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WebMail Announcement Area Description

This page describes the facility on the WebMail login page that allows a dynamic message to be added to the page. This lets us conveniently add announcements of maintenance, downtime, etc. to the page.

The first step is to find the files. If you are using Unix, the files are stored in 

   /usr/local/data/www/projects/webmail/
Windows users would most conveniently use samba to map a new drive to 
   \\samba\www
and then navigate to the \projects\webmail\ directory on that drive. The files in this directory are text files, so be sure to use a text editor such as Notepad or KEDIT to edit them.

File Descriptions

There are four important files in this directory.
index.html
This file of instructions.
message.js
This is the main, production file. Messages in this file appear on the main WebMail login page at https://webmail.ksu.edu/.
message-test.js
This is a test version of message.js. Instead of appearing on the WebMail login page, the message in this file appear on https://webmail.ksu.edu/msgtest.htm.
message-none.js
This is a blank template that is most conveniently used to remove a message.

Adding a Message

  1. Edit /projects/webmail/message-test.js. Follow the comments in the file and the example to add the message.

  2. View the new message by loading https://webmail.ksu.edu/msgtest.htm. If it doesn't look right, go back to step 1. Note that you can edit message-test.js all you want -- no one will see it unless they load msgtest.htm.

  3. When you are satisfied with the message and ready to move it to production, copy message-test.js to message.js. On Unix, use the cp command: 
       cp message-test.js message.js
    On Windows, you can use drag and drop and the Windows Explorer. However, there is a complication. You can't rename a file and replace another file in one step. However, you can copy message-test.js to your local hard drive, rename it to message.js, and the copy it back to /projects/webmail/ and allow it to overwrite the existing message.js.

    (You could simply erase message.js and then rename message-test.js to message.js. However, for the few seconds between, no message.js would exist, and anyone loading the WebMail login page would receive an error.)

Removing a Messsage

  1. After the message has outlived its usefulness, get rid of it by copying message-none.js to message.js. This overwrites the existing message with a blank one.

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June 9, 2000