操作练习：邮件管理

本次练习讲解主要针对 Haiku 下的邮件管理。并且我们假定 电子邮箱 首选项中已经对邮件服务作了正确的配置，并且您已经对 电子邮箱 应用的基本功能有了一定的了解。

Haiku 邮件系统

如果您在使用 Haiku 之前有过其他系统的经验，您可能会习惯于 MS Outlook 或者 Mozilla 的雷鸟等大型邮件程序。您必须输入所有有关邮件服务器地址等的信息进行配置，并且它们使用各自的联系人数据库。它们负责发送和获取邮件，并将邮件存入一些大的特殊文件。
更换邮件客户端会非常的麻烦，您必须进行导入/导出等操作，还要进行系列的转换。同时使用多个邮件客户端检查邮件也是不可行的，可能会带来不必要的混乱。

Haiku 邮件系统稍有不同。它由一些较小的独立模块构成。

mail_daemon 负责与您的邮件服务器进行通信。电子邮件 首选项集中管理邮件账户的配置，例如邮件检查时间。

每个收到/发送的消息都将保存为单个的邮件文件，它们的邮件头信息（如发送者，主题，日期）和状态（如新邮件，已回复，已发送）保存为 BFS 属性。这样能够方便使用 Haiku 的快速查询进行搜索和过滤。

With every email being in a separate file, viewing them becomes just as easy as browsing through a folder (or query result) of images with ShowImage. Leaving the Tracker window open, you'll see the moving selection of the currently viewed file while you use the previous/next button to move through them.
As they are independent files, using a viewer other than Haiku's Mail causes no problems whatsoever.

Similarly, creating a new message results in just another file that is handed to the mail_daemon that takes care of sending it off. Contact management is deferred to the People application.

In a nutshell, where other mail clients do everything, from communicating with the mail servers to providing a view with all your mails and tools to search and filter them, Haiku uses a chain of smaller tools and general file management:

• The mail_daemon to fetch/send mail and save them as normal files.

• Tracker windows and queries to find and show email files.

• The Mail application to view email files and create new messages relying on system-wide contact management by the People app.

Especially using Tracker and queries to manage emails is a powerful idea. The experience you gain can be transferred to any other problem that is dealing with files. Be it images, music, video, contacts or any other documents, using Tracker is at the core of all file managing.
Also, improvements in any of these system areas benefit not just emailing, but all applications that make use of them.

自定义状态

在您检查自己的新邮件时，您可能希望之后在仔细的进行阅读。您可以使用电子邮件菜单的关闭且保留为新邮件 ，让它们仍然保留在您的 “新邮件” 查询中，以这种方式让任务保留起来。

当然另一种方式是撰写回复并保存为草稿。但是如果您不希望编写回复，而只是留待以后再次阅读，这样就不大方便。

Better use Close and | Set to... to create a new status and use that to categorize your mail. For example, you could call the status "Later", and then query for that when you find more time.
Or you use different statuses for specific projects. For example, I created a status "HUG" (for "Haiku user guide") under which I collect every mail that may influence the contents of the user guide, like commit messages about code changes that alter or introduce some feature or anything else I feel could improve the user guide.
In any case, try to keep the status name short. That way it always fits in a normally wide "Status" column in Tracker.

You don't have to open an email with the Mail application to set its status. With the Tracker add-ons Mark as Read and Mark as... you can select some email files and set their status in one go.

使用查询

Sure, you specify a folder to store all your email, you can open it et voilà, there's all you mail. But over time the folder becomes crowded and showing all will take longer and longer as thousands of files and their attributes have to be parsed and sorted. Also, most of the time you don't really care about two year old emails of Nigerian princes and their inheritory trouble ...

Queries, to the rescue!

By using queries, you can narrow down the view of your mails. Actually, the mailbox icon in the Deskbar uses queries.

The Open Draft submenu does a query for the status "Draft", which is set by Mail when you save a message.

Open Inbox Folder and Open Mail Folder are just links to regular folders (and not very useful in my opinion).

The # new messages submenu is populated by a query for email with the status "New" (that same query is used to change the mailbox icon to show some letters in it, by the way).

You can add your own queries (or folders, applications, scripts etc.) to that context menu too, by putting them or links to them into ~/config/settings/Mail/Menu Links.

查询实例

下面是几个有用的查询实例：

查询具有自定义状态 "Later " 的所有邮件。	查询过去两天的所有邮件。
查询两周内 Ingo Weinhold 发送的所有邮件。	查询 12 个月内 Haiku commit list 上的所有内容。

更多帮助

• If you don't save a query as "Query" but as "Query template", invoking it won't show the result window, but the Find... window instead. That way you can easily exchange the search string for the subject or sender, for example, or change a "2 days" time limit to "3 days".

• Activating "type-ahead filtering" in Tracker's preferences allows you to very quickly filter a query result even further. Often it's enough to query for all mails of the last 3 days and go with type-ahead filtering from there. The big advantage is, that you don't have to exactly specify which attribute to search for, as all displayed are considered when filtering.

• RelatedMail is a nifty little application that will query for all mails with the same subject/sender/time-frame etc. of a dropped email. Kind of what the Queries menu in the Mail app is supposed to do.