7.5 Advanced email features

7.5.1 Adding a mail folder

7.5.2 Tidying your email

7.5.3 Mailbox settings

7.5.4 Mail events

7.5.5 Extracting attachments

7.5.1 Adding a mail folder

You may wish to have several mail folders and move messages into folders for specific subjects in order to keep your email well organised. You may even wish to filter new messages directly to these folders to reduce mailbox clutter. A mail folder can be added by clicking on  Add  |   Mail Folder  in your Personal Email Area or a Mailbox, which will prompt you to give a name for the folder.

Mail folders can be added in all the places that normal folders can be added, and nesting of mail folders is permitted. However, mail folders have an advantage over normal folders in that their contents are displayed in a different way from the regular Business Collaborator style - a way that is particularly useful for browsing email messages.

7.5.2 Tidying your email

In mail folder and mailbox views, it is possible to  View/Change  |  Tidy Messages  the email messages it contains. This action helps you to manage your email by moving messages into mail folders based on the date on which they arrived.

7.5.3 Mailbox settings

If you wish to change the settings associated with a specific mailbox, click on  View/Change  |  Mailbox Settings   in the mailbox view.

This allows you to alter your original choices for mail server name and email user name and password. In addition, you can choose whether or not to leave messages on the mail server. This could be useful if you also wish to obtain the same messages from the server using another email client.

7.5.4 Mail events

As in all other parts of the Business Collaborator system, standard events section 4.7 on email messages, such as read events, are recorded. In addition, there are some specific event icons for email messages which record email-only events. One of these is the reply event icon,  .

Another is the forward event icon,  .

7.5.5 Extracting attachments

This functionality (new in Business Collaborator version 4.7) enables users to email documents directly into a given location in Business Collaborator.

If you selected "Automatically extract all attachments to a new folder" when you created your mailbox, a folder called "Attachments for < mailbox name >" will have been created automatically at the same level as your mailbox. As soon as you receive any messages which have attachments, the attachments will automatically be extracted into this folder, as well as being available in the usual manner - see section 7.4.3. Documents stored in the "Attachments for < mailbox name >" folder can be treated in the same way as documents in any other folder in Business Collaborator. For example, they can be cut, copied, deleted (see section 3.6), renamed (see section 3.5.1), edited (see section 3.3.) etc.

In addition to creating the folder to store the attachments, checking "Automatically extract all attachments to a new folder" when the mailbox was created also sets up a filter (see section 7.6) on the mailbox to ensure that attachments to incoming email messages are transferred to the appropriate folder automatically. (Note that the Mailbox settings do not display whether or not attachments are automatically being extracted. In order to check this information, you should check the filters which are being applied to this mailbox - by clicking  View/Change  |  Edit Filters  inside the mailbox.)

By moving the "Attachments..." folder into a shared folder (see section 3.4.2), the attached documents can be made available to other users directly. Any attachments to new messages which arrive fitting the filtering criteria will automatically be copied or moved (according to the filter settings) into the destination folder.

To stop attachments being sent to the destination folder, the filter should be removed from the mailbox in the usual way - see section 7.6.5.

A document added to Business Collaborator by extracting it from an email message will have the following attributes:

• its name will be the name of the attachment
• its MIME type will be that of the attachment
• its description will be the subject of the email message to which it was attached
• the event information associated with its creation will indicate that it was created from an attachment, which Business Collaborator user received it and who sent the original email

If the sender of the email is known to Business Collaborator, the create event information will be displayed as in Figure 7.5-1 but if the sender is unknown, the equivalent page would resemble Figure 7.5.2.(The subject of the email message to which this was originally attached provides a link to the message itself.) In both of these cases, the user name of the user to whom the message was sent is ccs. In the former, the message was from the user whose full name is A Smith. In the latter, the sender is not a registered Business Collaborator user and so the "from name" and the email address of the sender are displayed.

Figure 7.5-1: The create event on an attachment from a known sender

Figure 7.5-2: The create event on an attachment from an unknown sender