The Web Mail Options Menu

The Options button at the top of the Web Mail screen allows you to personalise and alter the way the application behaves. The links below describe each of the options and how to use them. If you are unclear about how these options will appear, you can experiment with them.

• Your Information - Here you can create a signature file for your email, change the language and the time zone.
• Mail Management - Filters and maintenance operations are an important part of managing your mail.
• Other Options - Web Mail does allow some customising of how you want the application to look.

Your Information

Setting your email signature?

An email signature is a few lines of text that will automatically be added to the bottom of every mail message that you send. You might want to put your name and e-mail address in so that people know how to contact you in return. A signature saves you from typing in this information every time.

You can create your signature from the Web Mail 'Options' menu item. Select the 'Personal Information' item in the 'Your Information' section.

Simply add the text you want to include in your signature such as:

• Your name
• Role (if appropriate)
• Physical address (see below)
• Email address
• Contact phone numbers

Note: This information will be on your outgoing email, so think carefully about what to include. It may not be wise to include your home address for instance.

You can also nominate with simple check boxes whether you want to put your signature file before replies and forwards and whether to save all sent mail.

The Options / Language menu

You can change the displayed language by selecting from the drop down list. You will need to ensure that you have the Fonts suitable for that language installed on your computer.

The Options / Time Zone menu

You can set an alternative time zone here. Messages will then display the time sent in the selected time zone. Unless you have reasons to change this the default setting should remain.

Mail Management

The Options / Filters menu

You can set up filters to sort your email messages into folders before you see them, on the basis of criteria such as the subject or the sender.

If you want to filter future messages from a particular sender, click in the checkbox next to an email they have sent (in the Inbox screen), and then click "Blacklist".  This will add a rule to filter out that sender, and take you to the "Filter Rules" Options page.

You must first create your filter rules by clicking on Edit Your Filter Rules. You can then design rules based on your particular requirements. Remember that if your filtering is to move messages to specific folders, you must create the folder first.

To complete the process you must click the "Apply All Rules" button at the top of the page. This will then filter all undeleted messages according to the specified rules.  Returning to the filter options page you will see that you can nominate when to apply your filter rules.

You can also create, remove, or arrange the order of rules from the Filter Rules page.  Note that rules are applied once per message, hence rule order is significant.  Make sure you have the most important rules first.

The Options / Message Viewing menu

This selection allows a filter designed across all users to be applied based on a list of words considered to be profane. This is not configured, so checking this box will not affect the content of your emails.

The Options / Deleting and Moving Messages menu

Your email can work in two modes: marking mail as deleted, and moving deleted messages to a Trash folder.

Marking Mail as Deleted:
When you tell your email account to delete one or more messages (by clicking Delete in the message screen, or by selecting the check box to the left of the message in the Inbox screen and then clicking Delete), the mail is only marked as deleted, and is not immediately removed from your mailbox, giving you the opportunity to decide to undelete it later.  If you are certain you will not need the deleted message(s), click on Purge Deleted in the Inbox screen. 
If you only wish to make Web Mail stop displaying the deleted messages, without permanently removing them, click Hide Deleted from the Inbox screen.

Please note that marking mail as deleted is the default option. You will need to set the option to move deleted messages to a trash folder by clicking in the second of the boxes on the Deleting and Moving Messages Options page and by nominating the folder.

Moving deleted messages to a Trash folder:
If you are using a Trash folder feature, it acts somewhat differently.  When you tell your email account to delete one or more messages (by clicking Delete in the message screen, or by selecting the check box to the left of the message in the Inbox screen and then clicking Delete), the mail is moved to a Trash folder, giving you the opportunity to decide to undelete it (remove it from the trash) later.  If you are certain you will not need the deleted message(s), click on Empty Trash folder in the Inbox screen.

In addition, you can have your email account automatically empty your trash folder at various intervals via the "Maintenance Operations" section below.

Note: Messages stored in your Trash folder are still included in your Inbox quota, so if you have exceeded you mailbox quota you may have to purge your Trash folder as well as deleting some of the messages in your Inbox.

The Options / Maintenance Operation menu

This page allows you to customise maintenance tasks the Web Mail application can run upon login.
Check the first option on this page if you wish to perform any or all of the following operations when you log in to Web Mail:

• Rename sent-mail folder at beginning of month
• Delete old sent-mail folders at beginning of month
• Purge old message in the Trash folder
• Purge messages in Trash folder older than a certain amount of days
  

The other Options menu

Go to the Options button at the top of the Web Mail. The following options are located in the panel on the right of the screen.

Display Options

Change display options such as how many messages you see on each page and how messages are sorted. The following options can be set on this page:

• Default sorting criteria: arrival time, message date, from address, subject field, message size or thread view.
• Default sorting direction: ascending or descending.
• Messages per page in the mailbox view.
• Spelling errors per screen when spell checking.
• Expand the entire folder tree by default in the folders view.
• Show legend in the mailbox view.
• Mark different levels of quoting with different colors?
• Dim signatures?

The Options / Message Composition menu

Customise what your mail looks like when you send it and where drafts are saved to.
The following options can be set here -

• After how many characters to wrap text.
• Do you want to include original message in a reply?
• How to prefix quoted lines in a reply.
• Compose messages in a separate window.
• Which folder you want to create/use as your drafts folder.
• Should the compose window be closed after saving a draft?
  

The Options / Login Tasks menu

There is an option to display your last login time and date when logging in.
You can also nominate which view or mailbox to display each time you log in.

The Options / New Mail menu

There is an option to check for new mail at differing time intervals and whether or not you would like to see a pop up window when new mail arrives in your inbox.

© 2009 Adelaide University Last Modified 06 Jul 2004 ITS
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