offline notification

You have suggestions to improve PopMan? Here is the right place to mention them.

Moderator: Christian

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bigben

offline notification

Post by bigben »

Hi Christian,
I think it would be usefull to have a notification message/window when someone tries to call for mails without being online!
Best regards bigben
bigben

offline notification

Post by bigben »

Hi Christian,
I am wondering that no one else seems to have this problem mentioned in the forgoing message. At that time I didtn´t know the precise circumstances of this behavior - I just saw that there was no reaction on the screen when I tried to call for mails without beeing online. Not even the logon-window showed up. Meanwhile I made several tests und found that the programm reacted as desired (error-message 401) when run under win98! When the same Version of Popman(usb-stick) was operate under my winXP-system, there was no reaction as stated before. Everything was normal when Popman was started after beeing online. Further systematical tests revealed that the cause for this annoying behavior was the checkbox "DFÜ verwenden"! As soon this option was unchecked - everthing was normal and fine! This option seems a bit tricky under winxp and the recommendation in the helpfile should probably be thought over.
By the way, how about a german version of the helpfile? I think a lot of "normal" (and potential) users are not so familiar with this technical englisch, resp. englisch at all, to get the nessacary help and benefit from this feature.
Best regards BB
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Christian
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Post by Christian »

Further systematical tests revealed that the cause for this annoying behavior was the checkbox "DFÜ verwenden"! As soon this option was unchecked - everthing was normal and fine! This option seems a bit tricky under winxp and the recommendation in the helpfile should probably be thought over.
If the "Use dial-up networking" option is checked, PopMan detects whether there is an internet connection by calling the function InternetGetConnectedState of the WinInet.dll. If this function says that there is no connection, PopMan tries to go online by calling InternetAutodial, which will display the Windows Dial-up dialog, if Internet Explorer is configured to do so (Extras > Internetoptionen > Verbindungen > "Immer Standardverbindung wählen"). If you have no dial-up connection configured (because you use DSL or WLAN), no dial-up dialog appears and PopMan will just do nothing (because Internet connection could not be established). You are right that in this case there should be some kind of notification, e.g. in the right pane of the status bar. I don't want an annoying message box, because there is no easy way to distinguish, if there was no dial-up dialog at all or if the user just canceled the dial-up process.

If the "Use dial-up networking" option is unchecked, PopMan will not check if there is an internet connection but just goes ahead and tries to connect to the mail server, which results in error messages for each account if there is no internet connection. Therefore, I still recommend to have the "Use dial-up networking" option enabled (if you have a permanent internet connection it doesn't matter).
How about a german version of the helpfile?
Most people tend to ignore any kind of help file, but of course I have nothing against translated help files. Maybe I will provide a German help file with PopMan 1.3, but I won't promise (I don't even know when 1.3 will be released!), maybe there will be volunteers providing a translated version from the English original, so I can focus on the program development...
Christian Hübner
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