
- bottombanner.mail
- Fix typo of & instead of ? in links.
- Clarified restrictions on removal of notices at the bottom.
1.01b2
- Fixed bug with dealing with RFC822 headers that would show up under debug versions of TF Server
- Changed checknewmail.mail to fix </a> in wrong place
- Added auth tags to bottombanner.mail hyperlinks incase you use them after the timer has expired
The following files have changed in this release:
- checknewmail.mail
- Fix </a> in wrong place
- browse.mail
- Added auth tags to the hyperlinks
1.01b1
- Added [!config timefmt="xxx"!] command. This uses the same format as TeleFinder SPML
- Added [!config domain="domain.com"!] command. This adjusts the outgoing domain used when sending mail. Can be used to support sites with multiple domains
- Fixed double-memory release that would cause debug versions of the TF Server to go into MacsBugs (or otherwise crash the machine) when the Error Page was getting shown.
- Added User Manager statistics. This includes time logged on, last logon, and emails sent. Essentially, this means that you can track users using the Web Mail system, and use a utility such as Suzie to expire unused accounts.
- Added hit counter, similar to TF SPML's <!--#count--> command. Use the include command to include the contents of the counter file. See 'browse.mail' and 'bottombanner.mail' for examples.
- Changed autorefresh to request the page 'browse.mail?nc=1'. This enables the hit counter to count seperately for pages that are automatically reloaded (they go into 'browse-auto.mailcount').
- Fixed user logon timeout from 10hrs to 10mins
- Fixed newmailsound inclusion to be *inside* the conditional (you would get the sound all the time otherwise!)
- Set width=height=0 for sound embedding in Netscape in order to hide the audio controller
- Made cookie mechanism more flexible in order to support dodgy Internet Explorer clients. Cookies will now expire regardless of whether the user agent expires them (they have the time embedded in them)
- The [!echo authurl!] command still gives an authentification string that is universally valid (used as post args in the send mail form, in case the user spends more than 10 mins composing a message)
- Added support in the parser for <!--#command--> format, similar to SPML. Note that there must be no spaces in '<!--#command'.
- [!endif!] may be used instead of [!fi!] if desired (this has always been present, but never documented).
The following files have changed in this release:
- bbrowse.mail
- Put newmailsound include *after* the [!if newmailcount!] conditional.
- browse.mail
- Added [!count!] command to show example of its usage. It updates the file 'browse.mailcount' each time the browser is loaded.
- bottombanner.mail
- Display browser access count after the author's name: by Jonathan Paisley (counter-goes-here)
- newmailsound.mail
- Updated to (work and) hide the audio controller in Netscape.
- topbanner.mail
- Added config timefmt command as template. If omitted the TeleFinder default is used.
- [!config timefmt="%a, %d %b, %I:%M%p"!]
1.01
- Renamed to HDS Web Mail for TeleFinder
- Changed handling of attachments and files in mailbox to allow for different sub-sites
1.0 (real)
- Autorefresh feature now autorefreshes to the browser page rather than the page that produced it (eg the send mail action)
- File caching mechanism introduced; may be turned on from the admin page. Note, that this hasn't been tested fully yet, so you can leave it off if you're worried. It requires an extra 130kb (even when its turned off)
- Fixed problem with recorded macros overflowing if they were longer than 512 chars (thanks to Carl Vine for spotting this one)
- URL recognising now recognises URLs in normal brackets ()
- Large address books are properly handled (thanks to Bob Nunn for spotting this)
- Made the plugin FAT
The following files have changed in this release:
- autorefresh.mail
- bbrowse.mail
- Added a <br> after "You have no mail."
- bottombanner.mail
- Added DEMO banner.
- download.asimail
- This was missing in the original 1.0 release. It provides support for downloading files in the mailbox.
- mailform.mail
- Changed the way the address book is displayed and the quoting of replied-to messages.
- partiallogon.spml and password.spml
- These are new; they are an example of a way to provide a two-stage logon process (means you can hit return).
- pi_admin.mail
- Includes new option for enabling and disablin the cache.
- preferences.mail
- Renamed "Background Colour" to "Browser Theme" and added more choices of backgrounds (edit by changing the gifs in the 'gfx' directory).
- prefsupdate.mail
- Just replace this with your existing copy.
- tbrowse.mail
- Support for files in the mailbox.
- topbanner.mail
- Changes to allow multiple backgrounds.
0.9b6 (also 1.0 original)
- Fixed problem where mail paths would get confused if the user cache overflowed
- Fixed problem where two random characters would get sent before quoting a TF email file, causing random problems with the user agent
- Added way to download files that are in the mailbox (/mail/files/filename). This involved changes to the following files:bbrowse.mail, tbrowse.mail, download.asimail (new)
- Fixed problem with a lockup if there was more than one cookie being sent to the server (thanks to Gary Clarke for this one!)
0.9b5
- Fixed problem introduced in 0.9b4 with not recognising users, or only recognising the first user to logon. This depended on what happened to be in unitialised memory at one particular point
- Removed ugly 'auth' parameter from mailto hyperlinks
- Added screenshot in documentation for setting up admin realm
- Fixed possible crash if an RFC822 message has a Content-Type field with no qualifiers (eg text/plain rather than text/plain; charset=us)
0.9b4
- Fixed problem with wrapping long text lines from EMAL messages
- Flush changes to resource fork after registering
- US-English and UK-English language options (for Authoriszation)
- New mail sound available on certain browsers (user agents)
- Per-user option for plain binary transfers
- Support for identifying web user agent, with name and version number extracted automatically
- Regular expression string matching (using like operator)
- Fixed typo on name of 'logout.asimail' file in 'bottombanner.mail'
- Changed indication of read and unread mail from label 1 (Project 2&emdash;Brown) to label 7 (Essential&emdash;Orange). This change is to fall in line with the implementation in TF Server 5.6b4 and TF User 5.6b2
- Variables can be set to the empty string now
- Fixed problem with expressions being passed to macros
- Support for partial mail paths set in User Manager
- Address book addresses with spaces and other non-safe characters are now properly escaped
0.9b3
- Fixed bug that would cause crashes if an RFC822 mail file didn't have a Content-Type field (thanks to Mikael Fredriksson for sending me a bug report so quickly!)
0.9b2
- Added more descriptive page titles to aid in traversing the web-browser history
- Changed way 'read' mail is indicated [now it changes the item's label in the Finder&emdash;you can see the effects even in TF/User!]
- The above modification greatly speeds up the display of the 'browser'
- Fixed problem with decoding Base64 encoded messages
- Added new handler extension '.asimail' for compatibility with WebStar
- Fixed bug causing crash if plugin was run under WebStar
- Support for international characters
0.9b1
- First restricted release (to SpiderIsland)
Known Bugs and Limitations
- Macintosh files in AppleDouble POP3 mail attachments are not currently supported. You can, however, download the data fork and resource fork separately!
- The cookie used to verify your details doesn't always time out correctly. Ensure you use the "Logout" option.
Available from Operator Headgap Systems, Inc.
http://tfbbs.com