send and recieve

As a kid I used to play with walkie-talkies. These radios used to have a talk button. When you wanted to talk, you needed to press this button. The point: you could either listen or talk, but not both at the same time. I realize that mailxel helps me to apply this practice to mails: rather than to get distracted by incoming mails, the separation of sending (replying) and recieving (downloading mails at specific points in time) helps me to keep focus when working through my inbox.

(tech) jetty wrapper

So far, mailxel was using winstone as servlet container. As it turns out, embedding jetty in a similar fashion is straight forward. The relevant ingredients are published here:

• ejetty.jar
  Contains the launcher code (suppresses jetty logs)
• ejetty-wrap.ant.xml
  Contains the ant script to create a delivery jar file which contains all required components

ejetty is configured as follows:

host=127.0.0.1

port=6060

war=/embedded.war

url=http://localhost:6060

The result of this configuration: the embedded.war is deployed, jetty is started and your browser is opened at the given URL.

Feel free to use this wrapper and enjoy.

mailxel 0.7.8 released

mailxel 0.7.8 is out and brings the following new features:

• allow message queues (save and send later)
• allow for more than one send account
• display message time, not just date
• new 'excat' date selector
• in mail overview, show time as tool tip on date
• display attachments directly (no download), if possible
• add "schedule for today" category
• add "close all tabs" function
• add (user selectable) icons to message queries
• all lists are sorted by usage count
• display addresses on multiple lines if many
• add calendar (.ics) icon to mime type ... and display .txt
• add html (.html) icon to mime type ... and display html

... and a couple of bug fixes, of course. Check it out and report bugs and feature requests. Thanks!

time or date

Because mails are transported by machines and these machines often know quite an accurate time, we know the reception of messages down to the second. But do we need this information? My experience: seldom. More importantly, I consider the differentiation between dialogue and correspondence to be an important aspect of my mail processing habit. Whereas time is important for dialogues, to know the date of a correspondence is typically good enough. mailxel offers the choice to display time details. For the reasoning above, the option is turned off be default.

why mailxel has no auto-check for new mails

There is a rising demand for applications which ensure distraction-free zones (see, e.g. this universal darkroom script published on lifehacker), and rightly so: creative work needs undisturbed time to think (If you're not Bach, that is).

For the same reason, mailxel lets you decide when it is time to work on mails and when to work on other things: you need to start the mail download manually with this button.

Typically, after the mail download, you start processing the incoming mails. That's what the GTD workflow bar is for: you use the tagging functions to move from one message to the next and either respond to the mail (if this takes a short amount of time) or mark it as "do later" or "delegate".

mailxel 0.7.4 is out and brings minor feature updates and bug fixes. Check it out and let me know what you think.

who needs full text search?

To my own surprise, I am not using full text search for mailxel, even though that would be easy and straight forward to implement. Why? As it turns out, in most cases, the combination of sender and recipient and subject gives very precise search results. Nothing more is needed.

For the same reason, mailxel asks you to use wild cards where you need them, allowing you to formulate narrow searches. The philosophy is: if you get too many search results, narrow your query down. You can define the max number of displayed search results in the settings. The default is 30.

mailxel 0.7.2 is out and brings minor feature updates and bug fixes. Check it out and let me know what you think.

mailxel 0.7.1: faster, nicer, better

mailxel 0.7.1 is out and brings the following new features:

• search for attachment file names
• even faster overall response (also thanks to sqlite and GWT 2.0)
• welcome wizard
• write a note to myself
• improved login handling

and many more. Check it out; installation is super-simple, upgrade from older versions handled automatically.