The Preview Mail feature is activated by the toolbar button or File menu option by that name. This feature lets you examine and selectively retrieve, print, or delete messages from an incoming mail server without doing a normal retrieve. Please note that starting with Polarbar Version 1.22, Preview Mail is the only way to read mail on an IMAP4 server, because the idea behind IMAP4 is to use the server as the message store.
When you choose the Preview Mail feature and you have configured more than one incoming mail server, you will prompted to choose which server to work with. After you make your choice (either double click on a server name or activate the Open button after highlighting a server name), or if you only have one incoming mail server configured, the Preview Mail Setup dialog appears.
The Preview Mail Setup dialog is preloaded with the mail server host name, user ID (if configured), password (if configured), and port number, which you can change as needed, although changing the host name or user ID is not recommended for accounts that are configured to only retrieve new messages, because Polarbar stores unique new message information for each mail server and changing the server host name or user ID here will cause information for the wrong server to be saved for the originally selected server. (The recommended way to deal with multiple email accounts, whether on the same server or on different servers, is to configure an incoming mail server for each of your accounts, even ones that you rarely access&emdash;you can even configure them to be disabled and subsequently only use Preview Mail to access them).
If you enable the Debug Mode checkbox, then all communications between Polarbar and the incoming mail server will be logged to the Java console log. Otherwise, only mail server commands and command responses will be logged.
After you activate the OK button in the Preview Mail Setup dialog, the program will proceed to the main Preview Mail window. This window is very much like Polarbar's main window, with a folder tree panel, a message list panel, and a browser panel. For IMAP4 servers, the folder tree panel displays all of the root folders on the server, but for other servers, the only available folder is "INBOX". When you choose a folder, a dialog appears that tells you how many total and new messages are in the folder and if any of the messages are unseen (an IMAP4-only feature). Depending upon the displayed values, you will be given one or more of the following choices over which messages to display:
After you make a choice and activate the OK button, Preview Mail will retrieve the headers for the chosen messages from the incoming message server and will display that information in the Preview Mail window's columns, just like in the message list panel in Polarbar's main window. You can sort the entries based on the data in any column by pressing the button at the top of that column.
If you double-click on a message in the message list, Polarbar will retrieve a portion of the message and then display it in the message browser. For POP3 servers, only the first 50 lines of the message are retrieved. For IMAP4 servers, only the first 2000 bytes of the message are retrieved. For all other server types, the entire message is retrieved.
The right mouse button menu of each item in the list holds most of the same options as the Preview Mail window's Message Menu:
The Folder Menu