On Wednesday 22 January 2003 12:40 am, Bill Wisse wrote:
Hi What precisely do you mean by "" preview"" pane? And why would you want to turn it off?
the term "preview pane" comes from Microsoft as the term they used to describe the "default" behaviour of outlook/outlook express -- you have a "tree" listing on the left side (with plusses to expand sections, etc.), a straight "listing" in the upper-right that corresponds to the "selected" node of the tree, and the "preview" pane/panel in the lower right that showed [previewed] the contents of the message selected from the list above. This was "mostly benign" for quite some time, with the most obvious [detrimental] effect being that as you "scrolled through" messages they would automatically be marked as "ok, I've read this one". Then some enterprising young soul figured out how to construct an HTML message that, upon opening the message for "viewing", would do detrimental things to a computer -- if you had the "preview pain" enabled, merely SCROLLING through your messages would cause "bad things to happen" as you rolled past the infected message. As it is, this is exactly how kmail works, and could be subject to the same [fatal] flaw if you enable HTML viewing [true, there is a dire warning that appears if you try and enable this, but there are some people who, believe it or not, actually like getting [and sending] HTML-based mail] When you remove the "preview" panel, you can scroll through messages looking merely at the one-line header to determine "do I want to read this or not?", and "reading" a message would be similar to pressing the "V" key in kmail [try it] which pops the message up in it's very own window