BeMail's Secret Menu

BeMail has a menu which appears only when you click on a BeMail window with the secondary mouse button. This menu gives you access to some of BeMail's preferences, as well as allowing you to create or edit the signatures you can add to your outgoing mail.

This menu, because it is not in the menu bar, is hard to find. While it is described in the BeOS User's Guide, BeMail's interface is deceptively simple, and many people never read that section of the manual. Hence this Tip!

To access this menu, click anywhere in a BeMail menu with the secondary mouse button. Remember that if you have a one-button mouse, you can hold down the Control and Command keys on your keyboard and click to get the same effect. You'll see the following menu:

About BeMail... does what you'd expect, as does Quit BeMail. It's the Preferences menu and it's submenu items that are interesting:

The Font and Size menus allow you to choose the font and size of the typeface that BeMail will use to display your messages, when reading them or composing them.

The User Level menu gives you two options, Beginner and Expert. BeMail starts out in Beginner mode, which means that BeMail will warn you before you can move mail to the Trash, close messages without sending them, and other things that BeMail thinks you might not want to do. If you switch to Expert mode, BeMail will omit these extra dialogs, which can slow you down when you really do know what you're doing.

Wrap Text is a setting that tells BeMail whether to wrap your text (adding line breaks to your message at the end of each apparent line in the window) when you send mail. This is the default option, and is generally what you want to use, because otherwise your message lines will be very long, and some mail servers, gateways, and readers don't handle these long lines well (though that gets less true every day).

Finally, there's the Signatures... item. Choosing this item brings up BeMail's signatures interface...which I'm going to save until next week to explain. So, until then, happy Be-mailing!