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Dan's Mail Format Site:
Configuration: PocoMail
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PocoMail is yet another GUI-based e-mail reader for Windows, which claims to be more secure than Outhouse
Outlook because it doesn't use the IE rendering engine (though a recent version of Outlook doesn't either).
Configuring Pine
To get to the setup menu, click on the "Options" button at the top, or go to "Options..." in the Tools menu.
![[Screen Shot]](gfx/poco1.png)
On the Encoding Options page, you can set the character set you want to use. iso-8859-1 is generally good for Western European languages, while utf-8 supports the entire global Unicode range (but isn't always supported by older mail readers). Avoid the proprietary system-specific ones like the ones beginning with windows.
![[Screen Shot]](gfx/poco2.png)
On the Sending Mail page, you should select Forced Word Wrap and set the wrap number to something less than 79, in order to comply with line length standards.
![[Screen Shot]](gfx/poco3.png)
The Quoting Text page has some significant items for quoting, replying, and forwarding. The default settings are geared for top posting; if you'd prefer to use the more traditional interleaved or bottom posting, you should check off Enter new text BELOW quoted text (but don't just start typing there; move the cursor up to trim unnecessary material from the quotes, and to reply in an interleaved manner as contextually sensible). The default setting for quote-character (">") is reasonable, however. The reflow and wrap options are a good idea to fix messy mis-wrapped quotes as often occur when things have been quoted and re-quoted a few times.
With these things set, you'll be generating basically standards-compliant mail (especially if you let it default to sending plain-text mail instead of HTML), but one problem is that there doesn't seem to be any way to get a proper signature separator, even though the program is smart enough to recognize one in inbound messages and trim it off when you reply. Signatures don't get added with a "-- " separator automatically, and when you try to put one in manually, the trailing space gets trimmed off.
Links
Next: SquirrelMail is an open-source Web-based mail reader that's used by many ISPs and Web hosting providers to allow their customers to access their e-mail accounts through a browser.
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This page was first created 25 Mar 2007, and was last modified 25 Mar 2007.
Copyright © 2003-2007 by Daniel R. Tobias. All rights reserved.