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FastMail.FM does not open links in a new window because it's very easy to do this yourself. Just press and hold 'SHIFT' and click the link (Internet Explorer) or click the link with the middle mousebutton (Firefox). On the other hand, if every link would open in a new window it would be impossible to make it behave otherwise, forcing you into something you otherwise could have chosen yourself.
A related trick: Press CTRL+W to close the new window you opened and return to your e-mail.
Email on the internet is defined by a standard called RFC 2822. This specifies the way headers (eg email subject, to address, date sent, etc) are stored as well as the way message bodies and attachments are created. In general, message bodies tend to come in one of two main formats; text or HTML. The "XXX view" links control which part and the way these are displayed.
Displays the text portion of a message body. Most emails, even those with an HTML body, also have a text body that is a text only approximation of the HTML. If a message only has an HTML body, FastMail.FM will try and generate a textual approximation in this mode.
By default, if there is an HTML body, it will be preferred over the text body for display. If you prefer to view the text body of a message by default, you can go to the Options and Account Preferences screens and uncheck the "View HTML" checkbox.
Displays the HTML portion of a message body. If the message does not have an HTML body, this option is not available.
Unfortunately HTML is not a perfectly "embeddable" system, that is, you cannot just copy and paste one bit of HTML into another and have it *necessarily* display correctly. Since the entire view screen is an HTML page (eg the heading, the movement controls, etc), just sticking the HTML of the message into the rest of the page may not display correctly. So what we do is look at the contents of the HTML message and try and work out if it is directly embeddable or not. If it is, we default to this view, the "HTML view" which places the HTML message body "inline". If we determine that the HTML is *not* embeddable however, we use the "Framed view", which uses a different system to display the HTML message body in a more accurate way.
Displays the HTML portion of a message body in a separate "frame". If the message does not have an HTML body, this option is not available.
As described above, if the HTML of the message body is determined to be "not embeddable", we use a special HTML construct called an "iframe" to display the message body. This ensures accurate rendering of the message body contents.
Because of the way iframes work, we have to pick a particular height for the iframe initially, which if it is smaller than the entire contents of the HTML message body, may result in a separate scrollable area appearing. We try and make it so that once the message has loaded within this area, we resize it to the true height of the message so there is no separate scrollable area, just the whole page, but due to the way browsers work, this is not always possible.
The net result is that in "Framed view" you may notice two things.
In both cases, we're trying to make the best of HTML and browser will allow us to do.
This displays the raw underlying RFC2822 message contents. This is mostly for technical users only. Most people will not need to see use this unless they want to see some specific technicaly details about the message, or are asked to look at or copy the "complete message including all headers".
To display some HTML emails better, we use an HTML construct called an iframe. We only do this for browsers that are known to support iframes correctly. However it appears the "McAfee Privacy Service" disables iframes in some browsers, causing this problem. We recommend disabling the "McAfee Privacy Service", and instead use a better browser such as Firefox instead.
Sometimes you might receive an e-mail that has multiple attachments. In order to save you both time and bandwidth FastMail.FM offers you the option of downloading all attachments in an archive. These compressed archives require less space and bandwidth. You can open them using a ZIP-capable program (for example Winzip).
A related hint: You can also use this feature directly from the Mailbox view. Just click on the [*] in the 'A' column.
Yes. On the view message screen, select 'Print View' from the 'View' menu.
We don't actually have anything special in our HTML that should cause problems. However, we've heard of this happening with Netscape 4, when you use a 'Secure Login'. Why, we don't know. But if you login with a regular 'Login', it doesn't seem to have the problem.
This section contains controls that let you save attachments directly to your File Storage area. To save attachments to your File Storage, select the checkboxes on the left of each attachment you would like to save. Then choose the folder you would like to save the attachments to from the dropdown list in the 'File Storage' section. Finally, click the button 'Save Selected Attachments'.
If you just want to download an attachment directly to your computer, without saving it in File Storage, simply click on the name of the attachment.
These checkboxes are used to select attachments for saving to your File Storage area.
If you just want to download an attachment directly to your computer, without saving it in File Storage, simply click on the name of the attachment.
The three links < Mailbox > delete the current message, and then go to the previous message, the mailbox and the next message respectively.
These buttons let you reply to the sender of an email, reply to the sender and all other recipients, or forward the email to someone else.
On the advanced view screen, the popup menu to the right of these buttons lets you choose how the original message will be included in your reply or forwarding message.
This menu lets you choose how the original message will be included in your reply or forwarding message. There are six options. The best way to find out what they do is to experiment, but here is a summary.
On the advanced view screen there is a complicated-looking tool with a pull-down menu of folders and actions, a [+] link, and some navigation buttons. It's called the action tool, and looks like this:
and: [+]
If you click the [+], the navigation buttons are expanded into another pull-down menu:
and: [-]
You can click [-] to switch back to using the buttons.
The most important thing you're likely to want to do with this tool is move a message to a different folder. You can do that by selecting for example the -> Family (9/2) item from the menu, then clicking one of the navigation buttons, to choose where to go next. The numbers (9/2) indicate that there are 9 messages in the Family folder, 2 of which are unread.
There are some other actions you can choose:
For example, you might want to mark the message you've been reading as unread, then go to read the messages in your Friends folder. Select Mark unread from the action menu, click on the [+] so the navigation menu appears, select the Friends (10) item from that menu, then click Do. The navigation menu also has options to jump to the previous and next unread message, or the first or last message in the current folder.
The advanced view screen has keyboard shortcuts for all of the things you can do with the action tool. The keyboard shortcuts can help you to navigate and deal with mail faster than if you use the mouse.
When you press ctrl-space, a popup will appear with a list of actions and the shortcuts for each, for example `d' for delete. Once you have pressed a key for an action, a second popup will appear, so that you can choose which message to go to next. You can also choose to go back to the mailbox, or to a different folder.
To hide the popup, press esc, or ctrl-space again.
If you just want to navigate to a different message, you can press `ctrl-space g' for go to, and then choose where to go. Once you know the destinations, you can skip the `g', for example `ctrl-space .' takes you to the next message.
The Delete permanently action is dangerous, so we've made the shortcut - capital X - hard to type accidentally.
Yes, use ctrl-/ instead.
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 web bug protection is enabled, we replace external images with grey rectangles. You can click the link to show images if you think the message is safe. If you want to disable web bug protection entirely, go to Options -> Account Preferences, and change the Web Bug Protection option.
Forms in html emails can also be harmful, and are disabled if web bug protection is in effect. It is possible for malicious forms, when submitted, to send commands to servers and abuse privileges associated with your IP address. You can click the link to see the form.
Unless your web browser has cookies enabled, there is a security risk (apart than the risk of web bugs!) in displaying remote images in an email.
If you want to see the images, please enable cookies on your web browser. If your browser allows you to enable cookies just for some websites, you can choose to enable them only for the FastMail.FM site.
Here is a technical explanation of the security risk. When most popular browsers fetch an image, they send the URL of the previous page in a HTTP_REFERER request header. If you use FastMail.FM without cookies, the URL contains authentication tokens. Someone could record the HTTP_REFERER header and use the URL to access your email account. When cookies are enabled, a URL cannot be used to access your mail (without the cookie, which is NOT sent in the HTTP_REFERER headers!). We use `redirect links' to eliminate this security risk for links in html emails, but we can't do this for images; so enable cookies!