aMail version 2.1.2

User's Guide - About aMail

AUTHOR'S COMMENTS

This program was first written by Alex Hart, and is freely available. It's programmed entirely in Perl, and most of the testing of this program was done in a Linux environment on Netscape, V4.7?. It is by no means bug-free, but we're fixing it as they come. We are also sure there are some formatting problems on some systems with some browsers. The html uses a lot of javascript, and some of this breaks down in Windows, especially IE. If anyone can fix some of the javascript to work better, please send us the fixes and join to the club as developer (you can join anyway) !!!

Beginning in August 2000 this program became a coordinated effort from a group of people that considered aMail advanced enough to get it growth to the sky instead of write a new one from scratch.

This program was written to be a web based replacement for Outlook Express or Netscape Mail. As you can see from the screen shots, aMail looks more like a typical desktop mail application than do most web applications. On the main screen there are actually 4 different frames with information, all tied together with javascript.These scripts do not hand out email addresses or do any other account setup other than that needed to check and store user mail. Users need to already have a POP server account and SMTP server account to read or send mail through aMail.

Alex Hart wrote this program to improve his Perl skills and to have a good, web based email account. Email is something many people use every day, and nothing out there looked good enough. Alex wanted a web based email account without ads and without a size limit, so he tried to put in the exact features what he like to use in an e-mail program, both features seen in other mail programs, and some have never seen. This is a feature rich mail program, but there are limitations to web applications.

This is a work in progress, and probably will be forever.

PROGRAM NAME

If there is something else out there called aMail, this has nothing to do with it. If another aMail entity does exist and this has any legal ramifications, you may want to change the references to it, or at least take all mention of it off any web pages that are displayed (i.e. The aMail Login screen).

Contributors

This is a list of all the people that had contributed to aMail with time, code or any other way:

Alex Hart
Victor A. Rodriguez
Tony Leake
Alson van der Meulen
Ed Wehner

Alex Hart new work (ATPmail)

Alex Hart, aMail creator, is not working in the aMail project. Instead has written a new Web-based email program, called ATPmail, for those who want a low cost solution to Webmail, but ATPmail is head and shoulders above aMail in terms of functionality and appearance. It has a much more professional look and feel, and is less prone to bugs than aMail. You can see a demo of ATPmail at Alex web site.

Some of the advantages of ATPmail over aMail include:

Multiple email accounts per user
Automatically check email while logged in
Popup window when new email arrives
Admin screens
User quotas
Smaller, faster Web pages
Better browser compatibility
Less orange
Smarter javascript
Support for sendmail or SMTP
Option to download only new messages
Full time-zone support
Unix passwd file support for creating accounts.

Please, take in mind that this was written during December 2000, and that some changes are made to aMail and ATPmail that can't be reflected in this list.