Email to Tinderbox

The user may email data directly to a Tinderbox document. (This feature has particular interest for iPhone users, who can easily email snippets to key Tinderbox files)

A Tinderbox file may be connected to its own POP3 mailbox, which it will check when opened (and again when the Fetch Now button of the Network Status pane is pressed). The mailbox should be dedicated to this Tinderbox document, as it deletes messages after Tinderbox reads them.

A new Mail Preferences Pane in Document Preferences allows you to turn mail checking on and off, and to specify:

• the address of the email (POP3) server
• the user account (usually the full email address) and password for this TBX's inbound email
• a Boolean setting controlling where the TBX uses the email feature at all (default is false).

Tinderbox creates a new container /Mail, and adds new notes for each message in the mailbox. The notes are then deleted from the server (this is a natural by-product of using a POP3 server to draw down mail).

The Email attributes of email notes contain the 'From' address of the email.

You may drag notes from /Mail and place them anywhere in your Tinderbox document - they are Tinderbox valid notes.

Limitations:

• only plain text email is currently supported but email that contains encoded non-English characters (RFC 2047) are decoded.
• attachments and MIME/HTML email bodies may be ignored.
• proxy servers and alternate ports are not currently supported.

You to include in an email an action to set the new (emailed) note's Container. When Tinderbox receives an email, it scans the title and the body for instructions of the form:

Tinderbox: /path/to/mail

...or...

Tinderbox: /path/to/mail [action]

The first argument (a path) specifies a container in which the mail is to be stored If the container does not exist, it will be created. The argument is a TB path string so can be anywhere within the TBX, as long as correctly specified, and not just as sub-containers of the default 'mail' container. If a TBX's note names are not unique it will be necessary to cite as much of the path to the target container as is necessary to give a unique path.

Tinderbox: /path/to/mail [action]

The optional second argument (action code), specifies an action that will be applied to the newly-created note.

An example,using both arguments:

Tinderbox: /UrgentMail [Color=red;]

will save the note in UrgentMail instead of Mail, and will also set its color to "red". Note that in this case the use of the [ ] brackets is explicit, and isn't simply an editorial device to indicate the argument is optional. Put another way, you must use square brackets around the second argument otherwise Tinderbox can't parse out the action code and apply it as intended.

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