New Mail

New Mail is for those of you, who are you that would like a simple way to see when new mail arrives, which involves nothing more than looking at your keyboard's lights, to see if they are flashing or not!

Anyway, you should find that New Mail looks something like the screenshot below...

As you can see, there are quite a few different options and settings to choose from when using New Mail, but it should be straight forward to use, once you have had a quick look at them, and read the more detailed explanations given below. However, what is not visible in the screenshot, is that New Mail lives in the system tray, which is the part of the screen near your PC's clock, and that if you right click on the icon in the system tray, a pop-up menu will appear where you can select one of these options:

• Selecting 'Show...' from the menu will restore the New Mail window.

• Selecting 'Auto-Load' from the menu will automatically load New Mail on Windows start-up.

• Selecting 'Enabled' from the menu will enable/disable the monitoring.

• Selecting 'Close' from the menu will close New Mail.

If for some reason you decide that you no longer want to use this program, please make sure that the 'Auto-Load' option, found on the system tray menu, is not selected, before you delete the program from your PC, to avoid any error messages.

The monitoring of your mail client is what allows the keyboard lights to start flashing, shortly after any new mail arrives. The flashing will automatically stop once you have read your new mail, or if you close your mail client. The options and settings give you complete control over the flashing sequence, and the time between checking for new mail, so that the program can respond in whatever way you would prefer. The different options and settings are explained in detail below:

• The 'Options' section allows you to choose the order in which the Caps-Lock, Num-Lock, and Scroll-Lock lights will flash. The order can easily be reversed simply by selecting the 'Run The Flashing Sequence In Reverse' option.

• The 'Settings' section allows you to specify, how often New Mail will check for new mail, the pause time between each flashing of a key-lock, and the number of times the flashing sequence should be repeated for each successful check for new mail. The checking time period must be between 10 and 60 seconds, the pause time must be between 100 and 600 milliseconds, and the number of times the flashing sequence can be repeated varies, depending on the other two settings.

New Mail has four buttons: the 'OK' button, which minimises the program to the system tray and applies any changes; the 'Close' button, which closes New Mail and ignores any changes that have not been applied; the 'Apply' button, which ensures that the current settings are the ones being used; and the 'Test' button, which shows you what the currently applied settings look like.

Unfortunately, in Windows NT 4 / 2000 / XP, but not in Windows 95 / 98 / ME, the flashing of the keyboard lights has a slightly undesired side-effect, which could not be avoided, despite my best efforts otherwise, in that it will most likely result in your typing producing somewhat amusing results, OnES WHIch ARe PERhapS MORe EASilY DEMonsTRaTEd, THAn EXPlaINeD!