Defining Your Customization Requirements

Before you customize mail for Communications Express, you need to decide your customization goals. There are several common customization scenarios.

• Customizing the Skin to Modify Global Look and Feel

• Customizing Text

• Customizing Mail by Domain

• Customizing Mail Icons

• Adding Extra Features

Customizing the Skin to Modify Global Look and Feel

To customize the skin, you need to understand the structure of the underlying Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). The Skin color, font style, or font size can be globally changed in the CSS file.

Customizing Text

Since the mail client supports internationalization, most of the text used in mail are referenced through a special array named i18n. The strings are saved in xx/i18n.js, where xx is the locale name for the specific language. To replace the text with a desired text, you need to look up the string from xx/i18n.js and modify it. The default encoding for all files is UTF-8, and you need to make sure that you use the right one, especially when the text contains non-Latin characters.

Customizing Mail by Domain

Mail supports customization specific for each domain . A user who belongs to a specific domain will be directed to a different view (skin) on signing in. Refer the chapter Chapter 8, Customizing Communications Express for a Specific Domain for more information on customizing mail by domain.

Customizing Mail Icons

All Image files are stored in imx/ directory. You can look up the image file name from HTML files and replace the URL with the required one.

Adding Extra Features

For features that are not supported by the current mail component, you can create a new function using the listFrameHTML() function in the corresponding _fs_lr.html. You can also add new functions to be called by listFrameHTML(). The new content will then be inserted in the mail application. If the feature to be added involves more technical aspects that are not documented here, contact Sun Professional Service for assistance.