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What has happened lately?

Here's the news:


2006-05-27, Beam 1.1 has been released. As it's been two and a half years since the last release, I can't remember all changes, but here's a list of some of them:
  • Beam now offers a SPAM-filter.
  • When writing mails, there now is auto-completion of addresses and it is now possible to create people files from the mail addresses contained in the mail.
  • Beam has been integrated with Zeta such that it supports some features only available on that platform (e.g. ui-colors).
  • Beam now supports secure transport by means of OpenSSL. Just make sure that OpenSSL is installed on your system and Beam should automatically make use of it if the mail-servers support it.
  • There now is support for IMAP. Beam implements a fetcher of all new mail in the inbox only (aka IMAP-as-POP), but hey, it's a start >;o)
  • ...and a lot of other usability enhancements and bugfixes have been included.

2003-11-23, Beam 1.0 has been released. This is a major feature release, with the following enhancements and bugfixes:
  • Beam now offers mail-filtering through SIEVE (as described in RFC-3028). You can create and edit filters graphically or enter the SIEVE-script manually.
    Filters can be applied to inbound and outbound mail and you can filter the mails you have already downloaded, too.
  • When writing mails, it is now possible to select to/cc/bcc-addresses from your people files. Just pick them from the structured popup-menu.
  • Beam now supports identities, i.e. it separated the personal info (Name, mail-address, signature) from the network info (server, usename and password).
    Identities make it possible to use different personalities (like private / work) for one mail-account (i.e. Beam will automatically use the correct mail-address for a reply).
  • Beam now runs on PPC.
  • Basic support for mailing-lists is implemented, Beam tries to be smart about replying to lists and you can choose to reply-to-list or reply-to-person manually.
  • The performance and memory-footprint for large mails has been improved.
  • When replying to / forwarding multiple mails, you can now make Beam join all mails into one, join them by recipient or keep them separated.
  • libiconv is now used for character-conversion, so now a lot more encodings are supported by Beam.
  • charset mismatches are now automatically detected and Beam tells you where they occured and what to do about them.
  • support for swatch internet time has been added.
  • ...and a lot of other usability enhancements and bugfixes have been included.

2002-11-29, Beam 0.914 has been released, with the following enhancements and bugfixes:
  • when adding attachments, Beam now checks if text-attachments in fact are text (this fixes problems when adding MS-Word documents from non-BeOS partitions [like FAT32], where BeOS believes these files are of type text/plain)
  • fixed crash in quoting code when long lines containing only spaces were encountered
  • corrected a bug that would cause Beam to drop attachments when saving a mail twice before sending (of you lost attachments during send and could not reproduce the error, this bug was probably the reason).
  • Beam now handles empty group-lists (like "Undisclosed-Recipients:;" correctly
  • finally found a way to let Beam delete messages no matter what Tracker is running (LocaleTracker, OpenTracker or R5-Tracker)
  • Beam no longer complains about disappearing files during node-monitoring (this is especially useful when your system is running MDR2b4, which would trigger a lot of complaints in Beam 0.913)
  • removed two compiler switches (-no-pic and -fomit-frame-pointer) that were supposedly used to optimize code-generation, but in fact were responsible for random but severe crashes with completely corrupted stack-crawls

2002-11-15, Beam 0.913 has been released, with the following enhancements and bugfixes:
  • 2-byte encodings (like iso-2022-jp) are handled more reliably now
  • handling of cached mails is much faster
  • MailView now supports unlimited undo/redo
  • preference-dialogs work better now
  • encoding-problems within signatures are fixed now
  • Beam now has a real deskbar-item (which does not crash the original R5 deskbar)
  • dynamic signatures are now interpreted as a shell-script, not as one single command
  • replaced BeOS-native base64-functions by the ones from MDR (which do not seem to crash)
  • split Beam into two seperate projects for R5 and BONE/Dano
  • and many other (minor) bugfixes, usability and GUI-enhancements (see changes.txt)

2002-04-14, Beam 0.912 has been released, with the following enhancements and bugfixes:
  • better support for forwarding & replying to multiple messages at once, now you can choose whether or not to join the messages.
  • added support for printing one or more messages.
  • corrected some MIME-problems, increasing robustness and eliminating the compatibility-problems Beam had with other mail-programs (like Mail-It or Eudora). These programs now accept Beam-generated MIME-messages, including quoted-printables and attachments.
  • doubleclicking a folder now opens the corresponding Tracker-window.
  • deactivating the Desktop-icon does work now.
  • added configurable delay before a shown mail is being marked as read.
  • added option for using 8-bit-mime when constructing mails.
  • added an option to switch between soft/hard-wrapping of the mailtext (Beam always used soft-wrapping before).
  • when requested, Beam can now contact a POP3/SMTP-server and suggest the best (most "secure") authentication type.
  • and other (minor) bugfixes, usability and GUI-enhancements.

2002-03-24, Beam 0.911 has been released, a(nother) hotfix:
  • stupid bug fixed that caused Beam to crash when no state-info was found, (like after first install...).
  • forwarding attachments works correctly now.

2002-03-24, Beam 0.91 has been released, with many enhancements:
  • header-view contents are now selectable and draggable.
  • added support for redirecting mails.
  • signature support added (for static and dynamic signatures).
  • added automatic mail-checking (every xx minutes).
  • all shortcuts are now configurable via prefs.
  • added better quoting-modes (simple, push-margin and auto-wrap) in order to reduce comb-like effect.
  • added tooltips to all preferences-controls, which is one step on the way to better usability (but online-help is still missing).
  • added a Deskbar-icon that indicates the presence of new mail. (This seems to constantly crash the R5 Deskbar, but it works for OpenTracker & Dano versions...)
  • Display-font can now be selected when viewing/editing mails.
  • added option to show in- & out-folders always at top.
  • Beam should now work under Dano (BeOS 5.1), since I do not use Dano on a daily basis, your mileage may vary, but it *should* work.
  • Beam can now set itself up as preferred email application.
  • Beam now correctly shows BeOS standard-icons for mails, if it is preferred app.
  • fixed problems with highlighting URLs that contain a tilde ('~').
  • many more bugfixes, increased stability and other little improvements.

2002-02-22, Beam 0.903 has been released, a hotfix:
  • Beam no longer complains about unknown prefs-field 'BeMailStyle'.

2002-02-22, Beam 0.902 has been released, fixing many bugs of first release:
  • removed crashing bug when wildly moving through mailfolder-view.
  • disabled selecting and invoking for the dummy-mailrefview used in prefs.
  • make the reply-mode with selected text work (only selected text will be included in reply).
  • enable people to send mail if there is no working name-service (Beam used to complain that it could not determine own hostname).
    In this case, Beam now uses host/domain info from network settings-file.
  • preferences window is now moved to front when a user tries to open it twice (instead of crashing, as before).
  • recreating a mailfolder-cache now works.
  • new prefs-flag that selects BeMail-compatible shortcuts.
  • when a new node has been detected and seems to have zero size, we assume that an application is creating the mail-file directly inside the in-folder.
    In this case, we snooze for a short amount of time and then proceed to read the file, which hopefully is now completely written. This is no complete solution, but I hope that this will increase compatibility with MailDaemonReplacement and other programs.
  • fixed a couple of smaller redraw/layout issues.

2002-02-19, Beam 0.90 has been released:
  • Beam finally went public, hooray!

Last updated: 05/27/06
beam@hirschkaefer.de


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