Solaris Common Desktop Environment: User's Guide

Viewing Your Mail Messages

Once you've started Mailer and begun to collect email messages, you'll want to read and perhaps sort them.

To Read a Mail Message

Choose Check for New Mail from the Mailbox menu to retrieve any new messages that have been delivered to your mailbox.

Click to select the message to be viewed from the Message Header List.

The text of the message is displayed in the message view area.

Use the Next and Previous buttons on the Toolbar or options on the View menu to continue to select and read messages in the message view area.

To open a message into a separate window for reading:

Select the message and choose Open from the Message menu. From this window, the Edit and Attachments menus become available.

The message remains in the separate window even when you select another message in your Message Header List. You can then view two messages at the same time.

To Change the Character Set of an Incoming Message

On occasion, you may receive an email message from a machine that uses an encoding that is different from the default encoding for your machine. To be able to read the message, change the character set for your machine to one that matches the message's encoding (for example, US-ASCII).

Select the message in the Message Header List.

Choose Change Char Set from the View menu or press Control+Y, the keyboard accelerator.

Mailer displays the name of a character set (for example, US-ASCII) in the footer immediately below the Toolbar icons.

Choose the Change Char Set menu item or press Control+Y again to cycle through the choices until the correct one is displayed.

Selecting Default Char Set displays your message in the default encoding for your machine.

Mailer converts the text of the message to the character set that you selected, not its header or attachments.

Sorting Mail Messages

You can use the options on the View menu to order your messages.

By Date/Time	Sorts messages with the most recent at the bottom
By Sender	Sorts messages alphabetically by sender name
By Subject	Sorts messages alphabetically by subject
By Size	Sorts messages from the smallest to the largest
By Status	Sorts messages together by read and new (useful if you read your mail in non-sequential order)

The message headers are rearranged and redisplayed in the mailbox in the new order.