Top Gun Postman is no longer supported. The most recent version is called ProxiMail, and can be obtained from ProxiNet.
Update: actually, it seems ProxiMail is no longer supported by ProxiNet either. Hmmm. Sounds like a market niche that needs filling.
The remainder of this page is present for historical reference only.
Top Gun Postman is a POP3/APOP3 and SMTP capable mail dispatcher that runs on the Palm Pilot Professional. Top Gun Postman enables you to send mail messages that you have composed offline, and retrieve mail messages that are waiting for you in your POP3/APOP3 accessible mail spool. Top Gun Postman is not a complete mail package - it relies on the built-in Mail program that is distributed with the Palm Pilot Pro for the composition and viewing of messages.
This release is a beta version of the program, which means that although we believe we've eliminated most of the bugs, you may still run across a few. If so, please report them.
Feedback is encouraged; you can reach the developers at mailto:topgun@abraham.cs.berkeley.edu.
Version 1.2 beta incorporates the following new features and bug-fixes:
FrmCustomAlert()
, which is supposed to bring up an error dialog
box. Unfortunately, it seems to be buggy and will often crash the Pilot
instead. We removed the call to this routine and replaced it with our own
error dialog box.
Version 1.1 beta incorporated the following new features and bug-fixes:
TGpostman.prc
on your Pilot (using Pilot
Desktop on your Windows machine or pilot-xfer on your Unix machine).
TG Postman
application. You should see a
screen that looks like this:
Menu
button to bring up the menus.
About
menu, and select
About...
. Enjoy our cool attribution and the 1 bit photo
of ourselves.
Menu
button, and select the SMTP
Prefs...
item under the Options
menu. You
should see a screen that looks like this:
Save
button.
Pop Prefs...
item under the
Options
menu. You should see a screen that looks like
this:
Tap to enter
box to bring up the password
box, which looks like this:
Use
APOP
.
To:
,
From:
, Cc:
, and
Subject:
, pop up the list next to Paste extra
headers
, and select either "Top" or "Bottom". These extra headers
will appear at the beginning of the message if you select "Top", or at the end
of the message if you select "Bottom". Selecting "No" will suppress the extra
headers.
Truncate messages
at
. If you want as much of incoming messages as possible to be
stored, select the "Mem" option from the list; this will cause Top Gun Postman
to truncate the message only when it cannot allocate any more memory for it.
This memory limit is usually around 20-24K, but sometimes is as large as 32K
or more.
Delete
from server
. If you select "No", messages will stay on the server
after you download them. If you select "If complete", messages will be deleted
from the server only if they were not truncated during download.
Save only unread
messages
. This is useful in case you have lots of previously viewed
messages in your POP3 mailspool that you don't want cluttering up your inbox.
Top Gun Postman detects previously read messages by noting that the
R
status flag is set in a Status:
header.
Query for each
message
. This is useful in case people like sending you postscript
or large MIME inclusions by email. If this option is selected as well as
Save only unread messages
, you will NOT be queried
regarding previously read messages.
Save
button. Mail
application that is built into the Palm Pilot
Professional. Your composed mail will be filed in your
Outbox
, which is where Top Gun Postman will look for
messages to send. If the very first line of your mail message is ## (on a line
by itself), then all subsequent lines until a completely blank line are treated
as additional headers.
TG Postman
and tap on the Send mail
button. Top Gun Postman will attempt to start a PPP session (if one hasn't
already been started), and then will connect to the configured SMTP server and
send your mail. All successfully sent mail messages will be refiled in the
Filed
folder.
TG Postman
and tap on the Get
mail
button. Top Gun Postman will start a PPP session (if necessary),
and then will connect to the POP server. Once authentication has succeeded, Top
Gun Postman will begin downloading messages. You should notice a dialog box that
looks like the following while messages are being downloaded:
If you have indicated that you want Top Gun Postman to query you for each message, a dialog box will pop up after the header of each message is downloaded; this dialog box contains two buttons and a checkbox as well as the message headers and size, and should look like this:
Delete from server
popup list if you want to change the
default delete behavior for this message; the entries have the same meanings as
in the POP Preferences screen. Then, tap on either the Get
Message
or the Skip Message
button depending on
whether you want the message to be retrieved or not. Note: if you tap on
Skip Message
, but have Delete from
server
set to "Yes", the message will not be downloaded but will be
deleted from the server.
All downloaded messages will be automatically filed in your
Inbox
. If you hit the Cancel
button in
the middle of a POP3 mail transfer, any already downloaded messages will be
preserved on your Pilot, but no messages will be deleted from the POP3 server.
Note: to send your outgoing messages and download your POP mail all at once,
you can tap the Both
button at the bottom of the main title
screen.
Top Gun Postman doesn't control PPP - Palm OS automatically forges the default PPP connection when the network library is accessed. A useful trick, however, is to simply turn off the Pilot by pressing the green button instead of going to the Network preferences screen to manually disconnect PPP. Turning off the Pilot causes an open PPP connection to be gracefully shut down.
Mail Inbox records are limited to roughly 32KB in size by Palm OS, so we cannot store mail messages larger than this. We do gracefully handle large messages by truncating them as needed.
Nope. Maybe in the future, but no promises.
Top Gun Postman (aka TG Postman) was written by Ian Goldberg and Steve Gribble. If you feel so inclined, you may send money, postcards, t-shirts, or anything else you think we'd like to:
Ian Goldberg and Steve Gribble Soda Hall #1776, UC Berkeley Campus Berkeley, CA 94720-1776 USA
Comments, bug reports, success and failure stories are welcome; send them to the pilot-unix list or to the developers at mailto:topgun@abraham.cs.berkeley.edu.
Back to the ISAAC Group's Pilot page
This software is copyrighted by the Regents of the University of California. The following terms apply to all files associated with the software unless explicitly disclaimed in individual files.
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