Mail Manager

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Mail Manager System Architecture

Overview

Mail Manager can be installed on personal computers and handheld devices, note that no server based component is required.

User interfaces on both the handheld and PC are designed to be highly responsive to the user and do not therefore engage in the filing process, which is delegated to the 'background filer'. The latter queues filing tasks if the destination paths are not available, and will silently complete the process when they are. This enables Mail Manager to be used by mobile workers as they can file incoming and outgoing messages as they work, relying on the background filer to complete the filing when they next connect to the network.

To provide a very fast search which is also available when off-line, Mail Manager employs a highly compressed local index which only contains data from those folders that have been searched by the user.

No server required

Whilst Mail Manager can file messages to your servers (Exchange, file system, SharePoint etc), you do not have to install anything on any of your server/s to benefit from the software. This makes it very easy to deploy in teams or to pilot, as there is no disruption to central systems.

File format

When filing to file system folders or storage systems like SharePoint, Mail Manager creates an MSG file for each message. This is a Microsoft file format which contains the entire message including all its formatting, images, links and attachments. In practice Outlook creates the files but under Mail Manager's supervision. This ensures that they are 100% compatible with Outlook. Should you wish to open these files on a machine that does not have Mail Manager, simply double-click the file or drag and drop it onto the Outlook window.

Local index

Unlike many local indexers such as Google desktop search, Mail Manager's indexer does not sit in the background polling for changes and continually updating itself. This ensures it does not hog resources or index places that the user may never search. Instead it only indexes those places that the user searches. This keeps the index small and highly responsive.

When a user initiates a search on one or more locations Mail Manager's search tool starts a number of processor threads responsible for; showing the results, finding new messages that need to be added to the index, indexing new messages, and showing the results.

When searching a new folder, Mail Manager will focus on gathering data about the messages stored there and will add them to its index. When complete it will show the results.

When searching a folder that has previously been indexed, Mail Manager will first show results from its local index and will then find any new messages, index those, and finally display the updated data. The latter typically takes less than a second but will depend on how many new items are in the folder.

The local index can typically be found in the folder:

C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Oasys\Mail Manager\Index

Index size

To give a feel for the size of the local index we indexed all of our customer, reseller and development folders totaling over 134,000 messages of mixed size, many of which included attachments. This consumed only 429Mb of local disk space. Note: In normal use Mail Manager only indexes those folders searched by the user, resulting in a much smaller index than in our example.

The index purely provides rapid search. If it becomes damaged or deleted, Mail Manager will simply create a new one.

Mail Manager on the handheld

Handheld devices do not normally have the ability to access your company file system due to the protocol stack. So the handheld version of the software does not file the messages, instead it creates filing tasks for your PC to do. This has the advantage that unlike other systems, the filing experience is smooth and immediate to the user and works regardless of whether their device is connected to data services at the time.

When users file messages, the Mail Manager handheld software tags them with their destinations. This information is synchronized with your PC when it next comes on-line, if the PC is off-line the requests are queued. The background filer on the PC looks for these filing requests from time to time and acts upon them. Changes are synched back to the handheld via the same mechanism, so that the filing status can be displayed on the handheld device. The data is exchanged via "ActiveSynch" and does not therefore require any adjustments to your firewall or any additional software.

This unique approach ensures that filing is uninterrupted for mobile workers.

Note: All Mail Manager filing locations have a unique internal ID. When tagging messages Mail Manager uses the destination ID rather than the full path. This ensures that the message will be correctly filed even if the location name and path have changed when the PC finally sees the filing request.