Introduction Snak Features Requirements Description Scripting Script Library Version History Registration Download Support TIMM Features Requirements Description Version History Registration Download Support Source Code Legalese...

Description TIMM includes full searching and filtering facilities, has a full featured tagline manager and an address book which support groups and multiple recipients. Filtering lets you eliminate mail from annoying people, and with the searching functions you can search in the mail based on message text, sender, subject etc. TIMM automatically handles long Internet addresses and subjects, and can open multiple QWK packets simultaneously. The new version 1.4 is available for download here. This releases corrects bugs related to replying to messages and deleting taglines. When you register it is important that you provide your username - the name under which you receive the mail, as this is the basis for the registration key. It is also important that you provide an email address where I can send the key. If you only provide a postal address the processing may take as much as a week extra, on top of which comes the time it take for a letter to reach you. Some people don't provide either, and that means that they don't get what they pay for since I have no way of reaching them. You are encouraged to register with credit card via the Register application or via the secure webserver available here. The payment service deducts a significant percentage to process checks About TIMM TIMM is designed to be easy to use, even for people without prior experience with off-line mail readers. All the major functions and features are available from a button or a menu list. TIMM has online help available under the "Help" menu (the question mark in the right hand side of the menu bar). Each window can also bring up the relevant help text if you press the "help" key found on extended keyboards above the cursor keys. It also provides Balloon Help for each menu item. TIMM is not copy-protected, but a 30 day trial period is built into the program. If you want to continue to use it after 30 days, you must pay the $25 shareware fee. After the trial period, the program will gradually disable itself unless registered. After two months it will no longer open QWK files. Registering it, of course re-enables everything. Please see chapter "Registering" in the "Help" menu for details. You are encouraged to distribute TIMM whereever you wish, as long as you don't separate it from the read me file and the register application. The registration keys are not stored in the program, so you can safely distribute it even after you are registered - but please keep the package together. TIMM uses the ZipIt program to unzip the compressed message files, so you must also have ZipIt present on your machine. What Does TIMM Look Like ? The central window in TIMM - the message list, is opened when you drop a QWK file onto the TIMM icon, or when you open a QWK file from the file menu. The top of the window is taken up by a grey pane displaying how many messages the package contains, how many of those are unread and how many are filtered out. Below that, the individual conferences and the messages they contain are displayed in a hierarchial list. Each conference has one line with the number and name of the conferences and the number of messages it contains. Before the conference name is an arrow, which is used to show or hide the display of the messages in the conference. The rest of the window are the individual messages in the conferences. To the left of each message, the message status flags are drawn. The message status flags signify if a given message has been read, if it is addressed to you, or if it is visible only to you. A checkmark signifies a read message, a bullet signifies a msg to you, and a multiplication sign * means that the msg is visible only to you. To read a message in the conference, click on the particular line in the message list window. If you have allocated enough memory you can open multiple QWK files, each having a message list and reply and message windows. Be forewarned that if you try to open multiple QWK files without allocating enough memory to TIMM, it might crash. Initially the new message list window is opened on top of the other message list window. Just move the new window to see both. TIMM does not require that the QWK file has a special name. That makes it easier to store multiple QWK files, if you rename the individual files. You can for example name each file with a date. If information files from the BBS are included in the QWK file, they will be displayed in a special conference called "BBS Information". The files that TIMM displays are "BBSNEWS", "NEW FILES". Bulletins are not currently displayed, but they will be in a later version. Reading Messages Here a message has been selected in the message list, and it is then opened into this window. The major part of the message window is taken up by the text pane. This will hold up to 32000 characters. If the message is longer than that, only the first 32000 characters will be shown, and a warning is displayed when the message is opened If you want to save a copy of the mail in a file, use the Save menu item. TIMM can also append to existing files, making it easy for you to collect interesting messages. TIMM remembers the last file you appended to and offers a shortcut if you want to save a number of messages to the same file. The shortcut is cmd-a, and it is only active if you have previously appended to a file. Various information about the message is shown in the information pane. Between the information pane and the text pane is the button pane. The buttons makes it easier to navigate the messages. You can also use the cursor keys to navigate in the mail, cursor right and left goes to the next and previous message, respectively. If the scroll bars are active you can use cursor up and down to scroll. Replying to messages Here the user has decided to reply to a message by selecting some text to be quoted, and then pressing cmd-r or selecting Reply in the menu. TIMM will then extract the relevant information and open a reply window. The text that was selected is inserted, with each line beginning with "> ". It is a convention in BBS'ing to set quoted text apart from your own contribution. When you reply to an existing mail, TIMM will set the conference number correctly in the reply info pane. The main part of the window is taken up by the editable text field. Above it is the reply info pane, and below it is the tagline field. The reply info pane is the place where you enter the addressing information and selects in which conference the message will be placed after upload to the board. If you have prior experience with QWK readers you may know that addressing and subject information in most other readers is limited to 25 characters each. TIMM can automatically and transparently handle long addresses and subjects as described in the chapter "Long addresses". Thus you need not be concerned, if for instance you send Internet mail where addresses frequently are longer than 25 characters. The "Include in REP" check box is useful in those situations where you open a QWK file, create replies and upload them. Then you close the QWK file, but later reopens it. As the replies are stored inside the QWK file, the old replies will be included if you create new replies for upload, unless you tell TIMM not to include them. If you want the message to be presented to the recipient only, select the private checkbox. It is usually not used when posting to a conference, since the whole idea of writing to a conference is to invite discussion. Also note that some boards may automatically remove the private flag when uploading to a conference or similar. TIMM requires that the fields in the information area for a reply are not empty when you create the REP file for upload. How configurable is it ? TIMM works fine with the default preferences, but it can be configured in a number of ways. TIMM remembers the location and size of each window between launches so your setup is preserved. The first time, however, it uses default sizes and locations for the windows. Those defaults are selected to be reasonable on a 14" monitor. That means that the message list is made only so wide that it shows the first 25 chars of the subject. To the right of the message subject the message list windows also displays the sender and receiver of each message.To see the sender and receiver of a message, make the message list window wider until the information becomes visible. The configuration windows are accessed through the Edit menu. It has a sub-menu in which the configuration groups are listed. The configuration windows has a help function so that a short, descriptive text is displayed about each item in the window as the cursor passes over it. TIMM has two central configuration dialogs, "General configuration" and "Reply configuration". General Configuration Press the button called "Choose.." to select the location TIMM will use for the REP files. TIMM will automatically extract all available subject information from a message, but it is configurable how many characters of the subject are displayed in the message list. There is a choice betweem 25, 45 and 65 characters, since the various networks offers different maximum subject width. The "Move" and "Remove" options determine if the filtered mail is placed in a trash conference at the end of the message list, or if it is just removed. Any filtering can subsequently be undone with a menu command. Please be advised that filtering mail may take some time on a slow machine. The information in the field "Text Creator" is used when you save a message as a text file. It determines which program is launched when you double-click on the file in the Finder. The default for the field is "ttxt", which means that the finder will start TeachText to open the file. The checkbox named "Expand conferences" controls whether TIMM automatically expands the conferences and displays their messages when you open a QWK file. The checkbox named "RoseMail board" should be set if your mail comes from a RoseMail system. At least certain versions of RoseMail creates faulty QWK packages. If TIMM attemps to open one of them, it will fail unless this box is set. If your mail comes from other systems, and the checkbox is set, you might get some strange conference names in the list, and there will be two spaces before the name of the sender. Reply Configuration This configuration dialog controls various options related to replying. The Tagline radio buttons determines what will happen when you press cmd-T (the shortcut for "Get Tagline"). If "Select Manually" is chosen, the command will open the tagline manager window. If "Sequentially" is chosen, the command will just pick the next tagline in the current group and insert it into the current reply. If "Optional" is chosen, TIMM will not automatically add a tagline to a new mail, but you must choose one manually if you want one. This option also means that no "tearline" is added to the mail. That is for for FIDO compatibility. The Quote radio buttons selects the quoting style TIMM uses for quoted text. Initials on first line KS > quoted text, quoted text , quoted text > quoted text , quoted text , quoted text > quoted text , quoted text , quoted text Initials on all lines KS > quoted text , quoted text , quoted text KS > quoted text , quoted text , quoted text KS > quoted text , quoted text , quoted text No initials > quoted text , quoted text , quoted text > quoted text , quoted text , quoted text If the "Use Re: " checkbox is checked, TIMM will automatically insert a "Re: " before the subject line in a reply, if it does not already begin with "Re:" The comments area determines the text that TIMM will automatically insert in the beginning and end of replies and new messages. You will notice the %1, %2 , %3 etc. sequences. Those are place holders for text that will be inserted when you create the reply or new message. For example if you reply to a mail from a person called "John Smith", the text "John" will replace %1, The information in the field "REP Type" is used when TIMM saves the REP file containing the replies. The default for the field is "pZIP", which means that the file will be a ZipIt document. The "Max Msg Lgd" field determines the max number of lines to allow in a reply. If the reply is longer than that ,TIMM will segment it into multiple parts. Taglines Taglines are short sentences appended to outgoing messages. Net etiquette dictates that taglines and signatures be kept short and simple, so try to avoid long rambling signatures and taglines. The menu item "Manager..." in the tagline menu opens the tagline manager window. In this window you can edit, delete and create new tags and tag groups. The buttom "Move to: " allows you to move tags between groups. To change between groups, use the popup menu in the top left corner, the other one selects which group to move a tag to. A tag group is a collection of tags that have the same subject or theme. For example you may create tag groups for political tags, computer tags, funny tags or whatever. The current tag group is the last one that was selected in the manager window, and it is marked by a checkmark in the "Taglines" menu. To edit a tag, select it in the list and press the "Edit Tag" button. To insert a particular tag in the currently open reply, doubleclick on the line. Deleting tags is done by selecting one or more tags in the list and pressing "Delete Tag" To select multiple taglines in the list, press the command key while selecting. That will allow a disjointed selection. To put a new line in the text in the new/edit tag window, use the '¬' (option-l) character. Searching your mail TIMM offers two ways to search in the messages - a normal "Find" function activated with the common cmd-f shortcut or a menu item, and predefined searches. In both cases you can search in all the components of the message : Subject, Sender, Receiver and message text. You have the following specifiers available : contains, doesn't contain, begins with, doesn't begin with, is my name, and where relevant you also specify a text. Thus you can for example search for messages whose: Subject begins with "offline" Receiver is my name Text contains "TIMM" Searching is case insensitive, except when searching in the message text. A search is a collection of criterias like those mentioned above, that is stored on disk and thus always available. You can define up to 10 searches, and the searches currently consist of "and" terms, so that each term new term narrows the result of the search. In a future version searching will be extended with "or" terms that will expand the search. To create a new search use the menu item "Edit Searches...". A window then comes up, with functions to create, delete and rename searches. When you select a search in the popup menu, the criterias it contains are displayed in the table. If you want to delete a criteria, select it in the table and press the "Delete" button. To add a new criteria to the search, use the two popup menus and the text box to define it, and press "Add" when it is set up. So to create a search that will find all mail addressed to you set it up like this: In the first popup, select "Receiver". In the second popup select the specifier "is my name", and leave the text box empty. Then press "Add". If you have selected an illegal combination, you will get a warning dialog. Cmd-f will always invoke the simple find function, so to start your search select it from the "Search" menu. That will find the first message that meets all the criteria that you have defined. To continue a search use the cmd-g shortcut or the menu item. If no messages are found to meet the all criteria, a beep will be heard. Filtering your mail A filter is used to remove uninteresting mail, and it is made up of the same criteria as a search. It can for example be used to remove mail in an ongoing tread that you decide you don't want to read, or it can be used to remove mail from particular persons, that you decide are not worth listening to. A good convention in this area is found on Usenet - when you set the program to filter someone out, send the person a message containing a single word : "Plonk". That is the sound of something being dropped in the wastebasket, and the person then knows that he is being filtered out. A filter can be applied automatically when a package is opened, or manually by selecting it in the Filter menu. The information pane in the message list window gives information about how many messages were filtered out. The filtered mail can either be removed from the list all together, or it can be moved to a special trash conference. You can always undo the effect of a filtering by using the "Undo All Filtering" menu item. You can also use the filter function to collect messages that you especially want to read. Please note that if you reply to messages in the trash conference, TIMM is not able to place the correct conference number in the reply info pane, and you need to supply that manually. Keeping track of addresses In the Address Book window you can select the recipients of the mail and define, edit and delete addresses. You can also create and delete groups of addresses. The Address Book lets you attach comments to the addresses. In the case of Internet addresses taken from existing mails, the program will attempt to recover the real name and put it in the comment field. To select a recipient double-click on a line in the address or group pane. To select multiple recipients, hold down the shift key while double-clicking. This will automatically add the address(es) to the currently active reply window. To add an address to a group, select the group in the group pane. Then for each address you want to add, select the address in the address pane and press the "Add to Group" button. To view the contents of a group, select it from the pop-up menu above the address pane. When you select a different group than the main group, which holds all addresses, the "Delete" button becomes "Remove". This means that the address you select in the address pane can be removed from the group but the address is still included in the main group. If you delete an address from the main group, it is automatically removed from all other groups. Getting started with TIMM To read mail with TIMM, follow these steps: Download a QWK file with the messages from your board. Make sure that you have the ZipIt program on the same hard disk as TIMM. Drag the QWK file icon onto the TIMM icon Wait while the messages are being decompressed Select the message that you want to read, by clicking on it in the message list. If you want to reply to the message and quote some of the text, then select the text and press cmd-r. Then a reply window opens where you can edit your reply. After you've written your replies and new messages, select the "create *.REP file " menu. A file is then created. This file must be uploaded to the board. The message list displays the messages in a hierarchial list, where the conferences can be opened or closed by pressing the triangles. The top pane of the window is an info field that displays how many messages there are, how many are unread and how many have been filtered out. Snak is Copyright © 1997-2001 Kent Sorensen. All Rights Reserved. TIMM is Copyright © 1994-1997 Kent Sorensen. All Rights Reserved.