Send To Browser – How to get it to work in Pandora Mail

In Eudora mail client, the precursor to Pandora Mail, there's a very easy way to open a message; in your Windows default web browser. You simply select Send to Browser from the message's preview pane, and the message then appears in the browser, like so:

Mail messages come from all sorts of senders, in all sorts of formats ranging from plain text to complex HTML, and they may not always render properly in your mail client. Viewing a complex message in your web browser will usually render such a message more faithfully.

Unfortunately this easy-to-use Send to Browser (STB) capability is not available in Pandora Mail, at least it isn't at the time of writing this post using the most recent Pandora version 4.1..9.1).

This matter has been discussed here in the Pandora Mail Forum, and on 30 April 2019 Brana Bujenovic provided a quite reasonable workaround by making use of manual filters,  as follows:

STEPS
1. Open Filters, create new filter with following specs:
Criteria: Any Header appears
Type: Manual
Action #1: Notify Application [Select your Internet browser].
Under parameters paste %MESSAGE_FILE_TEXT_HTML%. See Help/Filters for all available parameters.
Action #2: Skip Other Filters.

2. Save filters.
Once you set it up - it's a singular menu item, much like "Send to Browser", but you have a control over it, and you can set up few more (for different browsers, text editors and such).

To Use It
Select one or more messages from the mailbox window, or open some message:
Hit 'Message/Apply Filters' from the main menu and choose the above filter from the list.

I tried this, and my first mistake was to click the "New" button, which created the filter in the default location at the bottom of my filters list. For some users with only a few filters this would be no problem. However I had migrated all my filters across from Eudora and had nearly three thousand filters, which meant that to invoke the Send to Browser filter I had to scroll down and down and down tediously for several minutes before arriving at the desired filter.

So my fist lesson learned was to create all manual filters at the beginning of the filters list, as follows:

A second tip is to always alter each manual filter's description to something meaningful (such as the name of the browser).

Otherwise the manual STB filter names will display the sort of unfriendly technical gobbledygook shown just above in the bottom panel (highlighted in yellow). At the moment I have four such filters, and would not easily be able to tell them apart without giving all of them unique descriptions.

Let's now move on to how these STB filters work in practice. Sometimes I would invoke a filter and the message would indeed appear in the web browser, but in other cases nothing would happen. The operation of these manual filters seemed hit or miss.

For months I remained in a state of puzzlement -– not unusual for an octogenarian you will doubtlessly say! Then just over a week ago, out if the blue I had a moment of clarity and revelation.

I reasoned that it's the body of a message that you're mainly interest in when you wish to render a message in a web browser, so I altered each of my Send to Browser filters to have the Basic Criteria to be Body Appears (rather than Any Header appears):

This seems to have done the trick. After this change, messages whose body is made up of HTML now are rendered in the web browser. This is because (as recommended by Brana) the filters for their Notify Application section the parameter value:
%MESSAGE_FILE_TEXT_HTML%

But one issue still remains. Some messages have only plain text in their bodies, for example:

Here are the links to the latest version of our Super-Duper Joke Generator:
DOWNLOAD  …....  http://www.extrasuperduper.com/download
RELEASE NOTES …..  http://www.extrasuperduper.com/release-notes
BLOG:  …...  http://www.extrasuperduper.com/blog
USER FORUM:  …...  http://www.extrasuperduper.com/forum

For each browser, you have to create a second Send to Browser filter for messages having bodies that contain only plain text (no HTML to be rendered at all):

In this case, instead of

you must use  %MESSAGE_FILE_TEXT_PLAIN% 

ENHANCEMENT REQUEST:
The way that Send to Browser works in Eudora is straightforward and excellent, and I still would rank it as a high priority enhancement for Pandora Mail … Brana, please consider doing this, the sooner the better!

Well, that should do it. Please try out the above and send me your feedback.

But that's not quite all …

USABILITY TIP:
To finish off this post, here's a final tip. You add a toolbar button for each frequently used manual filter. The following screenshot shows my current toolbar layout, with a toolbar button being clicked to send a message from ALDI to my Waterfox browser:

These Send to Browser buttons are real time savers. A single button click eliminates the cumbersome three-step filter invocation process (shown just below) that otherwise must be followed each time:

The only issue with this approach – and it's a relatively minor issue -- is that all of these Send to Browser toolbar buttons display rather meaningless gobbledygook tooltip text:
"<<Body>>:appears => Notify Application + Skip Rest

(added 02 May 2020) The following animated GIF demonstrates this meaninglessness:

It would be a lot better if these tooltips displayed each filter's meaningful description (such as "Send to Waterfox"). You can get this by customizing the toolbar via the "Show Text" toggle button):

Because this expanded toolbar takes up far too much room at the top of the Pandora main window, and I would highly recommend to Brana to change this toggling to a button at the right-hand end of the toolbar, just like that in the top right corner of Windows File Manager for easily toggling the Ribbon, as follows:

Okay, that really is the lot. Some tips, and some enhancement requests. I ask for so much, don't I, but my only aim is to help make Pandora Mail even better than it is now.

Pandora needs a message editing toolbar like Eudora's (and navigating long item selection lists)

Pandora's creator Brana Bujenovic has done a fine job in morphing Eudora into Pandora Mail, significantly modernising and enhancing features while doing so.

I'm getting quite excited about Pandora, and in this blog I'll continue to document my findings and opinions and invite readers' comments so that together we can make Pandora better and better over time.

I hope (and expect) that Brana won't be put off by my findings and opinions, all documented in this blog with the aim of making positive suggestions. To be frank, in my first year of being an octogenarian I'd rather be doing something else! But I will keep making the effort to provide a meaning contribution!

This post is about one of the fundamental aspects of e-mail, namely, the creation and editing of message content. Specifically, it's about the very basic aspects of content editing rather than the more intricate aspects, the simpler editing controls that we use for the bulk of message content (a.k.a. the 80/20 rule).

- - - - - - - - - -

I was prompted to write about this as soon as I started creating messages in Pandora. I just couldn't find a quick and easy way to -– of all things –- perform the basic function of choosing different font sizes.

Here's an example of selecting text size from the message editing toolbar (or whatever it's called) in Eudora. It's convenient and easy to use for operating with the commonest message content editing options:

I'm quite surprised that Pandora doesn't seem to have such a toolbar, at least I couldn't find one. All content editing in Pandora seems to have to be done via pull-down  Edit Menu selections (at the very top) or via context menu (right mouse click) selections in the body of the message:

I'm finding that my basic content creation and updating is noticeably slowed down by only having the drop-down or context menu approach.

- - - - - - - - - -

In the second screenshot, I make the additional observation that there are various places in Pandora where you're presented with long lists of items that you're have to scroll through vertically, and I find this scrolling to be painfully slow and cumbersome.

Then,  you have scrolled way down a list (for example, choosing Verdana font) and next time you want to choose a different item from the list (say, Arial font) then you have to laboriously scroll all the way back up through the list). On my system, which is reasonably powerful, it takes at least twenty seconds to scroll from one end to the other of the Text Color list.

Eudora (and various other apps) display such long lists in multi-column format like the following, lightly blurred to protect the innocent. The list items might get rendered to the left or to the right, dependent on screen real estate positioning In the following example (transfer of a message to one of my many mailboxes) it's rendered to the left:

Selecting an item is much easier/faster using this approach.

Eudora versus Pandora - Tabs for mailboxes (and web browsers)

The web browser that I use most of the time is Waterfox, the so-called Classic version of it which I have carefully tailored with a set of old-style XPI add-ons in order to maximise my browsing efficiency and comfort.

When I get newsletters in my mail client's Inbox, I usually launch multiple news article links from each newsletter and often finish up with at least twenty or thirty browser tabs open at once. Within each Waterfox window I have configured the Tab Mix Plus add-on to display multiple rows of tabs, looking like the following:

With this Waterfox add-on, how the tabs are displayed and browser features are handled is controlled by a myriad of useful options. Here is the Tab Mix Plus "Display" panel for configuring the Tab Bar:

And currently I have selected "Multi-Row" with up to three rows of tabs to be displayed:

On other Options panels I've set tabs to have rounded top corners with the active tab coloured yellow, and clicking with the middle mouse button to close the highlighted tab:

All in all, this add-on does an exceptionally good job of managing tabbed windows and what happens upon various mouse actions.

The above is all a precursor to reviewing how Eudora and Pandora handle tabs.

Here's the Eudora tab bar, with lots of mailboxes open. There is no way to control the tabs' relative locations

As more and more mailboxes get opened in Eudora, the tabs become narrower and narrower, until they reach a tiny size that displays only Eudora's  generic mailbox icon, If you hover the mouse over a tab, thankfully the tab's title is displayed as a tool tip:

When there are fewer tabs, the tab labels gradually start making an appearance:

If you right-click a tab, you can close it thus:

My criticism is that this requires two button clicks and I wish it would be better if -- as mentioned above for Waterfox browser (also for many other Windows apps) -- a single centre-button-click could be used to close the tab. Some of us would save hundreds of button clicks per day if this were implemented in Eudora.

Moving now to Pandora Mail client, here's an example of its tab bar with more than five or six mailboxes open. The tabs are of fixed size, and they don't shrink in width as more mailboxes are opened, but instead scroll horizontally. The red circle indicates where you cause the tabs to scroll left or right:

I've found that such horizontal scrolling becomes rathe tedious when you have more that bout ten mailboxes open. You must click on the "X" at the right-hand end of a tab, or as with Eidora right-click the tab and select "Close" as follows:

In conclusion, I'd really appreciate it if Pandora gets the ability to display multiple rows of mailbox tabs -- a selectable number of rows -- and to allow centre-clicking on a tab to close it.

Furthermore, in many other Windows apps (browsers, and more) you can rearrange tabs by dragging them to new locations in the tab bar, and Pandora should get this capability too.

Kryptonite puffs, anyone?

Persona names are easily changed in Pandora

Pandora carries over from Eudora the ability to define different personas (or personalities), which enable you to do all sorts of tailoring about mail messages are retrieved from mail servers or sent to them.

There is a mandatory "dominant" persona, the bare minimum for Eudora or Pandora to operate. You may create as many other personas as you like, to cater for different mail accounts on different mail servers (Gmail, Outlook Mail, AOL, or whatever), and to cater for different attributes that need to be configured for each specific mail server (POP versus IMAP, security options, account banes and their passwords, etc).

Each persona has its own mix of settings. These settings are stored in different files within Eudora.

In Eudora, when you create a new persona you must give it a unique name (whatever suits you, such as "My Bank" or "Gmail" and the like). An annoyance in Eudora is that there is no way to directly change a persona's name.

If you have a technical bent, you can edit various Eudora files, but this is beyond the capabilities of your average Eudora user.

Not so with Pandora. You merely right-click on the personality name , select Rename… from the context menu:

Then you simply enter the new name:

It couldn't be any easier.

Pandora Mail toolbar improvements compared with Eudora

Just a few more observations in this post. Firstly, here's my toolbar customisation in Eudora. This works best for me after decades of use. I realise that others will want a different arrangement, it's definitely a matter of personal preference.

And in Pandora I've gone for a pretty similar arrangement:

In just over a week with Pandora, I've found that there are distinctly more toolbar configuration options. You launch toolbar customisation from the Settings nenu:

You add a mailbox (in this example, Pandora Mail) by dragging from the right-hand panel to the desired toolbar location:

 

A distinct advantage over Eudora is that the toolbar button for each added mailbox  has the mailbox name (such as "Pandora Mail") displayed in the toolbar. In Eudora, you finish up with identical mailbox icons and not toolbar text, so you can' tell them apart (only by mousing over a toolbar icon will you see a Toolbar Tip appear for a few seconds).

Adding button separators to the toolbar in Eudora is an unusual operation (you hold down  the Alt key and move a toolbar icon sideways, whereupon a separator appears). In Pandora, you simply drag the <------ button separator ------> from the right panel to the desired location in the toolbar (similarly for button padding).

What's more, you can drag multiple button separators side-by-side to make a sort of "thick button separator" which is what I've done to cause the "Delete" button really stand out (so that I'm less likely to click it inadvertently):

Yet another nicety for you to consider migration from Eudora to Pandora.