By now you should an understanding of the Microdot-II interface, menus and the options available to you. Let's assume you want to write a new message (email or news) straight away within Microdot-II. How do we create a new message?
Say, for example, we wanted to send an email to Oliver Wagner (the programmer of Microdot-II)
we would insert the email address owagner@vapor.com. Let's say we wanted to send a
copy of the email to the other programmers of NetConnect we would enter their email addresses
into the Cc: box as shown below:
In the above image we are sending our "new" news message to two newsgroups.
Please Note: that if you use the external editor all styles (bold, italics etc) you have applied to your message will be lost. This also applies to attached files. Therefore, if you want to add external files, add the files at the end of your message.
Microdot's address book is opened by selecting Open address book... from the Settings menu (Hotkey Amiga-A). Here you can add, delete or edit email addresses for your own Microdot "phone book". The address book interacts with the "write new message" to allow you to select addresses for the "to:" "Cc:" sections.
| New Group adds a new group name to the listview. This group will contain your addresses for a particular topic. ie. create a group called "friends" and you could put all your friends email addresses into this group, separating them from others. | New Entry allows you to add an email address into the "address book". If you have created a group the new entry would go into this group. |
|
|
|
| The Duplicate button makes a copy of an address, while the Remove button removes it completely. | New Subgroup allows to create another group within a main group. If you had a group called "business" you could create a sub-group called "contacts" another called "suppliers" etc etc. |
8.73 A Word About Rich Text Formatting
Microsoft is shipped with the impressive textview editor which allows word-processing style features for your email and news messages!
Textview supports Rich Text Formatting (RTF). What is RTF? RTF is a method of creating different styles within a document with different codes. You don't, of course, see the codes within your messages. ie. if you wanted to create a bold selection of text the codes used would look like this <BOLD> text</BOLD> - however in your program you would just see this text (ie. the codes would be hidden.
What does RTF support? The following options:
Multiple Fonts - Only 2 fonts supported within the current textview Font Styles - bold, italics, underline and a combination of these styles Coloured Text - supported in the near future Alignment - supported in the near future
Please note: that if you send a Rich Text Formatted message the recipient needs a mail program that shows RTF documents. Microdot-II is currently the only Amiga mailer that supports Rich Text Formatting. However, on the PC and Mac, most mail-related programs support RTF - Eudora, Netscape (mail), Microsoft Explorer v3 (mail), Turnpike etc.
Microdot allows you to attach external files to your message. Just click on the "attach files" button and a requestor will appear. Just find the file(s) you want to attach and load them into the mail program.
You may be asked if you want the file(s) as UUencoded or attached - you are best choosing "attach".
You should see something like the above, when you attach your files. Remember - you shouldn't
send large attached files unless the recipient knows it is being sent and do not send
attached files to newsgroups (except for binary newsgroups).
Now your message is created you can send this to your friends. You have two options:
Send - if you are online this sends your message straight away Store - if you are offline then this will queue your messages to be sent later
The next time you go online you need to goto the Microdot menu and select Send Queued Messages
This GUI will appear and will show you the progress of your messages being sent to your
ISP.
Go to the previous, next, chapter, table of contents.
