I originally bought The Bat! way back in January 2000 because the email program I was using at the time, Agent, wasn't doing a couple of things that I wanted. After a year with The Bat!, I went back to Agent because quite frankly the message navigation and threading are far superior to that in The Bat!. However, not long ago Forte rolled out the latest and greatest version of Agent, and crippled some of the features that I wanted and after using it for a few days I had to export all of my messages and re-import them into the much older version of Agent that worked for me, so I figured I'd give TB! another try.
I see that a few of the things that irritated me about The Bat! are fixed, but keyboard navigation is still woefully terrible. Anyhow, I actually come looking for help, since I'm not going to go back to Agent until some major changes happen with it, and I've recently upgraded to the latest TB, and ding-dong it's good enough for now. So my questions are thus: 1) By far the biggest issue I'm having right now is that the headers pane is a fixed size, but I want to display more headers in it. I have a huge screen resolution, and would like to make that panel longer so I can actually display <gasp> four lines of headers or more without having to scroll with the mouse. The stuff I'm putting up there are the standard things plus the POPfile headers, and the point is to be able to see them at a glance, not to have to scroll every single message to see if they've been categorized properly. 2) Is there a way I can auto-format hanging paragraphs like this? Alt-L allows me to left-justify everything, and when I'm typing if I manually indent the second line then subsequent lines flow as desired, but if I edit the text then I need to manually reflow the paragraph. It's not terribly hard, but TB is so good at reflowing text and quoted text and all that jazz that this seems close enough to work, were there a means to activate it. 3) My domain provider recently started offering POP and SMTP over SSL. I'd love to use it. Unfortunately for me, I need to access it with pop.fancy.org, and the host's certificate says their domain name. The Bat! subsequently refuses to connect. Is there a way I can tell The Bat!, "yeah, I know it's the wrong hostname in the cert, but allow it anyway?" I tried connecting to the hostname in the cert, but as I guessed previously to trying, it refused me. I have been using SSH and tunnelling over that, but I'd like to get rid of that extra step if possible. 4) I want to use a macro followed immediately by text. E.g. in my reply template, I want to put the cursor at the top of the message in the first column, but I also want to say "You wrote:" right there. Is there a way to "stop" macro processing? I had hoped that I could do "%CursorYou wrote:", but that just strips the macro entirely, leaving " wrote:" on the first line. 5) Is there a way to automatically file replies in the same folder that contains the message I'm replying to? In most cases I don't want to do this, but in some I'm starting to feel that it's actually pretty handy. I have filters set up to file certain emails on receive to certain folders, and now I have to duplicate the exact same filter setup in the "send" filters, and copy doesn't work between "receive" and "send" filters! Ugh! (I set up a Gmail account tonight, and that one was easy; just file every sent message into the Inbox. ...although then I realized I actually wanted to BCC everything to myself @gmail.com, so did that via templates, exposing issue #4 to me.) 6) I like threading some folders by references/subject, but then I have to put the subject as the first field on the left. I'd love to have the message status/park/flag fields all the way on the left, as I do in non-threaded views. Is there a way to do this? (In the last 3.5x the view got /really/ screwed up when I tried to do it by pushing fields around in the View Manager.) 7) What is a "common" folder? I've been using TB again for a bit over a month now, understand (I think) what virtual folders are all about, but just noticed tonight this "New Common Folder". There's nothing in the documentation about it, so... I'm curious. 8) When I create folders for IMAP accounts, I want to create those folders on the server. How can I do this? 9) What are the "document" icons in the status window for? Everything else I can figure out, but the two with the checkmarks (one is an envelope, one looks like a piece of paper) aren't coming to me... In general I have that problem; I don't know what the icons in the message status column of the message list mean, etc., etc., and that stuff doesn't seem to be in the help file. ...at least, not that I've been able to find... 10) Is there any way to "export" templates? Tonight I went through the painful process of adding a couple of accounts and manually re-entering the templates from my first account into those others. Wow. Ick! 11) Is there any way to specify, "check this account after this other account has been checked"? I have an anti-spam solution that requires me to hit a server (0spam.com, yes, in addition to POPfile), and I want that to complete before I check the account that it is watching. E.g. I want to check 0spam.com, then when that's finished, check Fancy.org. ...that's all I can think of right now. I'm amazed at how high-traffic this list is, I remember that being the case years ago now, though, and wow, this is some amazing user community. (Unfortunately it'd be a lot easier for me to deal with personally if it were a newsgroup, but then I understand that that seems silly for an email program... Alas.) thanks a ton, -tom! ________________________________________________ Current version is 3.60.7 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
