How to use the application
The app searches your online email for matches and notifies you whenever it finds a match. To use it you define a search which consists of a piece of text, a mail server to search on, and an interval to search.
Here’s an example (with some pics):
Let’s say you’re waiting for an important email from your wife, her email address is yourwife@gmail.com and your email is hosted at Gmail.
First, tap the plus button located top right on the screen. On the next screen you can tap one of two options (top right) to specify what type of thing you’re looking for. The T option lets you create a text based search, the other one lets you choose from one of your existing contacts. For our example we’ll go with text entry.
On the next screen enter in the details of what you are looking for:
Title: A unique way of identifying this search
Phrase: The text you are looking for (in this case yourwife@gmail.com). If you want to get creative you can use Regular Expressions here as well.
Tap Show Me to select which parts of the email you will search in:
to: try and find the text in the details of who the email was sent to.
subject: look for the text in the subject of the email.
from: look for the text in the details of who sent the email to you (we’ll pick this one for our example)
content: search for the text in the main contents of the email. Please note that if you select this option your searches will take extra long to run.
If you don’t choose anything, all options are chosen for you by default. Tap OK to continue and then again OK (top right) to complete adding your search.
Your search is listed with other searches you’ve already set up. Tap the search to continue.
On the next screen, hit the plus (top right) to add your mail server:
Host: The host name or IP address of the server, in this case imap.gmail.com
Type: The type of protocol to use to connect, use IMAP if possible, it’s faster.
Security: Does your mail server require a secure (SSL) connection to connect? Gmail does, select SSL
Port: The port you will connect to on the server, the app will default to standard based on Type/Security selection, change if necessary
User: Your email user name on the server that you use to log in to get your email, in this case <name>@gmail.com
Password: The password you log in with.
Just a note here, all this information is stored only on your phone for purposes of connecting to your server. Additionally your password is stored in an encrypted format.
After you’re done, tap OK (top right). Your connection details will be verified and if successful you will be returned to the list of sources screen, if not, it will not save and return. If this happens, check your details to make sure you’ve entered everything correctly.
For the example I’ve entered an actual server (hence the non Gmail looking address)
Tap the server to continue. Tap plus (top right) on the next screen to add a schedule.
For now, schedules are very rudimentary, only allowing hour increments up to 24.
Name: Some arbitrary name for this schedule.
Interval: At what interval (in hours) should this schedule trigger the search.
Tap OK, your schedule is shows in a list with other schedules you’ve created
Tap the schedule to continue and you’re done!
Your search will now be listed with other defined searches:
To activate background searching you need to enable it in the Options menu, which you can get to from the main screen by selecting Menu on your device. Once this option is enabled, the app will run, in the background, the searches you’ve created at the scheduled times you specified. Whenever a match is found a notification (a small gray envelope with a line through it) will appear in your notification area.
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Alternatively you can tap and hold on a search to bring up an option menu and…
Search: Run the search immediately.
Edit: Edit your search, will repeat above steps with last chosen option highlighted on each screen.
Delete: Delete this search and all matches found. Will not delete any of the search details (phrase, server, schedule).
Reset: When you mark a matched email as “read” they cannot be viewed again, this option resets the “read” flag on the search so that they can be viewed again.
When a matches are found for any of your searches a number will appear next to the search, this is the number of matches that were found.
Tap on the search to show a list of matched emails
A list of emails matching the search criteria is shown (subject, sender and date). Tap on the email to view it’s details, tap and hold to mark it as “read” or tap the X (top right) to mark all messages in this search as “read”.
Note: Marking emails as “read” does not mark it as read on your server.
The body of your email is shown, tap on the paper clip to view a list of attachments for this email
Tap on the attachment to view it. If your device supports viewing the attachment type, it should open up the attachment in the supported application.
One last thing, while you’re viewing the email, if you tap the Pencil (top right) you can “action” the email (eg. reply to it), in other words you can open it in whatever application you have installed that supports the email format (html or text).
That’s it, if you have any issues there’s a “Email the Developer” option in the Options screen, use it to let me know.
