Message Drawers

Your mailbox is broken into parts, called drawers.

• One drawer holds messages that you have already read and have decided to save. This is the Saved drawer.
• One drawer holds notifications telling you about incoming messages that you have not yet read. This is the Unread drawer.
• One drawer holds messages that you have mailed off but which have not yet been read by the recipient(s). This is the Outbound drawer.
• One drawer holds messages that have recently been deleted. This is the Deleted drawer.

It is not unusual for one or more of these drawers to be empty. For example, if you have no new incoming mail, your Unread drawer contains no unread message notifications.

The Current Message:

MAIL8 can only look at one message at a time. The message MAIL8 is currently working with is called the current message. Each drawer has its own current message.

Conceptually, the current message in a drawer is the message that was most recently referenced. However, this is not always true. For example, suppose you delete message 1 in a drawer. That message is the one most recently referenced, but it no longer exists in that drawer (since it was just deleted). Therefore the current message in that drawer is the next message.

When you delete the last message in a drawer, we say that you have reached the end of the drawer. At this point, the drawer's current message pointer doesn't point at any message.

After a little experimentation with MAIL8, you should have no trouble figuring out how current message pointers work.

Copyright © 1997, Thinkage Ltd.