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Electronic mail usingMicrosoft Windows

Introduction to Simeon

February 1998Price £2

2 Introduction to Simeon

© 1998 Brunel University Computing Service February 1998

Introduction to Simeon 3

ContentsForeword......................................................................6Introduction.................................................................7

What is electronic mail?................................................7The anatomy of electronic mail....................................8

Getting started...........................................................10Introduction.................................................................10Access to the network.................................................10Accessing Microsoft Windows....................................10

Accessing Simeon........................................................11Logging out..................................................................13

Sending a message....................................................14Sending — to whom?...................................................14Sending the message..................................................14Header information.....................................................15Copy to self..................................................................17Suspending composition.............................................17Attaching files..............................................................17Abandoning a message...............................................17Exiting Simeon............................................................18

The two basic windows..............................................19The Message organizer window.................................19

February 1998 © 1998 Brunel University Computing Service

© 1998 Brunel University Computing Service

For permission to republish material from this document,University Computing Services, etc. are invited to contact

Information and Training OfficerComputing ServiceBrunel UniversityUXBRIDGEUB8 3PHUnited Kingdom

Tel: +44–1895–274000Fax: +44–1895–252691

E–mail: cc–[email protected]

4 Introduction to SimeonThe inbox folder..........................................................20

Reading mail..............................................................22The message header...................................................22Reading the mail on-screen........................................25Printing a message......................................................26

Dealing with mail.......................................................28Replying to mail..........................................................28Forwarding a message................................................30Saving the contents of a message..............................30Deleting a message.....................................................31Undeleting a message.................................................31Cleaning out the Deleted message group..................31

Managing incoming e–mail........................................33Drowning in a sea of e–mail........................................33Your own e–mail sorting office...................................33Existing message groups............................................34Preparing for practice.................................................35Setting up a Simeon message group..........................36

Managing incoming e–mailHow many message groups?......................................39Editing group definition..............................................40Your practice messages..............................................41

Filing your e–mail......................................................42Introduction to folders................................................42Creating a folder.........................................................42Filing your messages..................................................44Organising a folder.....................................................45Housekeeping..............................................................46Splitting a folder.........................................................47Double-entry filing......................................................47

In-tray, out-tray and pending....................................48Introduction.................................................................48Keeping the inbox present and correct......................48The sentmail folder.....................................................49Draft messages............................................................50Temporary suspension................................................51Second delivery...........................................................52

Attachments...............................................................53Introduction.................................................................53Sending an attachment...............................................54Receiving an attachment............................................55Filing mail with attachments......................................56

Customising Simeon..................................................57Introduction.................................................................57User options and preferences.....................................58


Introduction to Simeon 5Message options..........................................................60Other options...............................................................63

Keeping an address-book..........................................64Introduction.................................................................64Opening your address-book........................................64Adding a name to your address-book.........................65Using a list...................................................................67Using the address-book in composition.....................68Editing an address-book entry....................................68Using an alias..............................................................68Capturing a sender’s address.....................................69Deleting an address-book entry..................................69Searching the address-book.......................................70Multiple books.............................................................70

Using Simeon offline..................................................71



Foreword

Computing documentation must have certain conventions built into it to help the reader distinguish different usages. Nowadays, it is considered the best policy to maintain as smooth a flow as possible, so we have kept to a minimum the changes of typeface and the discontinuities of text which interrupt the visual and mental processing of the information. The following points lay out the tenets of our conventions.

• Commands which you type are given in boldface.• Command names, when mentioned in body text, are given

in italics in cases where ambiguity might otherwise arise.• Commands are offset and indented in cases where

ambiguity might otherwise arise.• Key names (such as RETURN) are given in small caps.• Composite keys to be struck simultaneously (such as

CTRL-HOME) are hyphenated.• A different typeface will be used as a last resort to avoid

ambiguity.• Commands are assumed to be terminated by pressing

RETURN, unless otherwise stated.

The context should make the various usages clear.

Most of the information given in these notes (and sometimes more) will also be given on the screen. Wherever possible, try to get used to reading the screen, and making sense of what it says. This will help you make the most of the tutorial, and will also help you in future computing endeavours.



Introduction

What is electronic mail?Electronic mail, often shortened to e-mail, is the medium through which computer users may send messages to each other. The users may be linked to the same computer, or may be on the other side of the world. The principal mail program for Windows users at Brunel is Simeon; other Computing Service documentation on elm (a Unix mail program) is available for purchase.

Often, electronic mail systems are described by analogy to the ordinary postal system — there are senders, recipients, addresses, etc. — and this is a useful tool in many respects. However, there are significant differences, so the analogy is by no means complete, and it is a mistake to bend your appreciation of e-mail to postal equivalents.

Electronic mail from Brunel will arrive at its destination much faster than its postal equivalent, and is free to users at academic sites. If you use the BIDS databases to prepare a literature search, for example, the preferred method of receiving the database output is by e-mail. It is certainly less error-prone than copying out the details longhand from the screen, and is less tedious (and less wasteful of a scarce resource) than printing one screen at a time to a local printer.

At Brunel, electronic mail has been designated the preferred means of communication for many tasks within the University: though the ‘paperless office’ may still be some distance away, we can make significant reductions in stationery use by taking electronic mail to our hearts — and it tends to be faster than the internal post.



The anatomy of electronic mailIn order that a message may be delivered properly, there are several parts which must be present and in order, just as with a postal letter. The following paragraphs will go through the various components.

The address

This is (apart from the message itself) the most crucial component of electronic mail: it identifies the sender or the recipient of the message. A typical address for a member of staff at Brunel would be

[email protected]

You will notice that a Brunel staff mailname is the first personal name and the surname, separated by a full stop and without spaces.

If the great man had been a student here, his e–mail address would have been the same as his login_ID, as in

[email protected]

Students at Brunel are identified by department/course, year of entry and initials. Other sites have different conventions: you might find any of the following (or other combinations):

I.Brunel ikbrunel ikb3I.K.Brunel brunel_ik meuah

In the above examples, ikb3 suggests the third user with these three initials; meuah would be the eighth undergraduate user in Mechanical Engineering.

The site identifier is separated hierarchically by full stops, so brunel.ac.uk refers to Brunel University, within the academic community, within the United Kingdom. As an example of a different address, the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 is identified as

[email protected]

where the site is the BBC, within the commercial sector, within the United Kingdom. Sometimes, the site identifier may contain further hierarchical information: for example, bh.bbc.co.uk identifies a machine serving BBC staff based at Broadcasting House in London.


Introduction to Simeon 9The address should always be quoted in its full form, although messages within Brunel may be sent without the site name. You may see abbreviated forms of address (such as me98ikb@brunel), but these are not recommended. If you find an address in the old-style order with the uk first (as in [email protected]), you should automatically reverse it into standard practice to lead from the small (Warwick) to the large (UK); the old order is no longer acceptable.

Header information

The header information, which is displayed to your addressee before the text of your message, includes the recipient’s address, your own details, the date and time of sending the message, and the subject matter of your message, along with other information. Most of this information is generated automatically, but you should enter those details which are under your own control in the appropriate places.

Signature

You can construct a signature file1 which will be appended automatically to your outgoing mail. Remember, though, that the header information will have already identified you, so you may not need this feature. Also, make sure your signature file is always up to date. Even now, there are still plenty UK-based signatures with old-style telephone numbers!

Message text

Without this, of course, there would be no need to send the message. You will compose this message as you would any other text file. With Simeon, you will use its own native editor: in other cases you may use a system editor.

1 Choose Tools, then Options, then Edit from the Simeon menu and edit the appropriate box within the User option



Getting started

IntroductionSince for many of you, this will be the first time you have used the Computing Service’s network, we shall start by going through the procedure of logging into the system. In later chapters, we shall take you through the various tasks which you will use in your day-to-day use of Simeon. This tutorial is not an exhaustive survey of what Simeon can do: if you need further help, please call your local User Support office. Of course, the User Support team may be contacted by electronic mail: when you have completed this tutorial, you will be able to mail your enquiries to them at user–[email protected] — but time enough for that a bit later.

Access to the networkWhen a PC on the Computing Service network is switched on, it will display the login prompt, identifying the machine name, for example:

cc–pc–11 login:

If this message is not given, turn the PC off and, after about fifteen seconds, turn it on again. Type in your login_ID and press RETURN, then your password (it will not appear on the screen) and press RETURN again. A virus checker is set up, and the PC displays the Message of the Day (which you should read for news about the Computing Service). You are now logged into the PC network.

Accessing Microsoft WindowsNormally, on login, you will be prompted to choose between Windows and DOS as part of the startup: naturally, to use Simeon, you should choose the Windows option.© 1998 Brunel University Computing Service February 1998

Introduction to Simeon 11If you have reached the standard DOS prompt, you should type the command

win31

to start up Microsoft Windows.

Accessing Simeon

Accessing the program

To access Simeon, you should look in the Network Programs group. Double-click on the group icon to reveal the group, and then double-click on the Simeon icon to start the program.

Once it has initialised itself, the program will, by default, prompt you to give your login_ID and password again, using the Simeon login dialogue box shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Simeon login dialogue box

This is a necessary step to ensure the security of your own messages — without it, we cannot guarantee that you would be the only person able to read messages sent to you. Type your login_ID, press the TAB key2, and then type your password. Complete your Simeon login by pressing ENTER or selecting the OK button in the login dialogue box.

2 If you press the ENTER key, an error box will appear. Select OK within the box to remove it, then click within the Password cell in the login box, type your password, and select OK to continue.


12 Introduction to SimeonBasic screen layout

The basic layout of the Simeon screen as described in this document is given in Figure 2: your initial screen should look not too dissimilar from this representation (although, of course, the messages will differ). You should compare the layout of Figure 2 with the screen which appears before you when you start Simeon and note the different aspects of the screen. We shall refer back to this figure at other points within this document. The most frequent divergences from the layout shown in Figure 2 are described below: if, despite following the instructions below, you still cannot reach the desired layout, please go to User Support.

No Post Office: Inbox window

Double-click on the words Post Office in the Message Organizer window. You may need to resize the two windows: the Tile option within the Window menu can be a useful friend,

No Message Group headings in the Post Office: Inbox window

These headings are the ones marked with Main, Deleted and your name (refer to Figure 2 for examples).

Click on the title bar of the Post Office: Inbox window to make sure it is active, and then choose View message groups from the Folder menu.

Message Group headings appear indented under main headings in the Message Organizer window

Click on the little boxed minus-sign to the left of the main heading. You may now double-click on the words Post Office in the Message Organizer window to open a Post Office: Inbox window.

Message headings appear indented under main headings in the Message Organizer window

Click on the little boxed minus-sign to the left of the main heading. You may now double-click on the words Post Office in the Message Organizer window to open a Post Office: Inbox window. If there are no message group headers in this window, go to the Folder menu and choose View message groups.



Figure 2: Initial Simeon screen

We shall return to Simeon layouts later in this document.

Logging outRemember that, after the tutorial, you must remember to logout from the PC. The Brunel PC network’s menu system gives you the option to do this. To logout from the standard DOS prompt, simply type logout. When you logout, the PC will return to a login prompt, ready for the next user.

It is vitally important that you do logout whenever you leave a PC, since your files are at risk. Anyone can impersonate you at the PC, and can destroy or amend files, send e-mail messages in your name … or anything else which you can do with your own presence on the network. In particular, you must logout if you are leaving a workarea to consult User Support.



Sending a message

Sending — to whom?Throughout this sequence of examples, you will be sending your messages to a user who will be very interested to read it — yourself! Please, when practising the use of an electronic mail system, do not send to another user without first getting that user’s express permission.

Sending the messageThe actual sending of a message is very simple, though of course Simeon allows you to incorporate many extra features. For your first message, you should follow these simple instructions. Figure 3 illustrates the status of your message just before you are ready to send it.

· Click the Compose button (marked Comp) on the button bar beneath the menu line. A Compose window will be opened; you will type your message within this window.

· Within the Compose window, click inside the blank panel to the right of the To: prompt. You will see the cursor change to an I-bar. Now type your own electronic mail address (in full) in the panel.

· When you have completed your message (the screen should look something like Figure 3 on page 15), select Send from the main button-bar within the Simeon window. Dialogue boxes will report the progress of your message as it is sent.

Congratulations! You have now sent an electronic mail message.


Introduction to Simeon 15This will take a little time to reach its destination (usually only a matter of seconds within Brunel, but obviously a little longer if it is being sent abroad). Your first stage in learning to use Simeon is complete.

Figure 3: Composing a message

Header informationBefore you close Simeon, however, you should look once again at the composition window. Click once again on the Compose button and look at the header panels which come up. There are five such panels, and Table 1 on page 16 describes each of them in some detail.

The header for a message stores the information which allows it to be delivered to the recipient, and to manage replies, etc. on behalf of the sender. Some of the header information is encoded and/or specified by the sending system, but the five panels allow for the user to submit the information which is naturally user-defined.


16 Introduction to SimeonIf you have difficulties in sending, receiving or otherwise dealing with electronic mail, the header information can be of use to User Support in diagnosing the problem, so please try to conserve as much as possible of this information before going off to see them.

To: This panel contains the address of the recipient, or a list of such addresses. List elements should be separated by commas, as in the following [email protected],[email protected],[email protected]

Subject:

This panel contains the subject heading. You should keep the length of this heading down to a maximum of about 30 characters, because some mail-readers will not print more than that on a recipient’s screen.You should not start or end a subject with the word Re or the word fwd, with or without punctuation attached. This is because e–mail software will tend to attach these words to a reply or a forwarded message respectively, and it is best to avoid causing confusion to yourself, your correspondents, or the software being operated by you or them.

Cc: Exact (‘carbon’) copies of the message go to the members of this list. The original recipient(s) and those to whom copies are sent will see the full lists of recipients in the header.Do not include your own name in this panel.

Bcc: Blind copies are sent to the people on this list. The members of this list are invisible to the other recipients, and vice versa.Do not include your own name in this panel.

Reply to:

Your own mailname will have been entered in this panel, whose content governs the management of replies to your message.

Table 1: Header panels



Copy to selfOur advice to those contemplating copying an e–mail message to themselves echoes that of Mr Punch to those contemplating marriage — “Don’t”.

With Simeon, as with virtually any e–mail product on the market today, copying to self is unnecessary and counter-productive (to say nothing of the aesthetics of the extra header baggage). It is unnecessary, because there is the option to save messages in the sender’s sentmail folder (see the chapter entitled In-tray, out-trayand pending on page 48 for details).

Suspending compositionFrom time to time, you will need to break off from composing a message and come back to the message later — indeed, on occasions you may be forced to do so. This does not cause any particular difficulties, but it requires techniques covered in the chapter entitled In-tray, out-tray and pending on page 48. For now, it is enough to be aware that you do not need to compose, complete, and send a message without any time-delays in the process.

Another use for this function of Simeon is the holding of a draft version of a message while its contents are being ratified, for example, by a Head of Department.

Attaching filesYou may attach a file to an e–mail message, allowing the easy transfer of such items as wordprocessor documents, spreadsheets and graphics to your correspondents. See the chapter on Attachments on page 53 for details.

Abandoning a messageIf you decide to abandon the composition of a message, simply close the composition window in the usual Windows manner. When you are asked about saving to the Drafts folder, you should answer No. The message will be erased without trace.



Exiting SimeonTo finish a Simeon session, you should choose the Exit option from the File menu. If you have any ‘unfinished business’ from your session, Simeon will prompt you regarding your desired actions prior to closing the session.



The two basic windows

The Message organizer windowAccess Simeon again by double-clicking on its icon. A Message Organizer window should be present: in its simplest form, it should look like the example in Figure 4 (the Simeon window has been cropped in the figure). Note that the Post Office has, on its left, a little box with a plus-sign in it. This plus-sign indicates that the entry may be expanded to display your list of folders.

If your Message Organizer window has an unexpanded Post Office entry, you should click once on the plus-sign; Figure 5 illustrates an expanded entry. Note that, following the expansion, the plus-sign against the Post Office is changed to a


Figure 4:Message Organizer window

Figure 5: Post Office folders in Message Organizer

window

20 Introduction to Simeonminus-sign. To contract the entry, click once on the minus-sign. If you do not have a Post Office: inbox window, open one by double-clicking on the word inbox in the Message Organizer window.

Your Post Office entry may already be expanded, in which case it will already look like Figure 5: the folders displayed there include inbox — the location of the incoming mail stored for your perusal — and several others which are user-defined. There are other folders farther down the list which are created for you by the system: folders and their uses are discussed in Filing your e–mail on page 42. For the moment, we shall concentrate on the inbox folder.

The inbox folderIncoming mail goes first to your inbox folder: most users will open the mail from within this folder. Once the mail has been read, it can be deleted or filed into another folder.

Figure 6: The inbox folder


Introduction to Simeon 21Figure 6 shows the Post Office: inbox with the pre-assigned message groups: the plus-signs to the left of the group headers show that the groups are unexpanded.

You can view the list of messages within any group by clicking on its plus-sign. We shall deal with the creation of user-defined message groups later in this document, but even with only the system-defined groups, you will appreciate the flexibility offered by the ability to expand and contract individual groups.



Reading mail

The message headerFigure 7 shows the folder once each of the message groups has been expanded. Of course, the particular messages portrayed in the illustration will not be in your folder, but the message which you sent to yourself ought to be there, along with any other messages which have been mailed to you. Note also that the Message Organizer window is focused on some of the (user-created) folders which have been set up to receive messages once they have been read.

You will see that messages are displayed within the Post Office: inbox window, one per line, as in Figure 7. Note the following points about the message identification line.

The icon

For a simple message, the icon is an envelope. Apart from one message about half-way down the list, all messages in the inbox in Figure 7 are simple messages; the odd one out in this case has a parcel as its icon — this denotes a message which has an attachment (usually a file in another format, such as Microsoft Word, or QuattroPro, which you may import and view using its native software).

Attachments are discussed in the section of this document starting on page 42.

If the message has already been read, the icon (whether a parcel or an envelope) is depicted as having been opened. An unread message is denoted by a closed envelope (or parcel); a further refinement shows a “sparkle of newness” if the message is being shown to you for the first time.


Introduction to Simeon 23Note that the deleted message has a prominent red cross through the icon.

The sender

The name of the sender appears in the Name column. The form of the name depends on how the name data have been collected by the sender’s computer system at the time of sending. In Figure 7, you will note names running from the formal [email protected] (which appears, albeit truncated by the window size, in the Deleted message group) to the less formal (for example, Helle Gaare Paulsen) to the informal, and frankly unhelpful Peter.

It is worth remembering two things about these names — you will need the formal e–mail address of the sender if you intend to reply, and in all probability, you will not need to make any alterations to the reply address as generated when you use the Reply button. This is because the formal address will be carried within the message’s header information, even if it does not appear on the message header as displayed by Simeon.



Figure 7: Expanded folders within the inbox folder

The subject

This is the subject of the message, as given by the sender. Many e–mail programs attach indicators (such as Re and Fwd) that the message is a reply or a forwarded message. If the sender has not given a subject, this part of the entry will be left blank. You ought to give a subject to each message that you send. When deciding on a subject title, please be concise: some software will automatically truncate a subject title after a set number of characters.



Figure 8: Reading a message

Date, time and size

The date and time of sending appears to the right of the subject title, followed by the size of the message (including any attachments) in bytes. In Figure 7, these data are hidden from view, but could be seen by moving the horizontal navigation bar in the Post Office: inbox window to the right. It is worth keeping an eye on the size of your messages: it all counts towards your quota!

Reading the mail on-screenTo read the content of a message, simply double-click on it: a viewer window is opened for you to read the message. If the message is too long to fit within the window, you will be offered an elevator bar on the right hand side of the Viewer window with which to move through the message; if it is too wide to fit, there will be a horizontal navigation bar at the foot of the Viewer window. Figure 8 shows both of these bars.


26 Introduction to SimeonNote the simple separation of the header information from the body text of the message. If there had been an attachment to the message displayed, there would have been a similar separation between body text and attachment information.

You cannot change any of the text in the Viewer window, but you can highlight spans of text for cut-and-paste. for example, you could lift the sender’s e–mail address to paste into your address book — and that’s another topic for later in this document.

Printing a message

Why bother?

That should be your first question whenever you have the urge to print out your e–mail message. Most e–mail can be read and deleted immediately; those messages which need to be kept can (and should) be filed in another folder after reading (the chapter on Filing your e–mail which begins on page 42 gives details of how to do this).

The idea of taking a printed ‘security copy’ is astonishing — ink fades on paper which becomes brittle, yet your network files are safe, secure, and backed up every night. If information has to be transferred from the message to another document, it may be done electronically. You can save the message, and then go in and edit away all the extraneous clutter which is only needed while the message is in transit.

These activities are described in the section of this document entitled Saving the contents of a message; you will find the text on page 30.

If you must print, here’s how

You may send a message to be printed when it is active —either when it is in the Viewer window, or when its header line is highlighted within the Post Office: inbox window. You may already have spotted the Print button on the toolbar, or seen the Print option on the File menu; these are indeed your two ways into the printing process.

First, though, you must check that your printing is set up correctly. Choose Print setup from the File menu. Check that your output will go to the printer which you intend to use, that the orientation is right for you (almost invariably, you will want to have your output in


Introduction to Simeon 27Portrait mode). Most importantly, make sure that your page size is correct. It will be A4 for any of the Computing Service’s laser printers; if you choose a different page size, your job may not print properly. Remember — you will be charged for output, whether or not it is in the format you expected.

You should not need to bother with the Options and Network buttons; if you do not understand what is happening to your output, you should contact User Support.

Once your setup is confirmed, you may use the Print button on the toolbar to print your message. The Print option on the File menu does exactly the same thing: experienced Windows users who expect to be able to select pages to print will be disappointed. To print part of a message, you will need to save the text, import it into another package (perhaps a wordprocessor), edit the text, and print from within that package.



Dealing with mail

Replying to mailYou may reply to the active message by using the Reply button on the toolbar. A message is active if it is open in its Viewer window, or if its header is highlighted within its message group.

When you click on the Reply button, a reply window is displayed. The window is identical to the composition window illustrated in Figure 3 on page 15, but the header information is partly completed for you. The sender of the original message is automatically entered as the recipient of the reply, and the subject title is copied, usually with a ‘Re’ prefix. But before you gain access to this window, Simeon will pose two questions.

Include original message text?

If you answer No to this question, the body text section of the composition window will be left blank. If you answer Yes, the body text of the original message is loaded into your reply’s body text area, usually with an indentation.

Reply to all recipients?

If you answer No to this question, the only recipient of the reply will be the sender of the original message. If you answer Yes, everybody who received the original (including yourself) will be included in the reply, by their e–mail addresses’ being added to the Cc: panel.

Normally, therefore, you will answer No to this question. Be very careful when replying to a message which has been sent to a mailing-list: you must decide whether the reply goes to the whole list or only to the sender. Furthermore, the behaviour of


Introduction to Simeon 29Simeon in filling the To: and Cc: panels may depend on the way that the mailing-list distribution is handled at its own ‘sorting and distribution office’.

Figure 9 shows a reply window after answering Yes and No respectively to the above two questions. The reply was initiated while reading the message in the Viewer window: note that the Simeon window is now becoming quite cluttered. It is often useful, at this point, to close the Viewer window for the original message — it goes a little way towards keeping a tidy Simeon window.

Figure 9: Replying to a message

You will see that, when the original message is pasted into the body text of the reply, it is preceded by a reference to the original message (who sent it and when), and that the sender’s text is marked with a greater-than sign (>) and a space. At the foot of the reply window in Figure 9, you will see a line of the previous message in the conversation denoted by two greater-than signs.



Forwarding a messageIn some instances, you will prefer to forward a message to another user, using the Forward button on the toolbar (again, the message must be active). The subject title is copied into the Subject: panel, usually with an indication (Fwd) that the message is one which is being forwarded. The body text is annotated appropriately. You should try forwarding a message (to yourself) to see how the forwarding window is laid out.

It is worth pointing out a possible repercussion of forwarding a message which has one or more attachments; the attachment(s) will usually be copied to your sentmail folder. Attachments can be rather large in size, so you will now have two copies — one in your inbox, and one in your sentmail folder. It is probably worthwhile getting rid of the sentmail copy; you may find the sections on The sentmail folder and Simeon options useful.

The same is true, of course, of any forwarded message (and the same advice holds good), but it is a more immediately pressing problem where attachments are concerned.

Saving the contents of a messageIf you need to save the contents of a message (to work with the data in some other application), you will need to decide exactly what you need. Most of the time, you will only be interested in the text of the message; to save the text, you should first ensure that the message is active (it will usually be in an open Viewer window). From the Message menu, choose Save and then Text. You will be prompted for a file title (the default will be message.txt); you may decide, in the first instance, to save the text into a holding directory, since it is quite likely that the saved text will not be useful on its own for very long.

In a relatively few cases, you will need to save the header information as well as the text; the action is identical, except that you should choose Message, then Save, then Message. The default title for the saved message (with header information) is once again message.txt — scope for confusion here — but the size of the file will be slightly bigger. Usually, though, the difference is no more than a kilobyte.


Introduction to Simeon 31This, though, is not the way to keep an e-mail message for future reference: to do this, you should follow the procedures discussed in the chapter entitled Filing your e–mail on page 42.

Deleting a messageOnce you have read a message and, if necessary, replied or forwarded it, the next step is usually to delete it. There will be a proportion of messages which need to be filed (electronically, of course) for future reference, and this will be discussed in Filing youre–mail on page 42, but the vast majority of electronic mail is ephemeral: if the messages were bottles of shampoo, the near-monopolistic brand name could (and should) be Browse & Go.

To delete a message, simply use the Delete button on the toolbar when the message is active. The message header will disappear from its message group, and will be placed in the Deleted message group at the bottom of the list. If you expand the Deleted message group, you will see that the icon has a prominent red cross emblazoned on it. As long as the message is still in the Deleted message group, though, it is not yet extinct. The next section will show you how to snatch a message back from the jaws of death.

Undeleting a messageIf, when browsing through the messages in your Deleted message group, you decide that you really ought not to get rid of a message just yet, you may undelete it. To do this, click once on the header of message in question within the Deleted message group to highlight the message3 and then click on the Undelete button on the toolbar. The message will be restored to the appropriate message group, just as if it had never been deleted.

Cleaning out the Deleted message groupAfter you have performed a cull of some of your messages (and after you have checked that you do want to delete them), you should clean out these messages from your Deleted message group. This is a

3 a double-click will open a Viewer window with the message — this can be a useful check that it is the right message!


32 Introduction to Simeonsimple action — just use the Clean button on the toolbar, and that’s it. Once the messages have been cleaned out, they are gone for good, irretrievably. However, it is only when they have been cleaned out that they cease to count towards your quota.



Managing incoming e–mail

Drowning in a sea of e–mailVery few people complain that they receive too few e–mail messages: many more feel overwhelmed, whether it’s by six messages or six hundred. Once you start receiving e–mail from all and sundry, you will find that your inbox will grow quite rapidly. Even with a dozen or so messages, it can be quite easy to miss a vital message, just because it’s tucked in with others.

Of course, this problem is not new, and is not restricted to electronic mail. As you walk up the garden path after that dream holiday, you know that there will be a mountain of post behind the door — bills, bank statements, book-club fliers and all sorts of other things (some of which you may actually want). Out of this chaos, you make some order by putting the bills in one pile, the junk mail in another (possibly directly in the waste-paper bin), and so on. You can then usually decide which pile needs to be tackled first, and in these smaller doses, you can often guess the best order in which to open the letters.

The main thrust of this chapter is to show you how to manage your incoming e–mail effectively using message groups as subdivisions of your inbox.

Your own e–mail sorting officeSimeon allows you to sort your incoming e–mail automatically. You could have one message group for mail from your tutor (or Head of Department), another to trap the mail which comes to you as a member of a particular mailing-list, another for a set topic: there is plenty scope for being quite precise about it. Since it takes about ten seconds to set up a message group, it’s easy to keep subdividing your incoming mail whenever you spot a suitable grouping.


34 Introduction to SimeonWith the message groups which are set up for you by default, most of your mail will be either in the group with your name on it, or in the Main group beneath it. Although it would be nice to think that you could allocate every incoming message to a group, there will always be some messages which will end up in Main because they’ve dropped through the various sieves for your message groups. After a while, though, if you are keeping an eye on your correspondents, virtually all of the messages which end up in Main are junk mail (and are discarded without reading), and it’s easy to spot the real messages amongst the banal, the irrelevant and the offensive.

Existing message groupsWhen you use Simeon for the first time, there will already be six message groups in your inbox. Two of them (Main and Deleted) are absolute fixed points, and you cannot do anything to change them. You may edit the criteria for the others, or even delete one or more of the groups.

Read acknowledgements

Under normal circumstances, you should not need to have any messages coming into this group. This is a group which is user-editable, but which is supplied as standard with Simeon. The criterion for this group is that the subject title should be Read Acknowledgement.

This is the title generated automatically if you ask to be informed when the person to whom you have sent a message actually gets round to reading it (or, at least, opening it). There is no need to do this for all but a few messages; the subject will be covered in Customising Simeon on page 57.

Phone messages

This is another group which comes as standard with Simeon; it is intended to trap all the transcribed telephone messages placed by a dutiful secretary in the inbox of a busy executive. The criterion for this group is very simple: if the subject title contains the word Phone, then this message group will accept the message.


Introduction to Simeon 35There will, of course, be users for whom this is not an ideal arrangement, so we expect that some people will either edit the criterion or delete the group entirely.

User Support

This group has been set up at Brunel to help you identify mail from the User Support team: the criterion is that user–support should be somewhere in the header information.

Your name

You will find a group whose name is your own; this has been set up to receive mail which is addressed to you as an individual. The criterion is that your name (as stored in the main password file) should be somewhere in the To: field. So if the message is addressed to you (perhaps along with other addressees), the message will appear in this group, unless it has been trapped by a previous message. If you receive the message because it has been copied to you, or because you are a member of a mailing-list whose alias has been used in the sending of the message, you will not see the message in this group.

The vast majority of the junk e–mail which pollutes the Net will therefore drop through into your Main group, from which it can be deleted without further ado.

Preparing for practiceIf you have been following our precepts, you will only have e–mailed yourself with practice messages. You may also have messages from elsewhere in your inbox, but the step-by-step guide below will assume that you have at least two messages in your inbox. The body text of these messages does not matter, but you should have the following subject titles for your two messages:

Osterley test

Uxbridge test

If you need to remind yourself how to send these messages to yourself, you should refer back to Sending a message on page 14.


36 Introduction to SimeonAlso, remember that correct spelling matters — both here and when it comes to setting your criteria.

Finally, check that the Hidden message groups entry in the View menu has a tick; if it does not, then click once on the entry to tick it.

Once you have your two test messages in place in your inbox, you can then set about isolating one from the other.

Setting up a Simeon message group

Introduction

Each one of us has a different profile of correspondence, but virtually everyone has a set of regular correspondents and/or topics of correspondence. Each of these groupings is a candidate for the creation of a message group. Most message groups focus on the sender, and we shall look at siphoning off the mail coming from a particular person. However, we shall start by creaming off messages based on a keyword in the subject title. This is because it is easier to make sure that you have the messages with which to practise.

You should note at the outset that the frequency of messages does not matter; it can still be very useful to have a message group ready to receive messages. In the description which follows, we show you how to arrange your groups so that the empty groups are not displayed; this means that your screen will not become unnecessarily cluttered with headers for groups which are currently redundant.

To set up any new message group to hold a subset of your incoming mail, you must first make sure that the active window is the Post Office: Inbox, which lists your messages. You may need to double-click on Inbox within the Message Organizer window to achieve this. Now, from the menu, choose File, then New, then Message group: you should see a dialogue box appear as in Figure 10.



Figure 10: Message group definition dialogue box

Before you go forward to create your new group, you should be assured that it is easy to delete groups which have outlived their purpose, or whose definition is not quite what it should be; you may also edit the definition of a group if there is a minor change to be made. These features will be discussed below.

Separating the subjects

For your practice run, you will need to have, in your inbox, the two messages described in Preparing for practice on page 35, and you should have displayed the dialogue box as illustrated in Figure 10 on page 37.

In this exercise, you will create a new message group to hold the Osterley test message. You should complete the dialogue box as follows:

Group title Make sure that the words New group in the top left-hand panel are highlighted, and type the word Osterley in place of New group.

Hide if empty If there is not a cross in the box, click once in the box to put one there. This will ensure that the group header is not displayed if the group is empty.

Message field This should already be set as Subject; if it is not, then choose Subject from the drop-down list.

Criterion This should already be set as Contains; if it is not, then choose Contains from the drop-down list.

Pattern to match

Make sure that the word pattern in the panel is highlighted, and type the word Osterley in place of pattern.


38 Introduction to SimeonSort by This should already be set as Most recent arrival;

if it is not, then choose Most recent arrival from the drop-down list.

When you have completed the dialogue box, click on the OK button to create the new group. You should see the header appear in your inbox (if it doesn’t, check for that Hidden message groups tick in the View menu).

You may be surprised to find that the Osterley test message has not been consigned to its new group; if this is the case, you probably need to re-order your groups. Simply click on the header and, holding down the mouse button, drag the header to the top of the list of headers. The criteria for the groups are checked in order, and if a message satisfies a criterion, it is consigned to that group (even if it also satisfies the criterion for another group farther down the list). The most likely explanation if your Osterley group is empty is that the message was trapped by your name-titled group before it reached the Osterley group. Once you have lots of groups (and lots of mail!), the relative positioning of your groups becomes crucial.

You could now repeat the process to create another group for the Uxbridge message: just follow the same procedure.

Mail from whom?

As noted earlier, most message groups are built around the separation of mail dependent on the sender. In this case, the message group header will probably be the sender’s name. When you have identified a correspondent whose mail you wish to segregate, draw up the dialogue box as illustrated in Figure 10 on page 37 (using File, then New, then Message group from the menu).

Replace New Group with the person’s name. This need not be their formal name (either in terms of their mailname or as on their passport!); it will be your way of identifying the sender. Once the header name is in place, make sure that there is a cross in the Hide if empty box.

From the Message field drop-down list, you should select From, and you should select Contains as the criterion. In place of pattern, you should type a key part of your correspondent’s e–mail identity. Normally, a part of the e–mail address is sufficient — the surname or login_ID are favourites, though of course the former would trap mail from everyone with the same surname. If you need help with this part


Introduction to Simeon 39of the process, you should contact User Support; they will be able to advise you.

Most people will use Most recent arrival as the sort-order choice; it is the default. This places any new mail at the top of the appropriate message group.

Once you have selected OK, the group will be set up, and will appear before the Main group. Once again, you may need to re-order your groups to gain the desired segregation of messages.

Mail from where?

Other parts of the From message field may be used to catch messages for a group — you may, for example decide to catch everything from a particular site. In this case, you should have From as the message field, Contains as the criterion, and (for example) bbc.co.uk as the search pattern.

Mail to whom?

If you are a member of a mailing-list, it is often useful to see mail coming to the list in a separate group; in this instance, you should have To as the message field, Contains as the criterion, and the mailing-list name as the search pattern.

Tidying up your group list

Remember that, once you have created your new groups and placed them in the desired order, you should pull down the View menu to remove the tick from the Hidden message groups option. Remember, this option gives a temporary over-ride to your decision (in the definition box) to hide the header if the group is empty; it does not change the status of that decision.

How many message groups?How many message groups you set up will depend on the quantity and the spread of your correspondence, but you will probably end up with more groups than you thought you would. A few groups come to mind very quickly; there are the obvious ones such as close friends, colleagues and superiors, along with some mailing-lists. That will


40 Introduction to Simeontake most people to about a dozen groups. But a quick glance at the name-titled group and the Main group will often show others. If you have an e–mail conversation with someone, and if that conversation spins over more than a couple of messages, it is worth asking yourself whether a group might be useful (it certainly makes the following of the conversation easier).

If that correspondent falls out of your e–mail life, the group may remain dormant for a while, and you may finally decide to delete the group. Really, the effort involved in setting up the group is so minimal that you can afford to be fairly open-handed about creating new groups. Also, assuming that you are reasonably diligent at discarding and filing your messages once they have been read, the likelihood is that a majority of your groups will be dormant at any one time, so your inbox will not be bursting at the seams with group headers.

Editing group definitionAfter you have created a message group, you may need to return to its definition later, either to check the search criterion or to make some alteration to its definition. Whether you are simply changing the group name as it appears on the group header, or redefining the pattern being searched, this counts as ‘editing the definition’. One example which seems to turn up fairly regularly is the realisation that your search criterion has not been quite rigorous enough — suddenly, searching for Richards is not good enough, because you now have two correspondents with that surname, and you must now set up separate groups for Tom Richards and Lyn Richards.

To edit a group definition, highlight the group header by clicking once on it, and then click on the Info button on the toolbar. This will bring up the definition dialogue box with its current settings. You are now able to change any aspect of the definition you please; when you click on the OK button, the changes will take effect.

To practise editing a definition (and to explore the range of criteria a little), make the Osterley group active, and bring up the definition box (by the Info toolbar button). Change the criterion from Contains to Is, and click on the OK button. The message with Osterley test as its subject title will no longer be assigned to that group, since the criterion demands that the subject be exactly Osterley, rather than containing that word. You should be very careful in using Is as a


Introduction to Simeon 41criterion: it is very restrictive and is probably useful only when dealing with subject titles which are generated automatically.

Indeed, any use of the Subject field in a search pattern makes the assumption that all of your correspondents will play ball and use the appropriate term in their messages … and can all spell your search keyword correctly!. Setting up a message group for e–mail about mathematics is fraught with problems — should you search for Mathematics or Maths? After all, if you try to be clever and search for math, you are going to include messages with such titles as Aftermath of the office party.

You should not expect to create your ideal list of group definitions in their ‘fully-fledged’ state at the first time of asking; after all, there’s an element of getting under the skin of your correspondents. Practice and experimentation are perfectly healthy components of setting up your electronic sorting office. After all, the (Royal Mail) Post Office has been working with postcodes for over thirty years, and the system is still evolving.

Your practice messagesOnce you have created and worked with your message groups, you may be tempted to delete your practice messages. By all means do so — it will be good practice. But please practise undeleting them as well, and leave them in your inbox: the next chapter will use them for further practice.



Filing your e–mail

Introduction to foldersAnyone who has been touched by office life will know about the filing of correspondence, and will approach it with emotions ranging from the ecstasy of control to the abhorrence of regimentation, with the tedium of the drudgery thrown in for good measure. But an effective filing system is essential for the smooth running of the office, and for the swift retrieval of archived documents.

The organisation of the inbox (your ‘e–mail sorting office’) is one aspect of filing, but it only covers the incoming mail. Some users may consider this sufficient, but there is an overhead for each message in the inbox whenever the Post Office is opened. Once it has been read and appropriate action taken, the message should either be deleted or, if you need to keep it as a record, consigned to a folder.

A folder is identical in structure to the inbox, and you can read messages from within it, as well as forwarding them, replying to them, and deleting them. You can even move messages to other folders.

There are some folders already set up for you by the system (the inbox is the prime example, but you will see such entries as drafts and sentmail too); these folders will be discussed in the chapter entitled In-tray, out-tray and pending, which begins on page 48.

Creating a folderTo create a new folder, you will need to make sure that the Message organizer is the active window; and that the Post Office is active within that window. You should have the Message organizer window look like that in Figure 5 on page 19, with the Post Office expanded to show its constituent folders.


Introduction to Simeon 43Click once on the words Post Office in the Message Organizer window to ensure that the Post Office is ready to accept a new folder, and go to the File menu. Choose New, and then Folder from the menu.

You must be careful not to go to the menu with one of the folders within the Post Office highlighted; this will cause your new folder to be a subfolder of that one, rather than being a folder within the Post Office. While it is possible to have a hierarchy of folders and subfolders in Simeon, we do not recommend this course of action, since it can interfere with the smooth transition between Simeon and other e–mail programs (at Brunel, of course, we are referring principally to elm, our supported Unix e–mail software).

When you choose File, then New, then Folder, you will cause the New folder dialogue box to be displayed; this is illustrated in Figure 11.

Figure 11: the New folder dialogue box

First of all, check that the Where prompt (beneath the top panel) is answered with Post Office: if anything else is displayed there, click on the Cancel button, make sure the Post Office line is highlighted, and start again.

In place of Untitled, type in the name of the folder (up to eight characters only, please, for ease of transition between programs): in this instance, you should type osterley as the folder name (now you


44 Introduction to Simeonsee why we have asked you to keep your practice messages). You will normally want to sort the folder by the most recent arrival; we suggest also that you check both the Subscribe and the View message groups boxes. The former is fairly self-evident: you need to be subscribed to a folder in order to view its contents, and the latter will ensure compatibility with the look and feel of your inbox. If you do not check the View message groups box, the messages in the folder will be in a single list, without any headers. The section on Organising a folder on page 45 relies on your having message groups in view.

Other aspects of the New folder window may be safely ignored at this point; you should now click on the OK button to create the folder.

As with message groups, you may edit the definition of a folder, and the entry-point to do this is analogous. Click once on the folder name within the Message organizer window to highlight the name, and then use the Info button on the toolbar to bring up the New folder dialogue box. You may rename the folder or change such attributes as the viewing of message groups in this way.

Filing your messages

Filing a single message

Once you have created your osterley folder, the obvious next step is to populate it with messages pertaining to Osterley. You should now set up your Simeon layout so that the osterley folder name is visible in the Message Organizer window, and the header for the Osterley test message is visible within the (active) Post Office: inbox window.

The act of filing a message is simple to the point of triviality. All you need to do is to click on the message header and, holding down the mouse button, drag it onto the folder name and release the mouse button. The message header itself will not move; instead, an icon rather like a ‘reverse-video national speed limit sign’ will act as a shadow for the message header.

When the message has been filed in the folder, it is immediately placed in the Deleted message group in your inbox, ready for cleaning out. It is perfectly safe to clean the message from your inbox, since it is now resident in the folder. Before you do so, there are effectively two copies of the message on the system.


Introduction to Simeon 45Files in folders still count towards your filespace quota — twice, of course, until you clean out your Deleted message group.

Filing an entire message group

If you have read the entire contents of a message group, and wish to file all of that group’s messages into one of your folders, you may do so in a single action by dragging the message group header to the folder name. This is obviously much less time-consuming than filing each message singly, and you might consider weeding out the messages to be deleted first to allow you to make use of this short-cut.

Filing several messages at once

When working with the list of messages, the normal ‘multiple selection’ rules within Windows, whereby you use the SHIFT and CTRL keys in conjunction with the mouse, will apply.

To highlight a span of messages (that is, an unbroken subset of messages within a message group), you should highlight the message at one end of the span (i.e., either the first or the last) with a single click, and then, while holding the SHIFT key down, click on the message at the opposite end of the span. The entire span of messages will now be highlighted, and may be filed in one of your folders with a single drag.

To highlight a selection of messages which are not contiguous, you may select each message by holding down the CTRL key and clicking once on each message. If you select a message by mistake, another ‘CTRL–click’ will deselect that message.

You may make use of this ‘deselection’ facility to deselect a message from within a selected span (useful for an ‘everything except’ filing action).

Organising a folderWhen you create a folder, there will only be the Main and Deleted message groups set, so all messages filed there will end up in its Main group. Now that fact that there are such message groups should alert you to the possibility of creating your own message groups within the folder. To do this, simply follow the procedures for


46 Introduction to Simeonmessage group creation outlined in Setting up a Simeon messagegroup on page 36.

Before you do so, though, it is worthwhile taking stock. The message groups that you create within a folder are likely to be different from those in your inbox, since the folder serves a different purpose from your inbox. For example, you may have a message group in your inbox to receive messages sent to you as a member of a mailing-list. If that mailing-list is a ‘many-to-many’ discussion list, you may decide to file these messages (or, at least, the on-topic ones) in a folder dedicated to that mailing-list’s discussions. You might well decide to create message groups within the folder which would separate messages according to their senders; alternatively, if the discussion was particularly focused, and if everybody in the discussion respected the subject titles, you might be able to create message groups based on different discussion threads. You should note, though, that you cannot ‘copy over’ message group definitions just by filing the messages from these groups into another folder.

HousekeepingWe have stressed the importance of keeping your inbox ‘lean and trim’. This is just as important with your folders, and perhaps will need a more conscious effort, since many folders end up as the electronic equivalent of dusty cupboards. you should set aside a little time every now and then (perhaps weekly — if not, then monthly) to review your folders and weed out the time-expired messages. Just go into the folder, quickly browse the contents (usually browsing the headers will suffice) and delete those messages whose term of service has come to a close.

Indeed, sometimes you know that you will be able to discard an entire folder, because a particular project has been completed; in this case, you may highlight the folder name in the Message organizer window, and use the Delete button on the toolbar. You will be prompted to confirm this deletion (Simeon does its best not to let your foot slip) and, on receiving the confirmation, the folder and its contents will be consigned to oblivion.



Splitting a folderDuring one of your regular bouts of housekeeping, you may find that a folder has grown out of its original existence, and would benefit from being split into two or more folders, each with more specific focus. This is very simple: just create the new folders and re-allocate the messages into the new folders.

Remember, though, that as you move messages out of one folder into another, they will remain in the Deleted message group in the original folder. Since this re-allocation is likely to involve a fairly large number of messages, you should be cleaning out the deleted messages every so often. This will keep the process running as efficiently as possible.

Double-entry filingJust occasionally, you may want to file copies of a particular message in more than one folder. While this is not a practice which is exactly encouraged (filespace economy again), it is worth knowing how to do this.

The safest and easiest way to do this is to file the message in one folder, and then to undelete the copy in your inbox. It is then ready for filing again into the second folder; the undeletion does not affect the copy of the message which has been filed in the first folder.



In-tray, out-tray and pending

IntroductionIn an ideal world, with ideal correspondents, you would receive a message, immediately undertake the appropriate actions and responses, and file or delete the message promptly, ready and waiting for the next message. But when did you ever see an office which worked to that level of efficiency?

In the real world, you will always have several messages (sometimes more than several) arriving, being processed, and going out at the same time. Some of these messages will be partly constructed, and are either awaiting information or ratification prior to their being sent. Simeon has its features which are analogous to every office’s triple-decked shrine —the ‘In’, ‘Out’ and ‘Pending’ trays. These are the system-defined folders which, for the most part, we have kept at arm’s length in this document. It is now time to explore these.

Keeping the inbox present and correctThe equivalent of the in-tray is, of course, the inbox, and we have already encountered this folder in some detail. Keeping the inbox clean and tidy (and small in stature!) is the key to speedy and efficient use of Simeon. Loading up lots of messages can take up a lot of time at the start of a Simeon session, and this delay is much worse if there are attachments being loaded at the same time as their attendant messages; the chapter on Attachments (page 53) will help you deal with this problem.

Occasionally, a momentary lapse in the network will disconnect the connection to the mailhost computer, and you may find that the Post Office: inbox window has disappeared. You may be able to restore it by double-clicking on the words Post Office in the Message organizer window, but it may be necessary to close down Simeon and restart it.


Introduction to Simeon 49It is worth noting that Simeon, Netscape and (to a lesser extent) the big office software products are all rather hungry for resources, and your chances of network lapses are substantially reduced if you restrict yourself to one or (at most) two of these being open at any one time. This advice holds good even if all but one are minimised — they are still hoarding and fighting for network resources.

The sentmail folderBy default, every time you send a message, a copy of that message is placed in your sentmail folder: this is your e–mail ‘out-tray’. This is very convenient, since it saves you the bother of sending a copy of the message to yourself, and it is more efficient that way, since the ‘copy to self’ does not have to be sent out, only to be delivered back to the point of departure.

If housekeeping is important with the inbox and other folders, it is much more critical when it comes to the sentmail folder. You should go through your sentmail on a regular basis (weekly, at least) to keep its size under control. One of the most common reasons for our users’ exceeding their quota is the failure to prune e–mail, and the sentmail is the principal culprit.

The automatic saving of a copy of the message in the sentmail folder is governed by the options (the chapter entitled Customising Simeon on page 57 addresses the setting of options), but that setting may be over-ridden for a particular message. While the composition window is active, the Options button on the toolbar will give you access to the Compose message options dialogue box. Simply remove the cross from the Save message option, and the message will not be copied to your sentmail.

We recommend that you do save copies of your mail by default (and do the appropriate housekeeping!), but that you are always aware of the overheads involved with the automatic saving of a large message.

While you are doing your housekeeping on your sentmail, you will probably delete the majority of your messages, because they are ephemeral. Others may be filed into folders (so that you maintain both sides of a conversation). A third category of messages will include those sent out to a mailing-list of which you are a member; these will come winging back to you as incoming messages when the mailing-list’s sorting office distributes the messages to the members. It is usually easier to deal with these messages as incoming


50 Introduction to Simeonmessages, and to discard them from the sentmail, but often you will prefer to keep the sentmail copy until the message has returned from the list-server, so that you are not left without a copy between sending and receiving your message.

Draft messages

Saving to the Drafts folder

Sometimes, you will find that you are half-way through composing a message, and you cannot finish it there and then. You may have another appointment, or you find that you need some extra information. In certain situations, you may need to prepare a message in draft form, then send it to someone to check and approve its distribution.

For these purposes, the Drafts folder comes into its own. When you are ready to lay aside the message (whose composition window should be active), choose the Compose menu, and click on Save to drafts. A copy of the message will be placed in the Drafts folder. Note that the composition window remains open; you will probably now close it in the usual Windows manner.

Once the message is in the Drafts folder, you may safely work on another message, or even close down Simeon: the pending message will still be in the Drafts folder when you come back to the package.

You should note that your message and its header information need not be complete when you save your draft: even the recipient’s name may be left blank when you are saving the draft copy.

Retrieving a draft message

To pick up on a draft message, open the Drafts folder and double-click on the message header. Your composition window is restored with the message as you left it. You may notice that the title of the composition window is now Restart compose; other than that, it is identical to a first-use composition window. You may now continue work on the message.

If you decide to save it to the Drafts folder a second time, you will not overwrite your first draft; a new entry will be made. If the second


Introduction to Simeon 51draft has superseded the first, you should now delete the first draft, and clean it out of the deleted message group.

Sending a draft message

Simply send the message as you would any other — by using the Send button on the toolbar with the composition window active.

‘Draft for comments’

If you have to send a draft of a message to someone for comment prior to distribution, the easiest way is to prepare the message, leaving the To field blank. Save the message to the Drafts folder, then add the address of the recipient of the draft. Before you send it, you might add a prefixing note asking for comments on the draft. That way, the message will be ready to be retrieved and sent in the case of immediate approval, and there is no risk of sending the ‘draft for comments’ to the intended recipient of the finalised message.

If you are being particularly careful (or timorous?), and you decide to send more than one version from which your reviewer (superior?) may choose the final message, you may decide to amend the subject to incorporate ‘Draft 1’, ‘Draft 2’, etc. (saving each version in the Drafts folder, of course): that way, when one version comes back as a reply with “I like this one” attached, you can go directly to the correct version in your drafts folder … assuming that your reviewer has not changed the subject line.

Temporary suspensionJust like any other Windows package, Simeon allows you to manage the windows within its compass. You may minimise a composition window, for example, to give you a clearer look at another Simeon item (perhaps a newly-arrived message). Likewise, you may minimise any other window onto the Simeon background. So if you are suddenly gripped with the belief that parts of your Simeon make-up have ‘disappeared’, you should go looking for them, iconised, on the backcloth which is bounded by the main Simeon window (the one with the Simeon menu). Alternatively, scan the list of windows given in the Windows menu (on the Simeon menu bar).



Second deliveryThe French talk of l’esprit d’escalier; the realisation just too late that you could have done better. If you have sent off a message, and realised that it should also have gone to someone else, or if you have seem some necessary amendments which require a re-sending of the amended message in its entirety, then you should use the Restart compose facility. Highlight the message header in your inbox, sentmail or other folder, and choose the Restart compose potion from the Message menu. You can then start amending the header and/or body text as you need. This facility also allows you to annotate a copy of a message before sending it to a third party.



Attachments

IntroductionIn the early days of e–mail, the only thing which you could send was plain text. This was a fairly serious drawback, and it became critical when wordprocessors and spreadsheets became widespread — was a document which had been lovingly formatted to be reduced to plain text so that it could be e–mailed, or should it be consigned to the postal service on a fragile, error-prone diskette?

Nowadays, though, e–mail programs, including Simeon, can parcel up a file in such a way that, when it is sent along with a plain-text message, its native format remains unaffected. In addition, many application files (particularly those containing graphical data) very quickly outstrip the capacity of a floppy disk, so an electronic method of data transfer becomes by far the easiest option. A Word document can be attached and sent; the recipient can then (with a suitable e–mail program) retrieve the attached file from the message, and read it using Word. There is no loss of formatting, and no loss of information.

What can be done with a Word document can equally be done with Excel workbooks, bitmap files, and many other formats. Transferring data across the Net is now much simpler; and the need for floppy disks is down to the transfer of data between un-networked machines, or between an Internet-connected machine and one which stands resolutely alone, bereft of any connection.

We would add a note of caution, though, when you are considering sending a message with a large attachment. Filespace is not limitless, and individual users will have a quota: do not send files which would breach or endanger any user’s quota. Equally, do not send large files to lists of users unnecessarily; at Brunel, we have several other options and the same is generally true elsewhere. This applies particularly to groups such as a class list at Brunel, where multiple copies would be placed on the same home-directory server. If you


54 Introduction to Simeonneed help in this area, please contact User Support before sending your mail.

Sending an attachment

Forming the attachment

To attach a file to a message, you will need to have the usual composition window open and active. You may then use the Attach button on the toolbar to open a dialogue box; within this box, you will specify the file which is to be attached. Once you have selected the OK button in the dialogue box, you will see an attachment icon in a section of the composition window. You may attach more than one file (just repeat the process for each), but most attachments are of a format which tends to produce large files (graphical files are particularly large), and you may find it more reliable to attach large files each to its own message. In this case, it is worth considering sending one message with each file, and another message indexing the files which are being sent. This makes for n+1 messages to send n attachments, but the separate ‘bill of lading’ message makes it much easier for the recipient to be sure that all the attachments have arrived.

Severing the attachment

If you decide that you have attached a file in error, simply highlight the attachment icon for that file, and use the Detach button on the toolbar to remove the icon from the composition window; the file will not now be transferred when you send the message.

Attachments and sentmail

When your message is copied to your sentmail folder, a copy of the attached file goes with it. It then follows that you now have two copies of that file — the original file, and the copy which is bundled up in your sentmail folder.

For this reason you should probably not save this particular message to the sentmail folder; choose the Options button on the toolbar while the composition window is active, and remove the cross from the Save message option.



Receiving an attachment

Reading the message

If you receive a message with an attachment, it will appear in your inbox with a parcel as its icon, rather than an envelope. When you double-click on the message header to open the message, the Viewer window will be opened with three sections rather than the more usual two — beneath the header information and the body text, you will find a section containing an icon representing each attachment. You should leave these icons alone until you have read the body text; if your correspondent has been assiduous, you will find information such as file format and size in the body text.

Getting at the attachment

Give a child a present in a box, and the chances are that the recipient will plunge in, eager to make the contents work — even before anything is known about the contents4. Simeon does have a facility for you to do just this; you may double-click on the attachment icon and, if Simeon can recognise the file format from its extension, it will open the appropriate application right away and display the attachment. Thus, for example, a file whose extension is XLS can be made to appear within Excel.

If you open the attachment in this fashion, you may browse it and decide whether or not to save it into your own filespace directly from the application. However, you should be aware of the dangers of having too many applications active at once in your Windows session.

Saving an attachment

A safer method of browsing your attachment is to save it into your filespace (perhaps into a holding directory), and then opening it explicitly from within the application, after you have closed down any unnecessary applications. Once you have worked with the attachment from within your filespace, you may then delete the message (along with the original attachment) from Simeon.

4 let us ignore, for the moment, those children who delight in discarding the gift, preferring to play with the box


56 Introduction to SimeonTo save the attachment, you must first click once on its icon (remember, a double-click will launch the attachment’s application), and then pull down the Message menu. From this menu, you will then need to choose Save and then Attachment, giving the filename where prompted. Simeon will do its best to match the attachment’s filename (which itself is a ‘best-effort’ match from the sender’s system) when providing a default filename.

Filing mail with attachmentsWhen you file a message with an attachment, the attachment is filed too — just as happens when a sent message with n attachment is placed in the sentmail folder. Since you will have a copy of any attached file which has proved useful, there will normally be no need to file another copy of the attachment.

The best practice, therefore, is to delete the message. However, in a few cases, there may be material in the body text of the message which you wish to file. Your best recourse in this instance is to forward a copy of the message to yourself, detaching the attachment(s) before forwarding. Since the forwarded message will have been stripped of its attachment(s), you may decide to annotate the message to that effect; also, since the forwarded message will have your name on iis header (as the sender), you may decide to amend the subject title so that its true provenance is more obvious.



Customising Simeon

IntroductionThe initial ‘look and feel’ of Simeon has been cast by the developers, and at Brunel, the Computing Service has set various options and parameters to make sure that it works on our network in the safest and most effective way. However, there is still room for individual users to choose some of their options, and this chapter will guide you through the various parts of Simeon which you can choose for yourself. Be careful, though, when you are making changes. Only alter one thing at a time, and check the effects every time. Like Hansel and Gretel dropping pebbles in the forest, you should always make sure that you know how to retrace each step you make away from the default setup.

User Support will have limited scope in changing your setup, and it is most likely that, if your options have caused you problems, all they will be able to do is to restore the default setup. This means that it is not just the specific options which are at risk if you take a wrong turning, but your message groups and any other changes you may have made.

The sections which follow will help you change those aspects of Simeon which are relatively safe, and will advise you of aspects which should be left severely alone. Any changes which you make are entirely at your own risk. When you find yourself in a hole with your Simeon options, stop digging immediately. Take a note of any settings which you can see, close down your session, and contact User Support without delay. Even a few hours’ delay can reduce the chances that User Support can salvage anything from your last working setup.


58 Introduction to SimeonAccess to options

To gain access to the options, pull down the Tools menu, and choose Options and then Edit: the options dialogue box (illustrated in Figure12 on page 58) will be displayed. Note the list of icons for the option categories on the left of the box: to select a category, you will need to click on the appropriate icon.

User options and preferences

User

This is the first category of options and will appear as soon as you call up the options dialogue box, as in Figure 12. Your name and e–mail address are filled in automatically by the sytem, so you should not need to make any changes there. There is space for you to edit a signature, which will be appended automatically to each of your outgoing Simeon messages.

Figure 12: User options

In Figure 12, you will see a simple signature — it identifies the name and address (both postal and electronic forms) of the sender, and there is a simple line which will separate the signature from the


Introduction to Simeon 59message. There is little or no need for anything more exotic, and certainly no need for anything longer.

Long signatures can be extremely annoying to the reader, and wasteful of resources as they trundle round the Net: please keep your signature (if any) to a bare minimum.

Fonts

You will note that the third option category is Fonts. The font options allow you to choose fonts for a large variety of purposes; these will help you to make the sending, reading and management of your messages a bit easier.

In general, we recommend simplicity. One font for reading and printing, another for headers (you may use boldface to create a hierarchy here), and a third for composing messages. As for colour, we are generally with Henry Ford (“any colour you want, as long as it’s black”). With regard to the size of type, it will obviously depend on your eyesight, but 10pt will generally provide a good balance between legibility and expected line length. However, there is a wide variety of fonts with which you may experiment.

Reading/printing

For most purposes, a serifed font (such as Times New Roman) will be most pleasing on the eye for reading a message, as it is for any continuous text. A sans-serif font such as Arial makes the eye and brain work much harder over a long span of text.The major problem with fonts such as Times New Roman is their proportionality. This will affect the look of text (particularly tables and ‘ASCII art’) which depends on a monospaced font for its layout. If you need amonospaced font, go for Courier. It is arguable that a table can usually be attached in a suitable format, thus obviating the need to use a monospaced font for reading the message.

Headers Such items as message group headers and folder names are important signposts of the structure of your Simeon window; as such, we recommend that they be in a sans-serif font — Arial, for example. Boldface is useful in some of these, again to accentuate the hierarchy.

Composing

In this instance, we do recommend that you use a monospaced font such as Courier. At least some of your correspondents will be reading your mail in this way, and


60 Introduction to Simeoneffectively, that is the way in which your message is being sent. By using a monospaced font, you will always be aware of your line-lengths.

Remember that (unless you format an attachment with particular fonts) you cannot control the way that your outgoing messages are read by your correspondents: that depends on the way they have set any options allowed by their e–mail system.

Message options

Compose

The Compose option category brings together most of the choices that you will want to make about the messages that you send, and the dialogue box for this category is illustrated in Figure 13.

Figure 13: Composition options

Options

Of the options, the only one which we would recommend be checked is the Save message option. This will ensure that you do


Introduction to Simeon 61not lose any of your outgoing messages (until you take the decision to delete them from your sentmail folder.

The Net can be generally assumed to be working; you can therefore assume that your mail will be delivered. Accordingly, the Delivery receipt option should not be checked in the normal course of events. In unusual circumstances, you may be asked to set a delivery receipt check for particular messages, and this will usually be set on a per-message basis using the Options button on the composition toolbar.

The Read receipt option is of a liitle more relevance to some people, but in the great majority of cases, it should not be necessary to check this option. In fact, you should really only check this option as your default choice if you consider it vital that all of your correspondents read your e–mail as soon as possible after you send it, and if you have alternative channels of communication to lean upon your correspondents to read the mail, and that this breathless eagerness applies to each and every message that you send. You should also note that some correspondents may bridle at an inference (whether intended or not, or yet whether justified or not) that their responses are being monitored, or even that they are in some way considered untrustworthy.

The Queue message option is only relevant for offline operation, and is thus outwith thescope of this document. It should be left unchecked.

Line wrapping

Your choice of line-length for line-wrapping will depend, to an extent, on your use of the Reply function. If you are wont to conduct conversations in e–mail, when replies are nested, one within the other, with consequent multiple use of indentation within your messages, then you will probably need to bring your line-length down to about 72 characters (as is illustrated in Figure 13 on page 60); you may be able to operate adequately with a longer line-length if your messages are all initiated by yourself. However, you should not use a line-length greater than 78 characters, and 76 or even 74 may be a better maximum. After all, your correspondents may need to use indentation.


62 Introduction to SimeonMessage priority

There is no guarantee that your correspondents or their software will do anything to differentiate the alleged priority of messages, so we recommend that you set this option to Normal. Some correspondents will see the setting of an Urgent priority as no more than attention-seeking on the part of the sender.

Folders for sentmail and drafts

These should be as illustrated in Figure 13. If you have any problems with these folders, please contact User Support.

Compose window

This option should be set at Close. There should be no need to leave, by default, a composition window open.

Reply

The best course of action for this category is to prompt yourself about ‘all recipients’ replying, to prompt yourself about the inclusion of the original message, not to wrap the original text (it can play havoc with the layout), and to use simple indentation (e.g., a greater-than sign followed by a single space) and header qualification (a simple Re will suffice).

Forward

As for your forwarding options, you should never forward a message as an attachment (it should be as close to the original format as you can make it); you should not wrap the original message (again, the integrity of the original is important), and your header qualification should be simple.

Helper applications

Helper applications options allow you to set default formats for attachments, based on the file extensions. Some have already been set on a system-wide basis. Note that there is no attempt to check that, for example, a file whose extension is XLS is, in fact, in Excel format until you try to open Excel. If you find that you need help in setting helper application options, you should contact User Support.



Other optionsThe other six option categories should be left alone, only to be changed under the direction of the Computing Service. In particular, the Logging option category should have the log detail set to None and you should have no subsystem checked for logging.



Keeping an address-book

IntroductionEverybody has favourite (or, at the very least, regular) correspondents, and most of us have at some time been given a booklet in which we may inscribe the names and addresses of our friends and relations. Recently, these volumes have given over space for extra information such as birthdays.

Simeon gives you the same facility, allowing you to store the details for your most regular correspondents. Of course, it goes further than even a pretty cloth-bound book can: you can gain very fast access to the entries in your Simeon address-book, you can group entries into lists, and much more besides.

This chapter will show you how to operate an address-book efficiently, thus reducing the chances of your e-mail bouncing because you have made a mistake in the address, and removing the need for countless self-adhesive notelets festooning your monitor box, your Filofax, or other available surfaces.

Opening your address-bookOn the far right of the main toolbar, you will notice an Address-book button. If you select this button, an Addressbook organizer window is opened. You should notice two entries — directory and local. These are the public5 and private address-books respectively. This chapter deals with the management of a private address-book: if you place an entry in this address-book, it can only be seen and used by yourself.

In the usual way, the little box to the left of an address-book names has a plus-sign if the book is unexpanded, and a minus sign if the

5 at Brunel, the X500 directory


Introduction to Simeon 65book is expanded. To move forward, you should have the local book expanded.

To begin with, of course, your book will be empty (even when expanded); you will see in Figure 14 the layout of an Addressbook organizer window for a working book. The details of Figure 14 will be described in the forthcoming sections.

Figure 14: The addressbook organizer

For the present, you will note the three icons — the book-and-disk which represents an address-book, the single figurehead which represents a person in the address-book, and the double-figurehead which respresents a private list within the address-book.

Adding a name to your address-bookTo practise adding an entry to your address-book, you should use the following three people and their (fictitious) e–mail addresses:

Isambard Brunel [email protected]

Maria Grey [email protected]

Joseph Lancaster [email protected]

With the Addressbook organizer window active, and the word local highlighted within the window, you should choose the New person button (with the single figurehead) on the address-book toolbar to bring forth the engagingly-named New person properties dialogue box.


66 Introduction to SimeonNow type the name Isambard Brunel in the panel adjacent to the figurehead, and the e–mail address [email protected] in the third panel, so that the window looks like Figure 15 on page 66.

For the moment, that is all you will need to do; click on the OK button at the bottom of the dialogue box, and you will see Isambard Brunel’s name appear within the local address-book.

Figure 15: Entering a person in the address-book

Now make sure that the word local is still highlighted, and add Maria Grey to your address-book in similar fashion. You will notice her name slot in neatly beneath that of Mr Brunel.

Finally, repeat the process with Joseph Lancaster’s name. Note, though, that his name appears in your expanded address-book list between the others. This shows that Simeon is sorting by the entire name as a single field — essentially, by forename6. To ensure a sort-by-surname, you would need to give the name as, for example, Brunel, Isambard; most people soon come to terms with the off-beat ordering. After all, you will see that it is easy to home in on a particular address-book entry.

You will notice the same sort-ordering in Figure 14 on page 65 with reference to Messrs Broadbent, Liddell and Gohar.

6 this will be familiar to those conversant with the Icelandic telephone directory, at least, but to few others


Introduction to Simeon 67You should leave your three new entries in the address-book for now — you will need them later in this chapter.

Using a list

Defining a list

Once you have built up an address-book, you will begin to notice entries which naturally form groups. It is likely, for instance, that you will at some point decide to e–mail a message to both Joseph Lancaster and Maria Grey, since they are both educators. To do this, you should create a list.

Make sure that the word local is highlighted in the (active) Addressbook Organizer window. Now choose the New list button from the address-book toolbar: this is the button whose icon has the double figurehead. Type in the word Educators as the name of the new list, and click on the OK button; you will see the new list name appear in the address-book.

Filling a list

Now click on Joseph Lancaster’s name and drag it onto the Educators list-name before releasing the mouse button. Do the same with Maria Grey’s name. If you need to, expand the Educators list: the two names are there. But they are also in the main list: the ‘main entry’ is not removed by taking a copy of the entry into a list.

Working with multiple lists

If you create more than one list, you should fill your lists from the main entries. If you drag a name from one list to another, it will be taken out of the original list and placed in the new list. If you drag the name from its main entry to a list, it will be copied to that list without affecting its place in either the main entries or any other list.

Entering a name directly onto a list

If you have a list name highlighted when you call up the New person dialogue box, then you will be able to enter the new person onto that list at the same time as the main entry is created: this is a useful


68 Introduction to Simeonshort-cut. If the same person is to be placed on any other lists, of course, you must drag the name from its main entry to each of the desired lists in turn.

Using the address-book in compositionWith the Addressbook organizer window active, click once on Isambard Brunel’s name to highlight it. Now move to the address-book toolbar and click on the button marked To: paste. If you do not have a composition window active, you will be offered a new window (accept the offer). When the composition window is opened, Isambard Brunel’s entry will be pasted into the To field.

Now highlight the word Educators, and click on the Cc: paste button on the address-book toolbar: you will see both of the educators’ entries appear in the Cc field. Note that your list-name does not appear anywhere in the panel.

You will appreciate, therefore, the savings in time which the address-book affords, and how the judicious use of lists can improve your efficiency by leaps and bounds.

You should now abandon this message by closing its composition window.

Editing an address-book entryIf you need to edit an address-book entry, all you need to do is to double-click on the name within the address-book; you will be given the Person properties dialogue box to edit.

Note that it does not matter whether you edit a main entry or a copy within a list; they are inextricably linked and all will be edited simultaneously. This means that you cannot maintain two different entries for the same person.

Using an aliasYou can make life even easier for yourself by using aliases for people within your address-book. Take Isambard Kingdom Brunel, for example — to his friends, he might have been known as Izzy. It is


Introduction to Simeon 69possible to have such a nickname (that’s nother popular name for ‘alias’ amongst e–mail programs) attached to the address-book entry so that you do not need to go to the address-book to add a name to the message header.

Double-click, then, on Isambard Brunel’s name within the address-book to edit the entry. Type izzy in the panel adjacent to the word Alias, and select the OK button to confirm the edit. Now close down the Addressbook organizer window and open a composition window.

In the To field of the composition window, type izzy, and then click on the Expand button on the composition toolbar. You will see Mr Brunel’s full entry appear in the place of his alias.

Now move to the Cc field and type Grey in the panel. Again, click on the Expand button, and you should see Maria Grey’s entry pasted into the field. If you do not, first check on your spelling of Grey, and if that is correct, check that the Send category of options is specified correctly. You will need crosses in the boxes offering expansion from all three of Name, Alias and E–mail.

This ability to expand from fragments of the main entry within your address-book is, by the way, why we did not choose ikb as Mr Brunel’s alias: it should work without the alias’s being set explicitly. Such a fragment may be termed an ‘implicit alias’.

In a list of recipients, you may mix full entries and aliases, and expand all aliases at once.

Capturing a sender’s addressWhen you are reading a message, you may lift the sender’s name and address directly from the message header and place it in your address-book; the Addressbook organizer window need not be open at the time. All you need to do is to press CTRL–Y while the Viewer window is active with the message, and the details are placed directly into your address-book, using the name as provided by the sender’s system to the message header.

Deleting an address-book entryTo delete an entry from the address-book, simply highlight the entry and click on the Delete button on the address-book toolbar.


70 Introduction to SimeonIf you delete a main entry, the person is deleted from all lists; if you delete a list entry, the main entry and all other list entries are unaffected.

With each Delete command, you are prompted to confirm that you do want to delete an entry from the address-book.

Searching the address-bookYou may search the address-book to collect all entries satisfying a particular criterion (for example, all entries with ac.uk in the e–mail address). Use the search button on the address-book toolbar and follow the instructions. It is advisable to delete your search entry from the Addressbook organizer window after you have used the results of your search.

If you have any problems when trying to use the search facility, you should contact User Support.

Multiple booksIt is possible to set up multiple address-books, but this is fraught with danger and confusion. We recommend, therefore, that you keep only one address-book within Simeon, and that it is called local. User Support may not be able to help you if you get into difficulty with multiple address-books.

This means that the New book button on the address-book toolbar is effectively out of bounds



Using Simeon offline

Simeon can be used offline — in other words, when your PC is not connected to the network. You may move messages between your Post Office and local folders, and work on replies, etc., without being connected to the Brunel mailhost. This can be useful for those users with portable computers, or for anyone dialling into our modem bank.

However, the management of e-mail using Simeon in an offline capacity is beyond the scope of this document. User Support will try to help anyone who wishes to use simeon offline, but cannot guarantee the same level of knowledge as with the standard online use of Simeon.

The online help will provide a starter in the use of Simeon when offline.


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