PopMan

First off I don't think I've congratulated you on an excellent piece of software. I've tried many email notification programs and the only one that comes close to yours in terms of simplicity, functionality and user friendly design is nPop (it has it's flaws). So keep up the good work!

Next, to the questions:

1) I sometimes get HTML emails that don't render as text, the preview simply displays the raw HTML. I think there are some emails from Amazon.com that do this. Does that mean there is an error in the HTML? I've briefly looked over the HTML code myself and it seems to be ok but I'm not expert. Perhaps I could forward you an example... not quite sure how I could forward it in a way that would work. Perhaps if I just send you the raw source you can test it yourself?

2) I'm using Popman on two computers and whenever I download mail on my laptop, it always says that the emails are unread. Even if I downloaded them on my desktop before and read them. Am I correct in thinking that mail servers store the state of new/read emails? What is the difference between an email being new and being unread? Surely if an email is read then it can no longer be new, thus all unread emails are new? Do I need to delete some data file on the laptop? This is not a big deal, I was just curious as to what is happening.

3) Do you know if anyone is currently working on a Hotmail plugin?[/i]

I sometimes get HTML emails that don't render as text

Maybe a wrong content-type is used in those emails: If the Content-Type says "text/plain" than PopMan threats it like text even if it contains HTML. Please send me an example of such email (don't use your email client's "Forward" feature, instead copy the raw sourec into a text file and attach it) and I will have a look at it.

I'm using Popman on two computers and whenever I download mail on my laptop, it always says that the emails are unread. Even if I downloaded them on my desktop before and read them.

PopMan stores the information of "new" and "unread" in a local file called "MailCache.dat". This is necessary because there is no standard way in the POP3 protocol to determine if an email is read or not.

The difference between "unread" and "new" is: An email is "new" if it has never been seen by PopMan before (therefore mailcache.dat). The email is "unread" if it has never been looked at by the user (this information is also stored in mailcache.dat). If you receive an email without reading it and you restart PopMan, you will still see the unread email, but the email is not "new" anymore, because it has been received before. So, if you delete "MailCache.dat", all emails, that you have received, will be "new" and "unread" again.

Do you know if anyone is currently working on a Hotmail plugin?

There is a Hotmail plugin for PopTray, that I could tune to work with PopMan, but it only works with the HTTP Hotmail protocol, which Microsoft has made unavailable for non-paied Hotmail accounts, recently. But if somebody pays for an email account, he would expect it to provide access via POP3, right?

Ok, so for:

HTML - I'll see if I can save one of the email's source as text and send that to you. However, having inspecting one email myself I can see you are correct and the content-type is listed as text/plain. I don't suppose you want to include some special case in Popman that says in HTML tags are found but content-type is text/plain then render as HTML anyway? I can understand why you WOULDN'T want to do this because you'd essentially be fixing something that isn't broken (i.e. the error isn't yours to fix).

The mailcache.dat file explains the behaviour that I'm getting. Basically what you're saying is that I'd have to somehow, synchronize the mailcache.dat file on each computer. I understand now, thanks.

As for Hotmail, you're right, you'd expect paying customers to receive the ability to use pop3. Other mail providers offer this service like ICQ and Mail.com. I guess I should ditch Hotmail then!

Thanks for your responses.

Anonymous wrote:I guess I should ditch Hotmail then!

Yes. And switch to Gmail (works perfectly with PopMan).
I can send you an invite if you want.

Bittercrash wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I guess I should ditch Hotmail then!

Yes. And switch to Gmail (works perfectly with PopMan).
I can send you an invite if you want.

Thank you, but I probably have more than enough email addresses for now... I've never quite figured out how I came to have so many and why!