Sick of staring at Arial 10 text? Miss automated signatures and prefixed replies? Embarrassed by Exchange's propensity to send huge, unreadable chunks of encoded binary data to Internet mailing lists? This extension modifies Exchange to behave more like a traditional Internet mail client.
Internet Idioms requires either Microsoft Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0. It will not work on NT 3.51.
It does not work at all with Microsoft Outlook 97 - only with Microsoft Exchange, or Windows Messaging. Furthermore, if the Office 97 installation sequence installs the Outlook forms into Exchange, Idioms will not work. (Run the switchforms utility from the Microsoft web site to restore the original Exchange forms.) Please remember to remove Idioms if you upgrade to Outlook!
It will not work with Microsoft Office 95 or Office 97 WordMail, since the WordMail forms don't support client extensibility; anyway, if you're using WordMail, you don't need my extension, since WordMail already contains most of the Idioms in one fashion or another. (You do need a memory upgrade, but that's not my department.)
For the same reason, it will not work with the simplified
send note included in the Windows 95 Messaging Update. This will
prevent Idioms from appending signatures to messages sent through
Internet Explorer mailto: references unless
you visit and clear Tools - Options - Send - Use simplified
send note to disable this feature.
And again, for the same reason, Idioms does not work within the forms that the client shipped with Exchange Server 5.0 uses to read Usenet Newsgroups.
If you read messages courtesy of the Internet Mail Connector component of Microsoft Exchange Server, Idioms cannot change the read font.
To avail yourself of the Rich Text Sentry (Check outgoing messages for accidental rich text) function, you must be using a message service that addresses its messages with the SMTP address type, such as Microsoft Internet Mail and Netscape Internet Mail. Note that Classic MSN users need not use this function, since MSN already filters all rich text from messages that leave it.
Download inetxidm.zip (available in both Intel and DEC Alpha flavors) from this Web page, and unzip it. Copy the extracted file inetxidm.dll into your system directory (usually \windows\system on Windows 95, or \windows\system32 on Windows NT). Check your system directory for the file msvcrt.dll, which ideally should have a version number of at least 5.00.7128 on Alpha, or 5.00.7303 on Intel; if you lack this, see the runtime installation instructions. Finally, activate Start - Run..., and type the following command:
rundll32 inetxidm.dll,Install
taking care not to add any extra spaces around the comma. (Software developers with access to the tool regsvr32.exe may use that tool instead of rundll32.)
Users of the German-language Exchange mail client should instead download the German-language version of Internet Idioms, also available for either Intel or DEC Alpha processors.
Within Exchange, you may configure Internet Idioms through the Internet Idioms tab on the Tools - Options property sheet.
First, exit and log out of Exchange.
Go to the Control Panel, open the Add/Remove Programs icon, and remove "Internet Idioms for Microsoft Exchange" from the list. Then delete the file inetxidm.dll from your system directory.
If Add/Remove Programs does not list Internet Idioms, then you have an old version of Idioms, and so will have to remove it the old-fashioned scary way. Fire up the Registry Editor (Start - Run, then regedit), open the key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software \Microsoft \Exchange \Client \Extensions
and delete the "Internet Idioms" tag and its value. Delete the file inetxidm.dll from your system directory.
If you're using Microsoft Outlook, use Tools - Options - General - Addins to remove Internet Idioms.
On Tools.Options, you will see a new property page tab, Internet Idioms.
The Font button allows you to specify the default read font. Check the Use default font checkbox to enable this button. Once set, any message from a non-rich-text-using sender will appear in this font, as opposed to Arial 10. I recommend Courier 10. Should you forward or reply such a message, your added text will appear in a different font, specified on Tools.Options.Read; I recommend that you set this to Courier 10 as well.
The Check outgoing messages for accidental rich text checkbox guards against the common mistake of sending Exchange-format rich text messages to Internet recipients not using Microsoft Exchange. This function watches every outgoing message for Internet recipients with the Send to this recipient in Microsoft rich text format flag set. When it finds a message with such, it warns the user, who may send the message as it is, stop sending the message, or else have Internet Idioms eliminate the rich text setting. A user can circumvent this check by selecting the recipient from the Address Book. Internet Idioms assumes that any recipient selected from an Address Book bears an intentionally set (or reset) rich text flag.
(This is the same function that Rich Text Sentry implements.)
The Append a signature checkbox, if set, lets you enter a chunk of boilerplate text into the following edit field. Exchange will attach this text to every new message you send, as well as every reply, for as long as you keep the checkbox set. The text will appear in the default send font. The location of the text may vary, depending on whether you have set the Indent reply text checkbox (q.v.), and whether the message is new or a reply.
By setting the following Take signature from file checkbox, you instruct Internet Idioms to treat the contents of the edit field as the pathname fo a file. Idioms will paint the edit field gray, and prevent you from typing in it. To change the file to use, press the now enabled File button. Signature files may consist either of plain text or rich text. To create a plain text signature file, use Notepad, being sure to save the file with a .txt suffix. To create a rich text signature file, use Wordpad, Microsoft Word, or any other editor that can emit RTF, being sure to save the file in Rich Text Format and with a .rtf suffix.
The Indent reply text checkbox instructs Exchange to change the format of its replies to prefix each line of text with a > character. Idioms will wrap this included reply text at 80 columns. (Holding down the SHIFT key will override this preference, forcing the reply to use the original Exchange format.) When faced with a very long message, or one containing Exchange-style paragraph lines in its first few lines, Idioms will offer to use the native Exchange reply format.
On the Insert menu of a send note you will find a new menu item, Signature. Invoke it to insert the contents of the signature at the current selection in the note. While Idioms does not append signatures to forwarded messages, you can use this command to insert a signature as desired.
At the lower right corner of the page rests my vanity About UI.
Note that Idioms keeps all its settings per-profile. If you have been using a 0.1.x version of Idioms, you may now delete the registry key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software \Angry Greycat Designs \Internet Idioms \0.1
(yes, Greycat with an e - since
then, I've Americanized the spelling) that an earlier version
used.
Signatures cannot exceed 4K characters unless they come from external signature files.
There's no way to specify "Auto" when selecting the color of a read-font.
A read-font, once set, overrides any font the user may have selected in Tools.Options.Send. To revert message text to the specified send font, press Ctrl-Space. Note that reply fonts still work without any such magic.
Read font mapping does not work on messages that contain rich text. For this reason, any message arriving through the Microsoft Exchange Server Internet Mail Connector will not appear in your chosen read font, since the IMC generates a rich text version of the message in Arial 10.
Read-font mapping does not work correctly with non-Western scripts such as Cyrillic and Greek. Unfortunately I lack the resources to develop for this configuration. (Could anybody loan me a Thai-language keyboard and Thai Windows 95?)
Replies that use prefixes throw a lot of rich text into the message. This can double the size of the message in your local store.
The reply prefixing function is hideously, unusably slow when invoked on long messages.
If Internet Idioms prefixes the reply text, Exchange will not know not to spell-check the included reply text.
The function that detects messages sent with paragraphs in order to eschew prefixing such messages only looks at the first few lines of the message. Hence it is easy to fool.
SHIFT is a poor choice for a mode-key to make Idioms revert its reply format, since Exchange already uses SHIFT to differentiate Reply (Ctrl+R) from Reply All (Ctrl+Shift+R). You have to press the correct command key, then either hold down or else immediately release the SHIFT key as necessary for Idioms to see it, or not to see it. This is extremely awkward.
Idioms has no user interface for controlling the margin at which it word-wraps reply text. Furthermore, it wraps only the text to which the message is replying. New text typed by the user must be wrapped by the message service provider responsible for sending the message.
Internet Idioms is currently available only in English and German. When used with a version of Exchange in a language other than its own, it will generate reply text consisting of an agrammatical mixture of the two languages.
For the purposes of detecting accidental rich text, Internet Idioms cannot tell that you're responding to a message that contained rich text in the first place.
When replying to an Internet mail message, Internet Idioms cannot tell that you have an entry for the sender in your PAB, since Exchange is not using that entry in your reply note. (Exchange instead is using a one-off recipient that it has generated from the address information in the original note. This problem is not unique to Internet mail; rather, it results from the mail system not using a central directory.) As a result, you may have an entry in your PAB specifying that this particular correspondent accepts rich text mail, yet Internet Idioms will still warn you about sending rich text. You must manually replace the recipient entries in the note's To and Cc fields with entries that you select from the Address Book in order for Idioms to honor the rich text setting in those entries.
There is no way to make Internet Idioms/Rich Text Sentry check Internet-destined mail sent through a Microsoft Mail gateway.
Carefully reread the installation directions, to see whether you installed it correctly, as well as the contraindications. Ensure that you have the correct runtimes present. Make sure that you didn't get an old version from the download cache of your web browser. Expunge all previous versions of inetxidm.dll from the computer. Double-check the registry entry (see the uninstall directions).
No, sorry. I have stopped all work on this project in order to work on other projects.
Certainly. I include the source to version 0.3.2 in my book. Should I ever find a way to release the source to more recent versions, I will do so on my web site.
Never. Try instead the Microsoft Outlook Internet Mail Enhancement Patch, available on the Microsoft web site.
Last modified: 13 August 1998
Copyright 1996-1998 Ben Goetter. All rights reserved.