INTRODUCTION

v0.18.0 was a major update and inevitably some bugs crept in that we didn't
detect prior to shipping.  Happily they have been fixed, and even more 
happily the regression test suite now has tests for many of them so that 
they will never reoccur.  v0.18.1 fixes these bugs (see THE GORY DETAILS 
below for the gory details) and also has two significant changes: the 
caching code associated with the History page has been totally rewritten
by me so that the History barely slows down as the number of messages in
the History increases; the Windows installer can now configure Outlook
and Outlook Express Internet email accounts for you (and undo the changes
if you uninstall POPFile).

POPFile v0.18.1 is also the first version where the UI meets the Bobby AA
rating for accessibility.  This means that not only does POPFile not 
discriminate against particular operating system, or natural languages,
or ways you want to sort your mail, but it is also accessible by everyone
regardless of the specific challenges they face.  (FOr more details on
this drop by http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/about.jsp)

Aside: If you are young, fit, and computer literate you might wonder why I 
bothered to make Bobby-level accessibility a requirement. Early on in 
POPFile's development a user told me that POPFile was a life changer. For 
him, sorting mail had been an arduous, frustrating task.

ESSENTIAL READING IF YOU ARE UPGRADING FROM v0.17.x

1. BACK UP YOUR OLD INSTALLATION: POPFile makes this really easy, just copy
   the entire POPFile directory somewhere.  You can then safely install
   POPFile v0.18.1 on top of your current installation; I just think a back up
   is a sensible precaution.

2. YOUR HISTORY WILL CLEAR: I have changed the format of the History files
   used in this version which means that the old History files will not be
   read by POPFile and will in fact be deleted to save disk space.  If you
   need to do any reclassifications prior to installing v0.18.1 do them!
   POPFile does NOT clear buckets, statistics or anything else on install of
   this version, just the History files.  To refresh the History view click
   the History tab at any time; POPFile will check disk for new messages.

3. IF YOU HAD BROKEN MAGNETS: I have added automatic update of broken magnets.
   If you had a magnet like [foo] which POPFile mistakenly changed to \[foo\]
   it should get magically fixed and start working.

4. ACCURACY MIGHT DROP FOR A SHORT WHILE: because of some changes made in the
   mail parser it is possible that you might see accuracy drop initially and
   you may find yourself reclassifying a few messages that used to work.  This
   is unfortunate but necessary to make POPFile even more accurate than before
   and v0.18.1 incorporates changes that make POPFile's classification
   accuracy better; however old corpuses might need a little retraining.

DOWNLOADING

You can obtain the latest release of POPFile by visiting

    http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=63137

UPGRADING

Just install POPFile on top of the currently installed version.  But did you
read the ESSENTIAL READING above first if you are upgrading from a pre v0.18.0
version?

FAQ

zonk3r has spent a great deal of time on a POPFile FAQ.  Please check it out
as it covers many questions that you might have:

    http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=14421&group_id=63137

THE GORY DETAILS

 1. Fixed a serious bug that could cause POPFile to stop responding to POP3
    and HTTP requests in the middle of downloading mail when the mail message
    containing a MIME encoding that used certain characters that were special
    in a Perl regular expression. (Reported by ecarlseen, gilesjuk, panther757,
    szkaroly and fixed by sschinke)
    
 2. The skinning system continues to evole with kraelen, stanley_krute and
    kinematics working madly to make everything skinnable, make everything
    comply with HTML 4.01, CSS1 and Bobby AA guidelines.
    
 3. The code that handled the History cache that was meant to speed the loading
    of the History pages and that I originally wrote was pretty lame and 
    some people (including me!) were ending up with 1000 message in the history
    and the load time sucked.  So I fixed it.  The new cache will load ONCE and
    ONLY ONCE per file and caches everything in memory.  When new messages are
    received they get loaded once per new message as well.  When a History 
    page needs to be generated everything can be loaded from the cache without
    doing any disk access which means that you should see little difference 
    between 10 messages and 1000.

 4. To magnets would not work correctly if the To line in the email header
    contained multiple lines.  (Reported by drunin and fixed by kinematics)

 5. There was a nasty problem where sometimes the statistics would not update
    correctly which typically happened when you downloaded a large number of
    emails in one batch.  This was caused by the fact that we weren't flushing
    the pipe between the child POP3 process and the parent regularly, this has
    been modified so that this can never happen and statistics update in real 
    time even as mail is downloading. (Reported by burale,  ct85711)

 6. The Windows installer has been much improved with the assistance of 
    xuesheng to make it reconfigure Outlook and Outlook Express for you and 
    include a number of new screens.
    
 7. Quarantine had a couple of bugs where it would show the incorrect date
    (reported by thejcab) and the wrong to address (reported by dyoungmciwcom)
    under some circumtances.
    
 8. When the From or Subject was encoded using base64 or quoted printable 
    weird things would show up in the History. (Reported by goulduck and fixed
    by williamxp)
    
 9. spf and I went back and forth discussing line endings in the files saved to
    disk so that all the MSG and CLS files could be loaded into an editor on
    any platform without extraneous characters.
    
10. People who live on the Bleeding Edge were getting update warnings from 
    POPFile even though they were on the latest version.  This has been fixed
    on the update server.
    
11. Magnets containing the & character could not be deleted. (Reported by the
    infamous stanley_krute and fixed by helphand)
    
12. There was a bug associateds with invisible ink detection that could cause
    POPFile's HTML engine to think invisible ink was in use when a font tag
    spanned a table. (Reported by mfichtner)
    
13. If POPFile didn't exit gracefully then statistics were not being saved to
    disk and would not be up to date. (Reported by daemon72)
    
14. The Shutdown page had no CSS because POPFile was shutdown, we now have a 
    simple SSI solution just for the shutdown page. (Fix and report by 
    helphand)
    
15. There was a problem with Subject Line Modification where if it was turned
    off every subject line got an extra space in it. (Reported by and
    fixed by helphand)
    
16. There was a bug where you couldn't look up words that had # in them. 
    (Reported by adammc and fixed by helphand)
    
17. Viewing base64 encoded messages in the History resulted in little useful
    output. (Reported by biljir and fixed by pkarlin)
    
18. sschinke whipped up a new -archive option that causes message removed from
    the History to get saved away on disk.
    
19. sschinke made POPFile behave better when a POP3 server suddenly stops 
    responding in the middle of a conversation.
    

DONATIONS

Thank you to everyone who has clicked the Donate! button and donated their
hard earned cash to me in support of POPFile.  Thank you also to the people
who have contributed patches, feature requests and bug reports and big thanks
to the two POPFile team members Stan and Sam for their continued efforts.

Keep the ideas and bug reports coming.

John.