The best place to start if you are just looking into customizing a Saké Mail installation is the "Customization" section of the Saké Administrator's Manual. That's because most customization options relate to the entire framework and not the specific servlet, and are controlled through the "general.ini" file rather than the "mail.ini" file. This document describes some customization tricks that apply very specifically to Saké Mail.

"Rigging" the Incoming Mail Server:
With MailMan, another web mail product from Endymion, rigging the incoming mail server in any way is a task that requires template customization. We have so many requests for information on how to perform this particular customization that when we developed Saké Mail, we specifically built in the capability to perform this task simply by setting a value in the initialization file. For more information on this, see the value "sake.mail.incomingserver" in the configuration section. You can also set the default server name, leaving an option for the user to change the server if they like.

"Rigging" the Outgoing Mail Server
Again, this task is so frequently performed by MailMan administrators that we have incorporated it into the configuration file. Just like with the incoming mail server, you can either set the default name or you can specify a name that cannot be edited, where the user is simply not presented with an option to change the server name.

"Rigging" the Protocol
If you would like to set a default protocol, then you can modify the default setting by moving the "checked" keyword in the template files "t_nf_login" and "t_f_login". If you would like to set a protocol that cannot be changed, then you can modify the "sake.mail.storeprotocol" option in the configuration file.

Setting the Default Names of Folders
By default, the displayed name of a user's inbox will be "In Box". Each default folder, "Sent Items", "Trash", and "Drafts", has both a display name and a physical name. The physical name is the actual name of the folder on the mail server. For example, the "Sent Items" folder is actually a folder called "sent" on the mail server. You can configure the physical names of the folders in the configuration file. In some cases, you may wish to change the name as displayed to the user in the interface, called the display names, of the default folders. This is especially useful if you are translating the Saké Mail interface into another language. The display names of the folders are configured via snippets at the bottom of the "t_folders" template.

Changing the Mechanism for Creating "From" Line Email Addresses
The email address that is listed in the "From" line for outbound messages is created by default by concatenating the username and the name of the server that the user has logged in to. If you would like to change the way that Saké Mail infers this email address, change the "FROM_ADDRESS_DEFINITION" snippet at the end of the "t_options_personal" template file. More information on the specifics of how to modify a template file are listed here. The default definition is "%%sake.mail.username%%@%%sake.mail.storeserver", which will generate an email address of the form "user@server". The most common modification would be if your incoming server (the "store server") is specified at logon as something specific, such as "imap.mycompany.com", but you do not want your outbound "From" lines to be of the form "user@imap.mycompany.com". You can specify that your outbound "From" addresses will be of the form "user@mycompany.com" simply by changing the definition snippet to: "%%sake.mail.username%%@mycompany.com". Keep in mind that a much simpler way of doing this same customization is to simply use the "sake.mail.domainstripmode" setting in the configuration file, which is set to "smart" by default. If all else fails, you can use the configuration value "sake.mail.allowfromaddress" to allow your users to specify the From address that they would like to use in their options or when they send messages. This value is set in the configuration file.