Managing IMAP

Star Mail

Star Office is a freeware gem. It is an “office suite” of productivity applications, with file formats compatible with Microsoft Office applications. Star Office includes an email client, Star Mail, which supports IMAP. Star Office is free to private, non-commercial users and students. In addition to its native Windows 95/98/NT operating environment, Star Office is also available for other operating systems, including OS/2, Linux, and Solaris.

Star Mail is a component of the Star Office Suite and cannot be installed separately—if you want to use Star Mail, you have to install the whole Star Office Suite. That could be problematic if you’re low in disk space—the Star Office download for Windows is 80 MB; installed, it requires around 160 MB of disk.

The interface is somewhat non-intuitive to those who are regular users of Microsoft products. While this is not necessarily a liability, expect some users to encounter a slight learning curve over the first few times they use the interface.

For more information or to download a free copy of Star Office, visit http://www.sun.com/products/staroffice/.

Features

Client-side filtering

Star Mail is one of the few IMAP clients that, at the time of this writing, provides client-side filtering.

Import filters

Star Office has tools for importing data from Messenger and Outlook Express.

Remote LDAP searching

Remote address book feature allows you to search Bigfoot, WhoWhere, and Switchboard, but not your own site’s LDAP directory.

Advanced searching

In addition to standard searching of message headers, Star Mail permits searches through levels of nested folders.

Performance enhancements for slow connections

To avoid wasting time downloading large messages, Star Mail allows the user to set a threshold on the size of messages and attachments. If the user attempts to open a message exceeding that threshold, he will be warned and asked whether to cancel the action or continue.

Configuring Star Mail for IMAP

If you are running Star Office for the first time, it may come up in full-screen mode. If you prefer to run Star Office in a window, then press Alt-V to bring up the View menu and unselect “Full Screen.”

Star Mail works great with both Cyrus and UW servers and does not require any special configuration, such as specifying the folder path, to support the server namespace.

The configuration required to set up new IMAP accounts is somewhat more complicated than it should be. More steps are required to configure it than are needed to configure the other clients evaluated in this chapter. When we attempted to send mail for the first time after configuring the client, the send failed with an error message that was less than informative. We eventually found out that, in order to send mail out, you must first create an “outbox”—it’s not automatically created for you.

Configuring the IMAP options

Follow these steps to set up your IMAP options in Star Mail:

1. Pull down the Tools menu and select the Options. On the Options menu, select Internet (click on the + sign to expand the list of Internet options).

2. Click on Mail/News. You’ll see the Mail/News configuration window, shown in Figure 4-1 .

3. Enter the full address of your outgoing SMTP host in the Outgoing Mail field.

4. Enter the full address of your IMAP server in the Incoming Mail field.

5. Enter your IMAP username and password in the User ID and Password fields.

The other information is optional to configure for IMAP. Click OK when you’re done entering the information.

Figure 4-1. Entering IMAP options in Start Office

Reading IMAP mail with Star Mail

At this point, you’ve done the preliminary configuration, but there’s still a bit of configuration to do before you can read your mail. Follow these steps to complete the configuration and read your IMAP mail:

1. Bring up the Star Mail client, which is located in the Star Explorer menu window. To bring up the Star Explorer menu window, pull down the View menu and select “Explorer.” If it is already selected (i.e., if it has a check mark next to it on the View menu) but you can’t see the Explorer menu window, then the window is minimized. To expand the window, click on the small bar near the top lefthand side of the Star Office window.

2. Next, bring up the Star Mail client by clicking on the E-mail & News bar, as shown in Figure 4-2 . The client’s menu will be blank if you’ve never used it before.

Figure 4-2. Star Explorer E-mail & News

1. You will need to create a new IMAP Account. Begin by right-clicking on the blank background under E-mail & News to bring up the menu.

2. Under the New menu, select IMAP Account... to bring up a window titled Properties of IMAP Account.

3. Click on the Receive tab. You will see a window that looks like Figure 4-3 . If you configured your mail options as described in the beginning of this section, then the values should already be filled in. You shouldn’t have to change any of the values—just click the OK button to create the IMAP account.

Figure 4-3. Properties of IMAP Account

1. The new IMAP account will appear in the Star Explorer window, as in Figure 4-4 . Click on the + sign to connect to your IMAP server and retrieve your messages.

Figure 4-4. New IMAP account

Tip

Sending mail out requires that you create an Outbox first. Right-click on the white background as you did to create a new Email group and select Outbox from the menu.