INTRODUCTION
v0.18.0 was a major update and inevitably some bugs crept in that we didn't
detect prior to shipping. Happily they have been fixed, and even more
happily the regression test suite now has tests for many of them so that
they will never reoccur. v0.18.1 fixes these bugs (see THE GORY DETAILS
below for the gory details) and also has two significant changes: the
caching code associated with the History page has been totally rewritten
by me so that the History barely slows down as the number of messages in
the History increases; the Windows installer can now configure Outlook
and Outlook Express Internet email accounts for you (and undo the changes
if you uninstall POPFile).
POPFile v0.18.1 is also the first version where the UI meets the Bobby AA
rating for accessibility. This means that not only does POPFile not
discriminate against particular operating system, or natural languages,
or ways you want to sort your mail, but it is also accessible by everyone
regardless of the specific challenges they face. (FOr more details on
this drop by http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/about.jsp)
Aside: If you are young, fit, and computer literate you might wonder why I
bothered to make Bobby-level accessibility a requirement. Early on in
POPFile's development a user told me that POPFile was a life changer. For
him, sorting mail had been an arduous, frustrating task.
ESSENTIAL READING IF YOU ARE UPGRADING FROM v0.17.x
1. BACK UP YOUR OLD INSTALLATION: POPFile makes this really easy, just copy
the entire POPFile directory somewhere. You can then safely install
POPFile v0.18.1 on top of your current installation; I just think a back up
is a sensible precaution.
2. YOUR HISTORY WILL CLEAR: I have changed the format of the History files
used in this version which means that the old History files will not be
read by POPFile and will in fact be deleted to save disk space. If you
need to do any reclassifications prior to installing v0.18.1 do them!
POPFile does NOT clear buckets, statistics or anything else on install of
this version, just the History files. To refresh the History view click
the History tab at any time; POPFile will check disk for new messages.
3. IF YOU HAD BROKEN MAGNETS: I have added automatic update of broken magnets.
If you had a magnet like [foo] which POPFile mistakenly changed to \[foo\]
it should get magically fixed and start working.
4. ACCURACY MIGHT DROP FOR A SHORT WHILE: because of some changes made in the
mail parser it is possible that you might see accuracy drop initially and
you may find yourself reclassifying a few messages that used to work. This
is unfortunate but necessary to make POPFile even more accurate than before
and v0.18.1 incorporates changes that make POPFile's classification
accuracy better; however old corpuses might need a little retraining.
DOWNLOADING
You can obtain the latest release of POPFile by visiting
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=63137
UPGRADING
Just install POPFile on top of the currently installed version. But did you
read the ESSENTIAL READING above first if you are upgrading from a pre v0.18.0
version?
FAQ
zonk3r has spent a great deal of time on a POPFile FAQ. Please check it out
as it covers many questions that you might have:
http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=14421&group_id=63137
THE GORY DETAILS
1. Fixed a serious bug that could cause POPFile to stop responding to POP3
and HTTP requests in the middle of downloading mail when the mail message
containing a MIME encoding that used certain characters that were special
in a Perl regular expression. (Reported by ecarlseen, gilesjuk, panther757,
szkaroly and fixed by sschinke)
2. The skinning system continues to evole with kraelen, stanley_krute and
kinematics working madly to make everything skinnable, make everything
comply with HTML 4.01, CSS1 and Bobby AA guidelines.
3. The code that handled the History cache that was meant to speed the loading
of the History pages and that I originally wrote was pretty lame and
some people (including me!) were ending up with 1000 message in the history
and the load time sucked. So I fixed it. The new cache will load ONCE and
ONLY ONCE per file and caches everything in memory. When new messages are
received they get loaded once per new message as well. When a History
page needs to be generated everything can be loaded from the cache without
doing any disk access which means that you should see little difference
between 10 messages and 1000.
4. To magnets would not work correctly if the To line in the email header
contained multiple lines. (Reported by drunin and fixed by kinematics)
5. There was a nasty problem where sometimes the statistics would not update
correctly which typically happened when you downloaded a large number of
emails in one batch. This was caused by the fact that we weren't flushing
the pipe between the child POP3 process and the parent regularly, this has
been modified so that this can never happen and statistics update in real
time even as mail is downloading. (Reported by burale, ct85711)
6. The Windows installer has been much improved with the assistance of
xuesheng to make it reconfigure Outlook and Outlook Express for you and
include a number of new screens.
7. Quarantine had a couple of bugs where it would show the incorrect date
(reported by thejcab) and the wrong to address (reported by dyoungmciwcom)
under some circumtances.
8. When the From or Subject was encoded using base64 or quoted printable
weird things would show up in the History. (Reported by goulduck and fixed
by williamxp)
9. spf and I went back and forth discussing line endings in the files saved to
disk so that all the MSG and CLS files could be loaded into an editor on
any platform without extraneous characters.
10. People who live on the Bleeding Edge were getting update warnings from
POPFile even though they were on the latest version. This has been fixed
on the update server.
11. Magnets containing the & character could not be deleted. (Reported by the
infamous stanley_krute and fixed by helphand)
12. There was a bug associateds with invisible ink detection that could cause
POPFile's HTML engine to think invisible ink was in use when a font tag
spanned a table. (Reported by mfichtner)
13. If POPFile didn't exit gracefully then statistics were not being saved to
disk and would not be up to date. (Reported by daemon72)
14. The Shutdown page had no CSS because POPFile was shutdown, we now have a
simple SSI solution just for the shutdown page. (Fix and report by
helphand)
15. There was a problem with Subject Line Modification where if it was turned
off every subject line got an extra space in it. (Reported by and
fixed by helphand)
16. There was a bug where you couldn't look up words that had # in them.
(Reported by adammc and fixed by helphand)
17. Viewing base64 encoded messages in the History resulted in little useful
output. (Reported by biljir and fixed by pkarlin)
18. sschinke whipped up a new -archive option that causes message removed from
the History to get saved away on disk.
19. sschinke made POPFile behave better when a POP3 server suddenly stops
responding in the middle of a conversation.
DONATIONS
Thank you to everyone who has clicked the Donate! button and donated their
hard earned cash to me in support of POPFile. Thank you also to the people
who have contributed patches, feature requests and bug reports and big thanks
to the two POPFile team members Stan and Sam for their continued efforts.
Keep the ideas and bug reports coming.
John.