gbForumMail

gbForumMail is a freeware application which provides offline viewing of your personal, vBulletin-based forum mail. You can view any or all of your forum mail folders, as well as search through your mail for a search string.

Download (v1.03, 90K)

gbForumMail uses a single main screen, with just a few controls (ListView control, which displays the email header information, and Viewer control, which displays the body of the selected email). There is no menu and no toolbar. There is a context menu for the ListView and Viewer controls).

Key Features

gbForumMail provides a variety of features for offline viewing of vBulletin personal mail.

Simple Interface
Uses vBulletin mail text files without change
Automatically detects downloaded folders
Colors code/quote content to separate it from the rest of the message
Sort mail by folder, from, to, date, and subjects
Splitter bar to size mail list and mail content areas
Alternating line colors in mail list (aids visual scanning of list)
Optional viewing of headers with content
Saves settings between sessions
Find search string in mail content (search up/down and match case options)
Automatically continue search in next/previous mail
Find option spans mails
Maintains last 20 search terms
Auto-detect and open URLs found within mail content

Using gbForumMail

Using gbForumMail couldn't be simpler.

From your vBulletin forum, download your mail as a text file(s). Place the file(s) in the "messages" subfolder, found within the folder where you installed gbForumMail.
Run gbForumMail to view your forum mail!

That's it. When gbForumMail is opened, it automatically reads the files in the "messages" subfolder, determining which forum mail folders are present. If the folder does not exist, gbForumMail will create it.

Once the mail files are loaded, you may view mail from any folder, or view a composite listing of all mail.

You can also search to find mail containing any search string. See the section below for more information on the gbForumMail Find features.

Find Features

To find a text string in the currently displayed mail, just enter a text string into the search term edit box and press the "Find" button. The search starts at the current location and goes up or down, depending on which of the options are selected.

You can also simply press "Enter" within the search term edit box to initiate a search. When you press Enter from the search term edit box, the content of the edit box is highlighted and focus remains with the edit box - allowing you to change the search term without moving your hands off the keyboard.

Pressing the F3 button, or using the Ctrl-F key combination, will move focus to the search string edit box and highlight the current search string.

The "Search All" option will direct gbForumMail to move to the next/previous mail when no additional matches are found in the currently displayed mail.

Context Menu - ListView

If you right click on the ListView control you'll get this context menu:

Show Email Summary - provide a count of all emails in all folders
Alternating Line Colors - displays every 3 lines with a different background color

Context Menu - Content Viewer

If you right click on the Viewer control you'll get this context menu:

Copy Selection - copies selected text to the clipboard
Select All - selects all text
Copy All - copies all text to the clipboard, without first selecting it
Select Font - opens a dialog from which the View font can be selected
Reset Font - restores font to the default value
Select Code Color - opens a dialog from which to select the Code highlighting color
Select Quote Color - opens a dialog from which to select the Quote highlighting color
Reset Colors - resets quote/colors to the default green/blue values
Show Headers - enables display of header information in the Viewer
Highlight Quotes/Code - toggles use of quote/code highlighting colors

vBulletin Text Files

The text file format for downloaded personal mail looks like this, and is the format gbForumMail expects to receive. From this format, it extracts the folder and individual mail.

PowerBASIC Peer Support Forums;http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pbforums
Private Message Dump for User Gary Beene; Nov 28th, 2010 05:49 PM -->

#########################################################################
Folder :	Inbox
#########################################################################

=========================================================================
From :	Walt Decker
To :	Gary Beene
Date :	2010-05-27 14:21
Title :	opengl
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary:

Do you have the opengl includes from Jose's forum.  I've tried to download
his winapi which includes them, but I'm on dial-up and I only get about 
1/3 of the way through when the download fails.

Walt Decker

=========================================================================

Other Comments

Misecellaneous information is provided in this section.

Sessions
When gbForumMail starts, it opens restores the view from the last session. The gbForumMail window size and position are also restored.

INI File
gbForumMail application settings are saved in an INI file, kept in the same folder as the gbForumMail application.

Comments and suggestions are welcome!