Mail Management
Moving The Bat! - into and out of
How should I back up The Bat! to move to a new machine or a reformatted hard drive?
1. First remove any trace of a TB! installation from the destination system.
2. Backup all your accounts with the built-in TB! backup tool on your source machine. If you chose to store the attachments separately from the messages, select the "store the attachments with messages" option while performing the backup.
3. Perform a new installation of TB! on the destination system. Create a dummy account while prompted and don't worry too much about the settings. The only thing to do is to place your default 'MAIL' account where you want it to reside (if you're not satisfied with its default location).
4. Perform a full restore from the backup file created in step 2 onto the destination system. Allow TB! to create new accounts when prompted. If you use color groups, copy the file "colors.ini" from the default mail folder on the source machine to the default mail folder on the destination machine.
5. Start The Bat! normally, and you should have your original set-up back.I want to move The Bat! to another folder or drive.
Close The Bat!, then move the The Bat! folder to the new directory or drive, then open the registry by running regedit.exe, and navigate down to HKEY_CURRENT_USERS\Software\RIT\The Bat!\Users Depot and change the path (and drive if necessary) to the new location. Then navigate up to the The Bat! key and also change the attachments path.I'm missing some folders (and I didn't delete them). How do I get them back?
With the account selected that is missing folders, simultaneously press the CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-L keys. This will force The Bat! to search for all folders.
Importing
Can I import messages into The Bat! from Forte Agent?
In Agent, mark the messages to be exported and choose "Save messages as.." Be sure to mark the following options:
[x] save raw message
[x] UNIX message file
[x] all fields
In TheBat, choose the folder where you want the messages imported, and use the "Tools / Import Messages / From UNIX mailboxes" option
(oder "Werkzeuge / Nachrichten importieren / UNIX Mailboxen" wenn du deine Fledermaus deutsch bedienst)
There are two drawbacks:
You have to do it for each folder in agent
You lose the date information in 'sent' messages, because they lack a 'Date:' header field
If you have many folders with 'sent' messages, download this Perl script that creates a 'Date:' header field (the date information is there, but not where TheBat expects it.)Can I import folders and addressbooks from Pegasus?
Download the Mail System Converter program (filename mailconv.zip) from <A href="http://www.dragon-it.co.uk/pegasus.htm</A> or send a message to listserv@sol.ftp.com with the subject set to "MAILCONV" (without quotes) (NB: this latter method hasn't been verified...)
Install the program
Using it, convert your Pegasus mailboxes to Eudora format (which is the same as Unix mailbox format) and your Pegasus Addressbooks to "Eudora V2 Nicknames" format
Launch The Bat! and import the resulting folders as Unix mailboxes and the resulting Addressbooks as "Eudora Addressbooks".
Enjoy.
Problems: due to a longstanding bug in The Bat! (still present in 1.31) concerning Quoted Printable in headers, only the purely 7-bit header fields (like Subject: ones) will be imported properly; those that have 8-bit symbols in it will be imported too, but all the blanks in them will be interpreted as underscores by The Bat! There is no workaround to this problem.
Exporting
Can The Bat!! export *all* messages from a (sub)folder to *one* text file?
Tools | Export | Unix Mailboxes.
This exports into a single text file.I've exported messages to .MSG, how do I get Outlook Express to read them?
Rename *.msg to *.eml and open it in OE.How can I copy a batch of filters between accounts?
This method applies to TB v1.53 and later - thanks to Stefan Tanurkov
Currently, you can do it in the following (slightly tricky) way:
Open a notepad (or other text editor) window and open the Sorting Office.
Use the following steps for each filter:
1. In the Sorting Office, use the Copy (Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Ins) command
2. Switch to Notepad and use the Paste (Ctrl+V or Shift+Ins) command
3. Switch back to the Sorting Office and repeat from step 1 for other filters.
When you have all the filters you want in the Notepad, select the entire text and copy it into the Clipboard.
Select the other account, choose the appropriate filter set and use the Paste command.
Managing Accounts
Does The Bat! allow using multiple ` servers per account.
No. You can only use one POP server per account.
Alternatives to this limitations do exist. Namely using ones own local mail server. This allows you to download mail from multiple remote POP accounts to your local mail server POP account. You can then download mail from your local POP account with The Bat!. Another advantage to running a local mail server is that many have their own SMTP server that eliminates the problems with relaying messages via ISP SMTP servers that have anti-spam measures in place. Examples of local mail servers include Hamster (freeware), MS Exchange and MDaemon.Whenever I filter messages to another accounts Inbox, the other accounts filters do not filter the mail. How can I get around this?
You can trigger the other accounts filtering by redirecting the messages to the target account and enabling 'Allow Local Mail Delivery' in the 'Network and Administration' options. However, each messages headers will be altered to reflect the redirection of the messages. If you wish to leave the message headers intact, you either have to filter the messages directly from the initial download account to the target accounts folders or use a local mail server as discussed elsewhere in this section of the FAQ (Does The Bat! allow using multiple POP servers per account).Can I delete or rename the default folders for each account?
No, this is not supported.I have The Bat! installed and running fine, but want to move it to another folder/disk.
- For example, I have:
- D:\The Bat!\ <--contains the executables
- D:\The Bat!\MAIL\ <--is the default Account location
- What I want is:
- C:\Program Files\The Bat!\
- E:\MAIL\
- Answer:
- Exit The Bat!
- Make a backup of both the Registry & your The Bat! folders!
Run this command line to save the RIT part of the Registry
regedit /e TheBatRegBU.reg HKEY_CURRENT_USER\software\rit
- Rename the D:\The Bat!\ directory (this is your backup!)
- Copy the MAIL directory to E:\
- Copy everything *except* the MAIL directory to C:\Program Files\The Bat!
- Edit two [...CURRENT_USER\software\rit\The Bat!] Registry entries
- Before
"Working Directory"="D:\\The Bat!\\MAIL\\"
"EXE path"="D:\\The Bat!\\thebat.exe"
- After
"Working Directory"="E:\\MAIL\\"
"EXE path"="C:\Program Files\\The Bat!\\thebat.exe"
- When The Bat! is next started - do this!
You will need to associate it as the default eMail client again.
You will have to open your Address Books again.
Discussion/Mailing Lists
The Bat can be configured to run a mailing list by way of filters and macro enhanced templates to emulate a list server. Depending upon how complex you wish to get, TB does this job very well.
Run Mailing Lists
You can run mailing lists as well as full fledged discussion lists like MajorDomo and Listserv.
At one time "The Bat! User's Discussion List" used to run from a copy of The Bat!.
All it had to do was to check the POP3 account, and filter, modify, correct the To: From: and Reply To: headers, then mail it out to everyone on the list. No fuss, no muss.
Take a look here for the step-by-step guide on how to do it.
Doing a simple mass mailing using the Bat!
(My thanks to David Tebbutt for this entry)
First of all, it is simple.
You need addresses for the mailing - email at the minimum, email and first name preferable, email and full name is even better.
If you are sending different emails to different groups of people, create address groups in your address book
The email structure is:
Addressee
This is taken care of by choosing a group of addresses for your email
If the First name and Last name are present, this makes the To: line look nicer
If there's no First name - eg Dr, Mrs or initials - put them in the Middle name and leave the First name blank
(You'll see why when you get to "Salutation")Subject
Now you need to start creating Quick Templates - in the Options menu
The first is Subject
%SUBJECT="Example mailing"
You put your own words in, of course.
Whatever is between quote marks appears in the Subject line of your emailSalutation
- Another Quick Template - call it Salute perhaps?
- If you make it conditional upon the presence of a first name, it will save you the embarrassment of seeing "Dear ," in your email.
- In fact, in the absence of any names, it will use the email address as if it were a name. You could then end up with messy salutations like Dear sexything32@aol.,
- Here's a possible format:
- %IF:"%TONAME"="%TOADDR":"":"Dear %TOFNAME,
"
- And, yes, that last quote is important, it completes the instructions.
- Ignore the percentages. It means If the Name used in the To: Field was the same as the To: email address then type nothing ("") otherwise type "Dear Firstname,
- " (At this point the body of the letter starts)
- If your address book includes a name for every entry in the mass mailing group the salutation can be simplified
In this case the template for the salutation could be
Dear %ABtoFIRSTNAME
or
Dear %ABtoLASTTNAME
The words
I would create a Quick Template containing the words you want to see in the body of the letter.
Call it BodySignature
This is where you terminate the email with your preferred signature.
Best to do it as a Quick Template, call it Sig perhaps.
For now do something like this:
--
Kind regards,
David & Marck
www.brainstormsw.com
The first line (-- ) is actually hyphen-hyphen-spaceEach of these can be set up as quick templates. And maybe an extra one to hold it all together:
The whole mail quick template
Make another template to tie the previous four together
Call it Whole and it will look like this:
%QINCLUDE="Subject"
%QINCLUDE="Salute"
%QINCLUDE="Body"
%QINCLUDE="Sig"
Don't forget to tick the "Use for New messages/Mass mailing" check box for this one!(Press the '=' to the left of each for more details)
To email, just go to the address book and select the group to receive the mailing
Click on File/Mass mailing using template
Choose the template (Whole in my example)
You will be given commonsense choices (like Put in Outbox) and away you go
Managing mail at the server level
How do I get The Bat! to not download messages beyond a certain size and yet download and delete all other messages from the server? If I simply set the Account Properties/Mail Management option to 'Receive header only if message is less than .... size' as well as to delete messages from the server, the large messages will be deleted as well.
We wish to delete all messages from the server except messages that exceed a certain size. We therefore set the size limit in the account options where TB! will send an alert message containing the large message headers. We set up a filter to catch these alert messages (using The Bat! as sender for the search string) and place this filter at the beginning of the list. These notification messages will therefore not be processed by the second filter.
The second filter rule tells TB! to delete the matching message from the server. This action is carried out on the next mail check. This filter with the search string set to 'e' and 'Kludges' will match every single message it examines. It will not get to examine and match the large message notifications because these are matched and removed from further processing by the first filter rule. We also wish all the rest of messages to be processed by the remaining filter rules so for this second rule, we have to enable the option 'continue processing with other filters.' This in effect breaks TB!'s default filtering behaviour which is to stop filter rule matching as soon as a match is found.
With these two filter rules at the beginning of your account filter set, you'll have large messages remaining on the server for you to examine when you wish.
The last thing you need to do disable in the Account Properties/Mail Management, 'delete messages from server' and also to either leave messages on server all the time or until a specified duration, whichever you like.
You're done!
Configuring TB! for SSL connections (Win NT/Win2000)
Here is the best way to configure TB! for SSL connections (Win NT/Win2000)
(My thanks to Rabi Lahiri for these instructions)
First, download the Windows binary of stunnel from www.stunnel.org.
I would suggest putting all three of these executables in a folder that you can easily navigate to using a command prompt (I use c:\stunnel\).
Open a command prompt and go to the place where you have all three of the downloaded files.
You then want to use instsrv.exe to install srvany as a windows service.
You can do this by typing "instsrv tb_stunnel c:\stunnel\srvany.exe".
This will create a service called "tb_stunnel". Of course, you can choose your own name and path for the executables.Now open up regedt32. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE->SYSTEM->CurrentControlSet->Services
Under Services, find the service name that you just installed.
Highlight the service name and click edit->add key. Enter "Parameters" as the key name and nothing for "Class", and then click OK.
Now click on the newly-created Parameters key and click edit->add value. Enter "Application" as the Value Name and REG_SZ for the Data Type.
Now double-click on "Application" and enter "stunnel-3.14.exe -c -d localport -r serverip:port".
Replace "stunnel-3.14.exe" with your stunnel executable name (srvany.exe must be in the same directory as stunnel), replace "localport" with any port of your choosing that's free *on your computer* (I use 6968 and 6969 with two different instances) and replace serverip:port with your mail server's ip and port. Secure POP3 is port 995...I'm not sure about Secure IMAP or SMTP but it should be easy to find. AFAIK, the serverip must be resolved...you can't just enter the machine name.
Now go to Control Panels->Administrative Tools->Services. Find your newly-created service and make sure the Startup type is set to Automatic and (under the "Log On" tab), "Allow service to interact with desktop" should be disabled.
That's it for stunnel and srvany...now go into TB! and change your pop3 server to "localhost" and port to whatever you specified earlier ("localport"). You should now be all ready to go!
The writer of these instructions personally has two different services running...one account set up with local port 6969 and another set up with local port 6968. It all works wonderfully and doesn't incur any noticeable performance penalty.
Should I use national characters in passwords?
For backups
Please do not use national characters in archive passwords.
You should really use latin characters, digits and punctuation only. Archives with national characters in the password may not always be dercypted correctly. The PKCS#12 key derivation mechanism is used to generate an encryption key from the textual password. The key derivation process is based on passwords in the Unicode character set. The Bat! uses components and functions from the Microsoft Windows API that work with the Unicode character set. If there is a configuration problem (e.g. the required input locale not being properly installed in Microsoft Windows), Unicode conversion can fail which may cause the archive to become unextractable.For certificate passphrases
Please do not use national characters in certificate passphrases.
The Bat! uses components and functions from the Microsoft Windows API that work with the Unicode character set. If there is a configuration problem (e.g. the required input locale not being properly installed in Microsoft Windows), Unicode conversion can fail which will cause the certificate private keys inaccessible. The PFX standard is also used to export certificates with private keys, and using national characters in password may cause incompatibilities when the certificates are being transferred between applications.
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