Once you are done reading this FAQ information, you may simply close this window
The Preferences screen is used to change a number of user options and overall FastMail.FM configuration options. You probably shouldn't need to access this screen too often. Usually you'll set it up once and that'll be it.
The name you enter here will be attached to your outgoing emails you send to people. Most email programs and systems will display this instead or as well as your email address. If you add a Full Name in the Personalities screen, it will override what you type here; if you want no Full Name to appear on an outgoing email, delete the contents of this field and the Full Name field on the Personalities screen.
You can change the password you use to login to FastMail.FM, by entering a new one here. You must enter the same password twice to ensure that they match correctly. Any password you enter will be checked to see that it is secure.
To better layout the display of FastMail.FM screens, we change the size of various onscreen items to optimise for small (640x480), medium (800x600), large (1024x768) or very large (1280x1024 or larger) screens.
The value chosen here will be used if you leave the 'Screen Size' popup menu on the login screen set to 'Default'.
Note that these screen sizes are approximate only. They have been designed around using the standard size font most graphical browsers start with. If you use a larger font, you may want to choose a smaller screen size to compensate and vice-versa.
The visible appearance of FastMail.FM is highly customisable using 'style sheets'. With the popup menu you can select from the available style sheets.
Note: Because of compatibility problems with most browsers and even the most basic style sheets, FastMail.FM will default to not using any style sheet at all if it detects that your browser is not Internet Explorer 5.0 or above, or Netscape 6.0 or above, or Firefox, or Opera 5.0 or above. Coloring will still occur, but it will use a basic HTML approximation of the style-sheet which will not work well for all styles.
A very generous FastMail.FM user (thanks Lisa!) keeps a FastMail.FM Stylesheet Gallery maintained with details of all stylesheets.
Most style-sheets (all the best ones!) have been created by generous and talented FastMail.FM users. Here's a description of the style sheets by the people that created them (not all style sheet authors have submitted descriptions yet):
You can also create your own style sheet if you use IE 5 or later. Save it as "c:\custom.css" and choose the "Custom" option in the Display Style popup.
To use a custom style sheet from your file storage area, follow the instructions here, and then choose the 'Custom in File Storage' option from the Display Style popup.
The '*' next to a stylesheet means that the stylesheet uses some extra images. In some cases on older web browsers this may slow down the display of pages, though on most browsers these days it's not an issue.
Some email programs allow you to compose HTML mail. HTML mail allows you to use different fonts, colours, font styles, embed pictures, etc. Every HTML mail item also has a plain text version of the mail. If you select this box, FastMail.FM will display the full HTML mail item. If you don't select this box, FastMail.FM will only display the text version of any HTML mail items.
This lets you select the time zone you are currently in. All dates and times of emails and logins will then be displayed in the selected time zone.
On the message read screen, there is a popup that lets you choose how to include the original email when replying to or forwarding an email. This sets the default value shown on the message read screen.
When you send an email to a person with an email address that isn't in your address book, you can have FastMail.FM add that email address to your address book automatically. The options are:
This tends to be most useful when you recieve an email from a person, and then reply to them. You can then save their email address straight to your address book and even add a nickname. If their email address included a full name with it, that will automatically be added as well.
When you login to FastMail.FM, you can choose to save your password. This puts a cookie on your machine that automatically logs you in next time you go to http://www.fastmail.fm. If you have a login cookie on your computer, a button labelled 'Clear' will appear here. If you don't have a login cookie, the word 'None' will appear here.
If you want to remove this cookie, so that you aren't automatically logged in next time, you can either 'Logout' of your session, or click the 'Clear' button here.
Normally FastMail.FM will change the character set of the view message screen to the appropriate character set for that message, thus allowing you to view messages in foreign languages correctly. Unfortunately this is not possible on the Mailbox screen because different messages could use different character sets.
However, if you tend to receive lots of messages with the same character set, you can set it here so that all screens without a known character set use this one instead.
The default value used is ISO-8859-1
This popup lets you choose how often FastMail.FM contacts you. The options are:
Spammers sometimes send email with images or other items embedded in them which load from a remote website when you read the email. This lets them know whether their spam got through to you, and if it did, they'll try to send you lots more spam.
If you select 'Disable images', FastMail.FM won't display any remote images in the web interface, or cause your browser to automatically load any other remote content when you read html emails. You can still view remote images in trusted messages by clicking a link in view screen.
If you select 'Enable images for known senders only', then images will be enabled only for messages that were sent from someone who is in your address book. Messages that appear to be sent by you will still have the images disabled, because many spammers set the from address to the same address they send to.
This option also disables forms in html emails. It is possible for malicious forms, when submitted, to send commands to servers and abuse privileges associated with your IP address. Again, you can click a link in the view screen to see the form if you trust that the message is not malicious.
By default, any outgoing email messages are wrapped at 72 characters, in order to make your messages easily viewable for a wide range of email reading software.
If you uncheck this checkbox, FastMail.FM will leave any long lines unwrapped. Note that this may cause problems for some people, so you should only clear this checkbox if you are certain that the recipients of your message are able to deal with long lines.