PoptrayU / Blog: Recent posts

This is a quick bug-fix release to address sounds not playing properly in 5.0 beta 1 (it was an easy to fix issue caused by the Delphi upgrade).

The Dutch translation has also been updated.

As I've recently upgraded my copy of Delphi, the entire project ported from Delphi 7 (written for windows XP) to Delphi XE4 (written for Windows 7/8). So this is a significant enough improvement to bump the major version number, despite 4.1 never having made it anywhere close to coming out of beta. Related to this upgrade:

Native Unicode Strings
One of the biggest changes in the new version of Delphi is that it uses two-byte unicode strings instead of one-byte ansi strings as the native format for strings. The upside of this is that this pretty much eliminates any lingering unicode issues like subjects that don't decode correctly, or unsupported code-pages, and a lot of kludge workarounds for getting non-unicode strings back from the Indy Networking tools are no longer needed. The downside is that the compiled application size immediately doubled since the unicode strings take up twice as much room to store, but hopefully the benefits will far outweigh the increased executable size.... read more

One of the long-standing problems of PopTrayU (and it's predecessor PopTray) is that although the program itself has been translated into a vast variety of languages, the installer itself only supported English, making it difficult for non-English speakers to use.

So, to counter this problem, I've released a new unicode version of the installer that supports internationalization. The PopTrayU version remains unchanged (4.1 beta 2) at this time, it's just an updated installer, not a new version of PopTrayU. I went ahead and translated everything into most of the languages PopTray supports using Google Translate's automated translation tools. The full list of languages the installer supports is available on the new translation section on the website. If you are fluent in one of the languages now available in the installer, and would like to help fine-tune or improve the translations, I've set up a page with detailed information about translating the installer.... read more

If you've upgraded to 4.1 beta 1, you will probably want to update. This release adds a few bug fixes. In 4.1b1 the progress bar was not lined up right, one of the main toolbar icons did not match the internal icons, and a couple things that didn't correctly follow the dark theme (when enabled) have been fixed. The help file has been updated to include the new 4.1 options.

The only major non-bugfix change in this release is that IMAP is no longer a dll/plugin, but built into the core. This appears to have speed improvements for IMAP accounts, and more importantly, driving this change, it will make IMAP issues MUCH easier to debug. The installer will automatically remove the previous IMAP plugin for upgrade installations.

The 4.1 version of PopTrayU is exciting (well, at least to me) because I've finally successfully upgraded the Indy networking components from legacy version 9 to the current version 10. Version 10 does not require special Indy-specific versions of the OpenSSL dlls, which should make it faster and easier to keep up to date with the latest SSL improvements and bug-fixes. This is also an important first step in making the codebase ready to port to a more modern version of Delphi. ... read more

One small (but annoying) bug removed. Previously, on a correctly installed machine, the plugin would give an extraneous error message on first use, "cannot load ssl library", and then function properly as if there was no problem once you reconnect. So this should cut down on useless error messages that aren't meaningful.

I'm still looking into figuring out why on some systems the ssl libraries need to be in PopTrayU's folder, and on other systems they need to be in the plugins folder. Old versions of poptray put the dll's in Poptray's directory, and that seemed to work fine at one time, but on my windows 7 dev machine, the dll's won't load unless they're in the plugins directory instead.
If you'd like to help me troubleshoot this, please send me a message at https://sourceforge.net/sendmessage.php?touser=137843 or jojobear99@users.sourceforge.net saying what version of windows you have (and whether it's 32 or 64 bit) and whether it works better with the ssl dlls in the plugins folder or in the poptrayu folder.

A new version has been released to add two two small bug fixes.

First, when previewing emails I was occasionally seeing an error that encoding "utf8" that was "not supported" (though "utf-8" worked fine), so that's fixed. The list of possible email encodings is not very strict and has a lot of possible but less common alternate names for various encodings, and not every single one is programmed into poptrayu yet.... read more

At long last, I've updated the Pop3 with SSL (and/or APOP) plugin from PopTray for PopTrayU.

It can be downloaded from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/poptrayupop3ssl/files/

Internally, it's almost identical to the PopTray version, excepting the bundled version of the Indy SSL library is the latest (compatible) version available (0.9.8y), and I added some credits to the Plugin's config page. However, the installer has been completely rewritten for PopTrayU so installation should be a lot easier and nearly automatic. Uninstaller is of course bundled as well.... read more

From now on, creating an account is required to log a bug on http://poptrayu.sourceforge.net/bugs/bug_report_page.php
I'd love to make it easier to use this form without a registration form, but the amount of spam posting to the anonymous account is causing the real posts to get lost in the clutter. Requests sent by email will still be manually added by me if necessary.

I am working on updating some of the PopTray plugins and re-releasing them for PopTrayU. The first plugin I have updated is Keyboard Lights, which was originally included as part of Renier Crause's PopTray Example Plugins.

For those of you who disliking blinking indicators, Keyboard Lights 2.0 adds a configuration page to the plugin, which gives you a choice of two notification modes, (the original mode) flashing the scroll-lock key's light or (a new option) a solid non-flashing indicator.... read more

Now you can set do not check hours on a per-account basis (in addition to or instead of global not-checking hours. This feature was requested by work-at-home users who would prefer not to be notified about work-related email outside of work hours. To differentiate the account being 'disabled' and 'account checking is being skipped because of do not check hours', the later will have a navy blue disabled icon, instead of the usual red account disabled icon. Similar to other disabled accounts, you can still manually check the account during 'do not check' hours by clicking the "check" button on the account's new messages tab. Please report any issues with this new feature on our new bug tracker http://poptrayu.sourceforge.net/bugs/.... read more

This update is highly recommended. It upgrades Indy (the networking library) to the latest version which should make things more stable overall.

In particular, if you have seen an access violation at address 004A843B in Beta 7 or 004A7E71 in Beta 6 (or other locations in prior builds), which corresponds to a line of code in the Indy library where it's decoding a message header, upgrading to Beta 8 will eliminate this error.

A new release of PopTrayU is now available. If you get emails with international characters, you will probably want to install this release, as the plain-text view on the Preview window can now show a much wider-range of international characters. This release also fixes a user-reported bug where the preview window locks up loading certain invalid html, fixes minor memory leaks, and changes a couple undesirable behaviors.... read more

FYI: If you set IE (any IE window) into offline mode and leave it that way, PopTrayU's embedded IE window will be set offline as well. Which means it won't load spam images or for that matter any external content. But it also means you'll have to use another browser to actually surf the internet or download files at the same time as you're previewing your emails. But if you're really concerned about spam image tracking, and can't live without HTML preview, you may wish to try this.

This beta has lots of new and exciting features:

Although not the most significant change, the one I am probably most excited about is the addition of "custom" to the list of colors for the tray icon colors for each account. No more limit to just a handful of colors.

Options for customizing fonts throughout the app have been expanded, and the default font has been modified for Vista/Win7 users to match the Vista/Win7 user experience. ... read more

I've updated/replaced the installer for beta 5 with a new copy that fixes the bug where it doesn't automatically shut down PopTrayU for upgrade installations. No need to update again if you already successfully installed beta 5 with the previous installer. Just trying to make things more user-friendly for those who haven't already upgraded.

This release has two important bug fixes:

First, multiple instance prevention is no longer broken, and works once more. The option to run with the command line switch /MULTIPLE to allow multiple instances, should you prefer that, is still available as well. S

econdly, some error message clean up. The code for decoding less common code-pages has been improved so it can show accented and foreign characters in more cases now, and a non-sensical error message about '' being not an integer has been fixed and replaced with a more meaningful error message. ... read more

Beta 4 fixes a sound issue on XP and below. Users who have beta 3 do not need to update unless you have XP or less, as there are no other enhancements in this build.

Beta 3 (which I forgot to announce on this blog apparently) fixed a bug in the installer from beta 2 and adds some customization options for fonts/colors. Users with custom button skins should update their button skin accordingly.

A second beta is now available. It fixes some minor bugs in the first beta, such as a broken link to the help file, as well as introducing the option to save PopTray.ini to the AppData folder for Vista/Win7 users.

The Ini Storage location is displayed on the defaults page for your FYI in case you want to manually copy your old poptray ini to that folder. Skin files should also be saved to the appdata folder. In some future version I hope to make importing poptray.ini from older versions more automatic.

The first beta version of PopTrayU is now available. Please see the project sourceforge page to download and test it.