Evolutionary Features

Unlike Thunderbird, Outlook, et al., Eudora's market segment has almost always been power users. In many ways, it remains competitive and functional to this day, provided that the Hermes SSL extensions are properly installed. With that having been said, the evolution of eMail clients is such that many formerly "power" features have become indispensable, and new ones have, as it were, sprung up to fill the void. We can not afford to be left behind in this arms race; ergo, as soon as HERMES.EXE compiles, we must prepare for a feature upgrade.

Out of all software eMail clients (i.e. excluding SaaSS packages like Gmail, ProtonMail, GMX, et c.) the three most obviously targeted towards the power sector are Pegasus, The Bat!, and Postbox. Feature for feature, we will remain competitive with the former two upon our first release, and partially also with the latter. For our second release, we intend to expand our functionality with the following:

Hiding Read Messages

We should set up an option, perhaps in the View menu, to hide messages we've already read. Werner (for example) gets upwards of 100 msgs a day, and it would simplify things for him to see only UNREAD messages that he needs to handle. Suggested placement of this option would be on the right-click context menu for Read (the blue bullet), and also Special > Hide Read.

Attachment Size Limit

Some MSP's (eMail Service Providers) implement a size limit for attachments. For GMail, this is 25 megabytes. Wouldn't it be nice if we could configure HERMES Mail to pop up a warning if we try to send an oversize attachment (with the definition of "oversize" being configurable).

Re-Use of Attachments

We might do this in several ways. One way to do it would be to convert the Message > Send File menu item to a submenu, which would keep a history of the last 10 attached files. Another way would be to have a Message > Send Previously Sent File or Message > Re-Use Attachment menu item that would open a dialogue box list of all previously attached files (sourced from HERMES' Out.mbx or wherever it keeps sent attachments).

Virtual Mailbox for Search

As written, Eudora 7 uses a special, limited view for search results. This has been acknowledged by the Qualcomm team as a mistake, but their attempt to fix it was cut short by the EOL announcement. That all means we have to pick up the slack. Search will have to be implemented as a sort of 'virtual' mailbox, much like Windows represents My Computer, Fonts, Recycle Bin etc. as 'virtual' directories. Some of the missing functionality:

• Preview Pane
• Drag-and-drop of messages
• Fewer sorting options
• Alt/Click does not group like items (it ought to)
• Printing from search results
• Message -> Send Again

One way to approach reusing the current mailbox display code would be to first rework the code to access a collection of messages through an abstraction. For normal mailbox display, the collection of messages would be implemented using the TOC, and for search results, the collection of messages would be implemented as a list of search results.

Attachment Search

We should have a facility to find, for example, pictures within all received attachments. This is especially useful for users who get, for example, bills through eMail; it's common to look at a mail with the intention of paying later, the system marks it as read, and then the user has trouble finding it again.

International Character Handling

One of the priorities, as far as HERMES is concerned, is to handle international (ESPECIALLY European) languages properly. The world is not just America! It would appear that Apple is the company that best supports accented characters; it should be fairly easy to emulate the functionality set out at https://support.apple.com/kb/PH25643?locale=en_US

Effort Tracking

Some people put a lot of effort into writing eMail, perhaps more effort than is warranted in that particular case. We might help such users by including a feature where you set a specific word or time target, and HERMES alerts you as soon as aforementioned target is exceeded.

Mail Merge/Fields

This would be much like variables in programming languages. Let's have a feature where we can, for example, write something like Dear @recipient@, and have it expand (depending on who gets the eMail) to Dear Thomas, Dear Richard, Dear Henry. Similarly, we could have something like @IFRYHOS@ expand to "I forever remain your humble and obedient servant,". Would cut down on excess typing, plus people who get a form letter might like to have that letter address them specifically (I have become tired of writing something like Gentlemen: at the beginning of an eMail when I'm writing to multiple people).

HTML Source View

HERMES supports sending styled text already. Why not have a view where you can see HTML tags in that styled text, so you can write it directly instead of relying on WYSIWYG? Of course, I don't support removing WYSIWYG, just adding a YAFIYGI (you asked for it, you got it) view also.

Anti-Tracking

Bulk eMail marketing agencies often track who gets their eMail via 1x1 transparent PNG's et c. We need to bust that functionality. One way of doing this would be not to render images hosted on Sidekick, Yesware, Toutapp, Mailtrack, Rocketbolt, etc.

Unsubscribe Detection

It would be nice for HERMES to scan incoming messages for a "List-Unsubscribe" header and, if it finds one, to put a big blue "Unsubscribe" link next to the subject (in mailbox view). That way, one would simply click on aforementioned link to begin the unsubscription process.

Quotation Highlighting

We ought to set it up so that quoted text is coloured. This would make it much easier to tell who said what, which is a persistent problem for those who use eMail to co-ordinate multi-man projects. Also, the character used to quote lines should be user-configurable; > as the default is the obvious choice, but some people like | or guillemets instead.

Emojis

Eudora already replaces ASCII emoticons, when reading mail, with JPG's (it still sends them as ASCII, thankfully). This isn't really necessary, but it would be great if we had a method of inserting actual emojis (U+1F600..U+1F64F, U+1F900..U+1F9FF, U+1F300..U+1F5FF, U+2600..U+26FF)---maybe something like the Character Map? Another idea would be to have an alias for every emoji, something like :happy: etc, with a menu that pops up listing the possibilities as you type.

Detection of Addresses, Phone Numbers, and Tracking Numbers

It would be nice to have HERMES detect phone numbers, for example, display them as links, and start the appropriate handler when clicked (for example, Skype for phone numbers).

Configurable Display of Images

There ought to be an option for Blink (HERMES' HTML framework) not to display images. This does NOT---I repeat, not---mean to strip HTML out of styled eMails. Colours, styles, etc. should remain as is. Only images ought to be ignored.

[Walt Stagner]

All of the above sounds great for after HERMES can compile and you can get some beta testing going and or future releases.

Eudora also seems to truncate embedded links that people send me. I'm not sure what that character limit is, but you guys can find it in the source code, I'm sure.

Another issue (and maybe this is all the "UT" stuff you're talking about is that I get weird characters embeded in email that I get...especial from Yahoo and Gmail users. For example that A with 2 dots over it in the message below or maybe it's an A with a tilde char:

• Unleash a surge of energy in your eyes (and say gooodbye to eye strain) • Soothe burning eyes caused by sitting iin front of the computer • Sharpen vision so you can read fine priint on a prescription label • Rediscover your confidence when drivingg at night • Win back your independence and freedom
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