Greedy Goblin

Friday, April 2, 2010

All about the mailbox

I'm going to summarize important fields from making money and handling inventory. Obviously none of the information here is my invention, it's a summary of game and addon abilities.

The first is the mailbox. Everyone knows it and uses it. However if someone have a serious industry, he'll have lot of mail. Like 4-500. Handling them is not easy.

The first thing I'd like to introduce is postal. It's more or less a must-be addon for businessmen and handy for everyone else.
  • It processes 50 mails at once
  • It allows you to filter between mails, opening only AH-sales, cancels, expires, wons and non-AH
  • It has a built-in name-autocomplete feature
  • It fills the "subject" field automatically with the contents of the mail (like "copper bar")
  • It blocks trade windows while you are at the mailbox

The second thing I'd like to introduce is OpenAll. You must know that if you open a mailbox (manually or with Postal), you only see 50 mails, no matter how many you have. If you remove (some of) them, 62 seconds later the mailbox refreshes and you see those mails that were invisible first (max 50 again). So if you have 500 mails, you open it, press "Open all" on the Postal interface, get your mail, wait a minute, press again. Altogether 10 presses in 10 minutes. OpenAll does it for you, you can go AFK while collecting mail. Of course you can just /reload after each page, but then you have to be at the computer.


The third thing to mention is "giga storage". It needs only a "storage" alt. As soon as you have 12 of one kind of items, you send it in a box to the storage alt. He doesn't open the mail, just let it stand in the mailbox. When you need the items, he opens the box, but instead of removing any items from it, simply presses return, and the full box returns to you.

It's important to store the same items in the box, so the title of the mail tells what's inside. This way the bankalt don't have to open any mail to know what's inside, just have to scroll the mailbox and read the titles.

The mailbox shows 50 items, so in order to remain searchable you cannot send more than 50 boxes (600 items/stacks) to one bankalt. If you have more, you need more storage bankalts.

18 comments:

Tal said...

One note - filling in the subject line with the name of the first attached item is part of the default Blizzard mail UI, not a feature of any addon.

Anonymous said...

If you're not AFK and want to read your next mails, you can also type /reload. It will reload your interface. If your computer is fast enough, you can win some serieus time by doing so.

Even with no addons the subject of the mail will become the first item attached to it. So that's not an addon function, but a function made by Blizzard. Also not that you can just right click the items to get them attached to the mail(same for trade btw). I didn't know, I found out by accident.

Anonymous said...

Another great feature about Postal is that it saves the name of the last person you sent mail to so you don't have to repeatedly spell out your alt's name if you are sending large quantities of goods to it.

Unknown said...

The description of what that openall addon does is a bit vague.

If I read it correctly, it basically presses a button for you once per minute, right?
Because if that's the case, I'd be carefull using it, as blizzard generally doesn't like people being able to afk-click.

Gevlon said...

@Christian: it's a Lua addon, not a program. It can only do what Blizzard explicitly allowed to it (BTW it checks every 10 secs)

Anonymous said...

I wonder if it can reloadui while checking mail :S Otherwise - minimum interface and /reloadui will cut your 10 mins to 2.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the "Openall" suggestion, I'll definitely get that one. Now all I need is a way to increase my bag space so I can hold 700+ glyphs, when collecting them with "Openall" :P

Anonymous said...

Maybe I was a bit vague, if you do /reload. It will refresh the mail in your inbox immediatly. That's why it saves time.

Anonymous said...

Hey I tried to post this as a response to Kaléna's comment about this "terrible idea" because it is unfair to the "have nots". However, my account is expired I think.

If anyone wants to post it feel free:

[quote]Your proposal skews looting in favour of the "haves", and is therefore inherently a terrible idea.[/quote]

__My Response________How is it favoring the have nots? They run it with random people and see gear they don't want. Other people hit need or greed and pay them for the gear they don't want. Then something comes along that they do want, they use the money they made from the other gear and they get it.

Now it does skew looting in favor of people who are willing to think and against people who blindly need everything they can, but that's the point.____

Anonymous said...

QA3 has an auto loot option that lets you hit one button and walk away until all your mail is done. Whenever the mailbox refreshes it will start opening again.

It also has an automail function to mail to your alts if setup properly all you have to do is open the mailbox you don't even have to enter part of your alts name to autocomplete.

Even if you don't like using it for the actual posting auctions, the mailing functionality is nice IMO and doesn't require multiple addons.

Tonus said...

There are going to be some M&S replying to the topic because they don't entirely understand what is being said. That first one ("it favors the haves") is a classic case of trying to find a fault in the idea without really thinking about it.

re: scanning email faster- I do what the anonymous above suggested. After Postal goes through the 50 emails it can see, I just press my /console reloadui macro and open the mailbox again after 5-10 seconds instead of 30-60 seconds. You spend a lot less time waiting for the system to catch up with you.

Treeston said...

ReloadUI() is a protected function, and thus can only be called in response to a hardware event (button press). So no, addons can't auto-reload for you.

Sjonnar said...

@Anon: 'Hey I tried to post this as a response to Kaléna's comment about this "terrible idea" because it is unfair to the "have nots". However, my account is expired I think.'

Are you in NA? because i tried to post in support and it said i didn't have an active subscription on this account. I can post just fine on NA forums, so it must be a NA <-/-> EU thing.

It's a real shame too, because i strongly support the greed w/ compensation button.

Maebius said...

I don't have an EU account, but I really really like the idea of the gold-for-gear system you described.

I'm not the richest character (never really became a Goblin, but have been subscribed to this RSS for months anyway), but do have a druid and ran into the cloth/caster-leather issue myself and would have Loved to roll on clear upgrades, or at least get a few coin for passing on unnecessary drops.

Stokpile said...

Only problem I have with mail opening addons is that I could do it manually infinitely faster. Now if they reloaded my UI automatically and re opened the mail box then I'd be doing a dance.

Anonymous said...

Stockpile: You must be superman, to be faster than an addon. Try opening 900 mails. I've got a bet, you'll be still sitting in front of your comp, and I'll be in a bar drinking with my friends long before you finish.
But hey! You are the smart one!

Cedric said...

You are forgetting the most important mailbox add-on of all: "Mail Opener". It opens your mail every ten seconds automatically so that when you have 500 mails, you just open your mailbox, go AFK for 10 mn and when you come back, your mailbox is empty (or your inventory is full, whichever comes first).

I actually changed the delay to 2 seconds speed things up.

Invaluable add-on for Glyph makers. That and Ultimate Craft Queue, of course.

Unknown said...

scratch thats its on curse at http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/mailopener/download/403318.aspx