Object Info:

listCommands

Introduction

Last Month, there was a discussion on the Frontier-Talk mailing list on the problems associated with of getting on and off mailing lists. In the discussion, several people pointed a specification for including this information in mail headers. The hope is that mail clients will build in some functionality to parse this data and provide you a list of options based on header data. Brent Simmons suggested that this could be implemented in Frontier and accessed from your mail client via shared menu.

Following that discussion, I put together listCommands and implemented it through Claris Emailer's shared menu. Recently, I added support for Eudora. listCommands allows you to issue "subscribe", "unsubscribe", "digest", "post", "help", and "archive" commands from your email client's shared menu for mailing lists that support the proposed standard (for example, all of the lists hosted by UserLand). If there is no list information in the header, listCommands will alert you via a dialog box.

Ultimately, I would think that funtionality should be incorporated into the mailClient suite. Until that happens, however, this should do the trick. listCommands is free, however, the usual caveats apply about this being beta software with only limited testing (especially with Eudora).

System Requirements

listCommands requires Frontier 4.2, Emailer or Eudora, the mailClient suite, the Eudora or Emailer glue file, and the EmailerExtras suite (if you are using Emailer as your client).

Download

You can download listCommands from ftp://es-designs.com/listcommand.sit.hqx. Alternatively, this is a Fat Page, if you have a "Fat-capable browser" and are running Frontier 4.2.2 or greater, you can load the script directly into your object database.

Installation

To install listCommands:

1. Make sure that Frontier is running with the mailClient suite installed.
2. Launch your email client.
3. Load the ListCommand table into your workspace subtable (either by direct insertion via fatpages or downloading and importing the ListCommand object).
4. Jump to workspace.listcommand.installMenu and run the script. This will install a "List Commands" menu item (containing the commands listed in workspace.listcommand.commands) at the bottom of your mail client's shared menu.

Note

listCommands is extensible. Commands listed in workspace.listcommand.commands will be added to the "List Commands" submenu with an associated script. For example, if you added a seventh command to workspace.listcommand.commands with a value of "Host" and reinstalled the menu, a "Host" menu item would be added to the "List Commands" submenu to call workspace.listcommand.listCommands ("Host"). The command would process any URLs associated with "X-List-Host:" item in the message header.

listCommands act on URLs. If no URL is present in the header item, an error will be generated.

Please send questions & comments to tclifton@es-designs.com.

Tom Clifton - 7/29/97