3 Outlook Express 6 Q's / general encoding

[fernando]

hello everyone,

I've now got 3 questions about OE6 which I can't find the answers to !

1) Is there an upgrade or extension available to provide spam/junk intelligence ?

2) is it just me, or do you find that the message rules are inconsistent ? ie, when automatically running across new downloading messages, my rules fail to consistently filter mails exactly as per the order of my rules.
That's assuming that the rules activate from the 'top' one downwards.
If so, is there a known fix ?

3) Mail encoding - this is also an issue I found in Mozilla Thunderbird, which is mainly why I've gone back to OE. I'm sure, therefore, that my issues here are a mixture of my lack of understanding plus inconsistencies across webmail programs on reading/decoding my received mails (more than email clients) : -

Basically, when sending an html mail with a picture or plain colour background, how can I set things up so the outgoing mail is actually as compatible as possible with the outside world? I'm finding so far that most webmail clients either show my email as black 'plain' text on white or just the correct html text on white.

I'm assuming the above is related to my OE 'language' encoding and/or my OE MIME settings. For eg, OE offers the following MIME user settings for html or plain text, none of which I understand the impact of :

no encoding.
quoted printable encoding.
base 64 encoding.
Allow 8 bit characters in headers. (I have never understood what 7 bit / 8 bit means, whether relating to headers or the actual displayed mail)

That's it - thanks for any tutorial you may be able to give me !

[Neil Jones]

1) Is there an upgrade or extension available to provide spam/junk intelligence ?

No, OE has the ability to block "suspect" attachments which is, um, all of them. Alternatively set up filter rules with your email provider.

2) is it just me, or do you find that the message rules are inconsistent ? ie, when automatically running across new downloading messages, my rules fail to consistently filter mails exactly as per the order of my rules.
That's assuming that the rules activate from the 'top' one downwards.
If so, is there a known fix ?

What rules do you have set up? They run from the top one downwards in order so if you set a rule up to, say, shift all messages with attachments to a separate folder and then specify to move a message from a friend who's sent an attachment to another folder, it won't catch it because it's already moved it to the first folder so the rule won't see it.

Question of logical order, really. In this scenario you would need to move your friend's rule to above the all attachments rule so it catches it first and moves it before the all attachment rule catches it.

Basically, when sending an html mail with a picture or plain colour background, how can I set things up so the outgoing mail is actually as compatible as possible with the outside world? I'm finding so far that most webmail clients either show my email as black 'plain' text on white or just the correct html text on white.

First things first: Please don't send email in HTML. It might look pretty but it also takes up much more room and is to my mind, pointless. If it's compatibility you want, send all email as plain text only.

Having said that, most webmail clients including Hotmail and Yahoo will quite often override any formatting you may specify with their own formatting and there's no way around that.

I'm assuming the above is related to my OE 'language' encoding and/or my OE MIME settings. For eg, OE offers the following MIME user settings for html or plain text, none of which I understand the impact of :

no encoding.
quoted printable encoding.
base 64 encoding.
Allow 8 bit characters in headers. (I have never understood what 7 bit / 8 bit means, whether relating to headers or the actual displayed mail)

8 bit characters is for non english languages or when you need to use non standard characters; very unlikely to need it.

As for the encoding options, it's all to do with attachments and the like.

MIME/none encodes only attachments. Has no effect otherwise.

MIME/Quoted Printable encodes the entire message in such a way that no line breaks are used except to indicate the start of a new paragraph. The result is a message that wraps text according to the viewer's window, rather than breaking the text into discrete lines. MIME/Quoted Printable is a special case. It formats your text as paragraphs, rather than as lines of a specific length (under 80 characters usually).
(from a Usenet poster)

MIME/Base64 should never be used. Base64 is in OE to encode attachments to HTML messages. (source: usenet). You also need a third party program to decode it as well.

To most intents and purposes, there's no difference between MIME/none and MIME/Quoted Printable, save for posting to newsgroups/usenet and the like where the Quoted Printable option allows others to quote it properly.

Outlook Express is painted as the be all and end all of News Readers; it isn't. For a start it still doesn't quote other posts properly on its own, correctable with third party software but since we're now on version 6.1 of OE, for it still not to be able to quote properly is a bit unforgivable really IMO.

[Chris]

Basically, when sending an html mail with a picture or plain colour background, how can I set things up so the outgoing mail is actually as compatible as possible with the outside world? I'm finding so far that most webmail clients either show my email as black 'plain' text on white or just the correct html text on white.

First things first: Please don't send email in HTML. It might look pretty but it also takes up much more room and is to my mind, pointless. If it's compatibility you want, send all email as plain text only.

Personally I hate email sent as plain text. It always seems to be wrapped at the edges badly, which makes it a pain in the arse to print it should I require a hard copy. It uses a hell of a lot more paper for longer emails too and there is lots of wasted space on the r/hand side. Also it's not very nice to read on screen as the text is wrapped and cannot stretch across the width of the screen if you expand the window.

I'd rather have email sent as HTML for the very reason that it displays nicely on screen without any of that bloody wrapping and can be printed easily without tons of wasted paper.

[fernando]

thanks Neil (again!) and Chris for your helpful replies;

sounds like I'm not doing anything wrong as such, then;
just hoping for too much !
I'll stop expecting any background i send on html mails to be automatically visible when people receive it ! I like to use html still, if only to send my text in a dark blue verdana font.

As for my 'rules' problems, i do indeed have them set in logical 'processing' order, but it's a fair question for you to ask.
here's an example of how my rules don't consistently work :
(but these inconsistencies are themselves 'consistent' !)
I have a rule set to send any message with bounce or BOUNCE in the subject line to a specific folder, but this gets ignored and those mails are caught by a lower rule instead.
My other inconsistencies also appear to be in rules which are subject line-related. Maybe OE needs the subject line to ONLY include the specific word(s)? This issue was one other reason why I tried out Mozilla Thunderbird, where I haven't found this problem.

Finally, (not hugely important), can I set up my OE to use a 'silver' or 'grey' template for its general background, rather than the white, which gives me a bit of a 'dazzled' effect after a few minutes !! ?

Many thanks again !

[Neil Jones]

I have a rule set to send any message with bounce or BOUNCE in the subject line to a specific folder, but this gets ignored and those mails are caught by a lower rule instead.
My other inconsistencies also appear to be in rules which are subject line-related. Maybe OE needs the subject line to ONLY include the specific word(s)? This issue was one other reason why I tried out Mozilla Thunderbird, where I haven't found this problem.

Sounds like you have it set to check for presence of "bounce" and "BOUNCE" in the same subject line. You'll have to alter it to check for "bounce" OR "BOUNCE" and not both.

Tools --> Message Rules -->Mail. Select the rule in question.

Where it says something like this in the description box:

Apply this rule after the message arrives
Where the Subject line contains '*** SPAM ***' or 'failure'
Move it to the Deleted Items folder

Click on the underlined "contains..." and change the rule. You want 1) "Message contains the words below" and 2) "Messages matches any of the words below". OK back out.

Finally, (not hugely important), can I set up my OE to use a 'silver' or 'grey' template for its general background, rather than the white, which gives me a bit of a 'dazzled' effect after a few minutes !! ?

Not that I know of, this uses the system wide colour you set up in the Display Properties for windows.

Right-click desktop --> Properties --> Appearances --> Advanced.

Select "Window" from the dropdown list. Color 1 is white. Be advised that if you change this all your other windows will change as well. Change it if you wish and OK back out.

[fernando]

thanks again, Neil.

I know what you're saying there about the rules, but some of my other 'failing' subject line-specific rules only contain one word. I can only assume that OE is somehow 'pickier' than Thunderbird in this respect, but I have no idea why.

For eg, one of my failing rules is set to look for

• (exactly like that with no spaces) in the subject line, but the rules just don't pick it up!
  This made me wonder about the use of [] but one of the later rules which does pick up those
  • mails is also looking for one [word] and it works !!
    ( It's just coincidence here that the same mail has both
    • and [word] in the subject)
      
      Oh well. It's a bit like OE is ' downloading too fast and not looking carefully enough' at the emails as they pass through the rules! But consistently !
      I may go back to Thunderbird anyway, thanks now to my new html and mime knowledge from you ...
      
      thanks again !

[Pete]

Personally I hate email sent as plain text. It always seems to be wrapped at the edges badly, which makes it a pain in the arse to print it should I require a hard copy. It uses a hell of a lot more paper for longer emails too and there is lots of wasted space on the r/hand side. Also it's not very nice to read on screen as the text is wrapped and cannot stretch across the width of the screen if you expand the window.

I'd rather have email sent as HTML for the very reason that it displays nicely on screen without any of that bloody wrapping and can be printed easily without tons of wasted paper.

Outlook 2003 has a useful thing that removes the extra line breaks from plain text messages.

Personally I use the "Notebook" stationary for my emails. I also set the font options to always use Trebuchet MS.

Can't say i've ever liked Outlook Express. Don't particularly like Thunderbird either although I normally try it out on a new release because it does change a lot.