Additional Information
Video Transcript
In this video, we're going to go over how to compose email messages in LuxSci WebMail.
Opening the Email Composer
First, how to start composing email messages. If you are in a workspace that has a email composition widget, you can begin composition right on the page. If your workspace doesn't have such a widget, you can add that widget to your workspace. Next, anywhere inside the LuxSci interface, go under email and click compose email. This will pop-up your email composition window. Third, if you're actually in your WebMail interface, you can click on compose and get an email composition window overlay right there.
Email Recipients
Next, to send email, you have specify the recipients. You can just start typing their names or addresses. If you type something, it's going to automatically look in your address books and find possibilities. In this case, "LuxSci Support" matches. Click on that, it puts it in there. You can remove it by clicking on the "X." Then you can add additional recipients. You can also add carbon copy (Cc) and or blind carbon copy (Bcc) lines, and remove them.
Instead of typing the addresses, you could click on the address book icon and search your address books either by explicitly clicking on addresses you find therein, removing them by double clicking, then clicking on remove, seeing the information about who they really are, adding them to Bcc or Cc instead of To, and even doing searches. Sometimes this is easier than trying to do auto complete when you have very large address books.
The Message Body and Plain Text vs. HTML
Next, when you're composing a message, you can just type your message body right into the body area. These icons here allow you to control the display and the formatting, for example, to make it bold or to make it italic. Sometimes you may want to switch to a more advanced HTML editor to give you more options such as inserting tables and images, and other types of things. Sometimes you may prefer to compose only in plain text. You can toggle between these using your settings icon. Whatever you've used last is what's going to retain for future messages until you change it again.
Adding Attachments
Next, people often like to add attachments. There are many ways to do that. One, click on the add attachments icon, and then go into your computer and click an attachment, and hit open. That automatically uploads it to the server and shows you the image there. You can click on the "X" to remove it. You can click on the image itself to open it up in a preview just to double-check that you actually uploaded the right image. You can do other things as well such as going to your desktop and dragging the image over top of the composer and dropping it, that will update it too.
Read Receipts
For those of you who like to have read receipts so that you can know if your recipient got your message and opened, you can turn them on and off in the Settings menu. That enables read receipts. That disables it. Remember that even if you enable read receipts, it's up to your recipient's email program and your recipient if they're even sent back to you, so they're not entirely reliable.
Email Encryption
If you use SecureLineTM encryption, you will see a lock icon here. The open lock means encryption is off. Click the icon to turn encryption on. If your lock icon starts on, then you maybe in a secure account where all messages are, by default, encrypted. If you're permitted, you maybe able to click to unlock the messages. If you can't unlock the messages, ask your administrator about enabling an "Opt Out" feature.
Email Composition Settings
You can control the settings for email composition by going into your Settings menu and clicking on Composition Settings. This pops up, your dialogue box that gives you lots and lots of options to cover and customize many different possible settings. Two of the ones that are often of interest are the ability to turn read receipts on and off, so for example, all messages will have them or all messages won't. The ability to save all recipients that you send messages to in your address book so that the next time you want to send a message to them, the email address will be there and saved for you. You don't have to move around to figure out what it was. Make the change that you want, then save changes.
Drafts
All right. Once you're composing your message and you're not ready to send it, you can click on the disk ico to save your message as a draft. You hit "OK," that will save the message and go back to your email message list. If you "Save and Keep Composing," it will save it as-is now and then let you keep working on it. We'll quit and go back to our message list.
We can go to our Drafts folder and we can see the messages that have been saved as drafts. Here is one we were just working on. You can click on that and we can see exactly what it was that we were doing. You can right-click on the message and you can choose "Continue Draft," or you can go down here and press "Continue Draft" in the header. Doing this will reload that entire message and the attachments that we uploaded, and allow you to continue working on it.
Other Ways to Send Messages
It's closed out. You can also send new messages by clicking on any existing message you have and using Forward, Reply, or Reply To All Recipients. That will load the message into the body. In this case, since we're still in text mode, it converts the message into plain text. If we were going with the HTML mode, we have to start over. But if we apply now, it's going to load the message as HTML that you can reply with.
Edit As New
One very interesting feature is Edit As New. Right-click on it or go into your magic wand menu. You can choose "Edit As New" and that loads the message into the composer just like it was a draft, preserving the subject, and the body, and the recipients all just as they were. Then you can continue editing and then send it.
Forward as Attachment
A third thing that's very useful is sending a message as an attachment. That's "Forward As Attachment." This is particularly useful because you can select multiple messages, forward them as attachments, and all of these messages are now attachments to your new email message. You can send this to somebody else. If someone wants you to send them copies of a whole lot of email messages that are in one of your folders, you can select all of those messages and send them as attachments to one larger email. Just make sure you don't send too much at once. In LuxSci, you can send about 75 megabytes in one message through WebMail.
Signatures
When you compose a message, the From name and the From address is defined here in this dropdown. This is known as your WebMail signature. It also is related to this text that appears at the bottom of the message, the so-called signature. You can customize those going under Email, WebMail Signatures. In this example, we have just one. Let's click on Edit. You can see the name. You can see the name that it's going to be from. We'll edit this. You can see the From email address, Reply To email address, and the text that appears at the bottom of HTML messages and at the bottom of plain text messages.
In this case, Contact and Email are placeholders for your name and your email address from your contact information, so that's just substituted automatically when you send. Let's edit this and save it. Now we compose an email message. This one is still our default, but we can select the other one. Then it changes the signature text on the bottom, then it's going to change the From name and the From address of your email messages. One neat feature of LuxSci is that someone sends you an email message to Videos. Then when you reply to it, it's going to automatically select a matching signature.
