The Menu Tree
Click the Edit drop-down menu, then select Preferences. A window opens. On the left, it lists different topics, for which you can set your preferences on the right. Little plus-signs indicate that subtopics are hidden behind them. You can click the plus-signs to expand the topic-tree.
Advanced Options
Under Advanced, you find several important configuration options. For
viewing sites with all their functionality, both Java (applets) and JavaScript
(browser-directives) should be enabled.
Style sheets allow the page creator to really "design" the page, so you
normally do want them turned on (unless viewing some really crazy page).
Many sites in the educational community require authentication, which
usually means they have to store a piece of data called a cookie
on your computer. For online shopping, it is also usually necessary to
accept cookies, as the site may store information about your current transaction
in them, without which you cannot complete the transaction. Thus it is
crucial to accept cookies at these sites.
On the other hand, you may not want to accept all cookies, as many commercial
sites use them to keep track of your movements on their site. You may
like this, as it allows them to present you with offers tailored to your
taste, or you may value your privacy more.
Cookie warnings can quickly get annoying, as many sites attempt to store
5-10 cookies, so if you want to keep watch over your cookies, a little
tool such as the shareware application Cookie
Pal
is very useful.
If you don't
want to use Netscape Composer for editing or creating webpages, you can almost
skip this section. There is only one setting important for you: in the Publishing
subtopic, make sure to have both boxes checked (as shown at right). That
way you can save a webpage for later offline viewing (i.e. not connected to the
internet). To do that, it is not enough to save the page in Netscape Navigator,
as that will just save the page's text! Images, however, are separate files (linked
into the page), so Navigator will not save them. Instead, while viewing the page,
choose File-> Edit Page, which opens the page in Composer (if the
page uses a frames-based layout, you need to select File-> Edit Frame instead,
as Netscape Composer does not understand frames). Then, choose File-> Save
in the Composer window to store the HTML-file and the image-files on your
computer.
Besides,
you need to configure it for remote publishing. Enter the site address as shown
at right, using the ftp-protocol. You need to insert your NetID
before the @-symbol, the correct servername (tigger or icarus),
and the full path to your web-directory. To find that path, login to tigger
(or icarus) and type 
First,
you need to tell Messenger where it should pick up your email, which is done
in the Mail Server section. Previously, that was only possible via the
POP3-protocol. Messenger would retrieve all your mail from a maildrop
on tigger or icarus, known as your INBOX. This mail would be downloaded
to your local inbox on your computer. While you could leave a copy on the server
to read it from another computer (say at work and at home), you had no way of
organizing these messages into folders, or of keeping copies of outgoing messages
there, neatly organized. 
That
has now changed with the arrival of IMAP, which leaves your messages
on the server, so you can access them from anywhere via Eudora, Netscape
Messenger, Outlook, or pine. All IMAP-details are described
in a 
Advanced
in the IMAP-options (before version 4.5, access these via 
).
The correct path has to be of the form 
The
Messages subtopic can be customized at your leisure, but some settings
work better than others. For forwarding/replying, use "inline"
or "quoted". Do not use the setting "as
attachment", as that is inconvenient for the recipient. Do spell-check
your messages, unless you are an excellent typist and a walking encyclopedia.
And make sure to reduce the default line-width for outgoing messages from 72
characters to something that will display well in most people's windows (<65).
For accented characters, definitely use quoted-printable, but avoid sending
such messages to newsgroups and mailing lists. Instead, type the messages without
diacritical marks (or write them out, such as n~ instead of ñ).