The 'Save Draft' button allows you to save a temporary version of your email. This allows you to continue working on it later. Drafts are stored in the 'Drafts' folder. To create a new draft simply compose a message as you would normally, and, instead of sending, click the 'Save Draft' button.
To continue working on a draft you created earlier, go to your Drafts folder and simply click on the mail. The Compose screen will open and you can continue editing your message. If you choose to Cancel composing the message the original draft is unchanged. If you choose 'Save Draft' again the original will be deleted and replaced with the current version. If you choose to send this mail the Draft is deleted from the Drafts folder.
FastMail.FM also offers a way to create Template mails that can help you if you regularly send out the same type of mail. You can have any number of template mails, they behave like drafts, except for the fact that they do not get deleted when sending out your mail.
To create templates you'll need to create a folder called Templates (make sure you type it in exactly like that, including the capital T). Go to Options - Folders to do this. Now when saving a draft that you want to use as a template go to your Drafts folder and move the draft over to the Templates folder.
To send out a template, simply go to your Templates folder and click on the subject. The compose screen will now open, just as it does with Drafts. When clicking Send the original template is saved.
Use the 'Do Action' button to actually perform the selected action on a message. The currently available actions are:
-
Format - same as 'Format' button. The Format button only appears on the Advanced screen, and does not appear in the Action menu on the Advanced screen.
-
Left to right - change display direction from left to right
-
Right to left - change display direction from right to left
-
Set editor: XXX - change the HTML editor used when editing HTML emails to the specified editor. Only available in text mode, and sets the editor for the current session. This is currently for testing only.
This allows you to insert pages from your Notepad which you have marked with the 'Is quick note' checkbox.
The 'Is quick note' checkbox allows you to save the note you are editing as a quicknote, which can be inserted into your mails through the Compose screen. This makes it easy to send people often-used information.
The 'Save Draft' button closes the current message and saves a copy in your 'Drafts' folder. Clicking the subject of the message in the Drafts folder will open it back up in the Compose window so you can complete it later.
The Euro symbol is new and there are several different ways it can be represented. Basically, the official way is to use the ISO-8859-15 character set. You can set this as your default character set on the Preferences screen. Then any emails you send will use that character set by default.
The Microsoft way hacks ISO-8859-1 to include a 0x80 character. Officially, this modified character set is called CP1252. Unfortunately most things that don't specify a character set assume ISO-8859-1, but Microsoft tends to assume CP1252. So basically you can send something incorrectly as ISO-8859-1, but it will generally display correctly on Microsoft programs.
If this all sounds confusing, that's because it is. If anyone has any good experience and solutions for this, we'd appreciate hearing from you.
For several years, FastMail.FM has allowed you to use Ctrl-Enter on the Compose screen as a shortcut to send a message. Unfortunately Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 both have a bug that means this doesn't work as expected, instead showing the "Download manager" dialog as well as attempting to send the message. This bug in Firefox is documented and being tracked at the bugzilla site here.
Someone just recently noted that using Ctrl-Shift-Enter doesn't trigger the bug, but because it still does have the Ctrl key pressed, it triggers the correct JavaScript code to send the message. So for Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 users, this is a good work around until this bug is fixed, just use Ctrl-Shift-Enter instead.