Additional Information
- About: LuxSci Email Hosting
- Video: Basic WebMail Usage
- Video: Composing Email using LuxSci WebMail
- More LuxSci Videos
Video Transcript
In this video I'm going to demonstrate some of the advanced features of LuxSci WebMail.
Hiding and showing Images in Messages
Let's start by looking at a email that has an image in it. Here it is, nice big image. We can, as we described earlier in other videos, use this button to switch to a view where we see only the list or only the message. That gives us more room. Now, up here in the Settings menu you can toggle the display of images. Here I turned it off. That replaces all the images with a gray box. This is particularly useful if you don't want to be on the radar of spammers. Without images being displayed, no one can know if you opened and read a message or not, unless of course respond to a read receipt.HTML vs Text Message Display
Similarly, you can toggle display of HTML content. This will take the message and display you a text version of it. Here we go. Now the message is very simple, very bare-bones, no images, no HTML, and actually, very safe to view. A message like this can not infect you when looking at it, no matter how malicious the original message was. You can go back here and toggle these back on, and you can use these hot keys, like Shift+K and Shift+H, to toggle these any time you want with your keyboard.
Annotating Email
Let's go back to a view where we can see the list and the messages at once. Now, sometimes you may want to make notes about a message, like, say that, "Oh, this was an interesting message. I want to come back to it later and remember what my thoughts were." You can do that by clicking on the "Note" command. Click on this, enter anything that you want to say. You can even reference external images, and make tables in here, whatever you like, submit the annotation, and now what you see is the original message was deleted, and a new message was added with your annotation at the top, who made the annotation, and when it was made. Essentially, you can use this to collaborate with others using the same folder, or even just to give yourself reminders about these messages.
Tagging Email
Another interesting feature of LuxSci WebMail is the ability to tag a message. Select the message or multiple messages, click on "Tag," and choose one of your existing tags. For example, previously I've used the Important tag to tag messages as important and color them red. I could just a well make a new tag, for example, Deferred, for things that I want to deal with later. Instead of red, maybe I make it gray, apply that, and now the message is a light color, gray. This allows you to have a visual indicator of the various status of the messages in your folders.
WebMail Settings
Your WebMail interface has a lot of settings that you can use to customize how things work. You can go in here to Email Listing Preferences, and you can dig through these to make the interface look and behave just how you like it. A couple of very common settings that people change are: the number of messages in a page for WebMail. So, for example, if you have thousands and thousands of messages in your WebMail, you may want to display more than 25 at a time. You could change this to 100 or 500. Of course, using a very large value could make WebMail slightly slower for you.
When Happens When Messages Are Deleted?
Another thing that people often change is what happens when you try to delete a message. Here, you can turn on and off whether or not WebMail asks you if you really want to delete it. That's important to prevent you from deleting things by accident, but it can be very annoying. Here, you can toggle it.
You can also decide what happens to messages that are actually deleted. By default, messages that are deleted go to your Trash folder, and there they wait for 30 days until they're automatically cleaned up. You could turn that off, and you could have it only happen so that messages are just marked as deleted when you delete them. Messages that are marked for deletion have a line through them in the interface. They're still there. You can still read them. They're still full messages. They're just waiting to be expunged.
When you have messages waiting to be expunged, you can clear them out by going over to your email folders area, clicking on this icon and choosing Remove Deleted Messages. This will remove all messages waiting to be expunged. If you're doing this commonly, you can go into your settings, open this up, scroll down to your options for the WebMail toolbar -- that's that row of command icons on the top -- you can customize what icons are there. For example, we may want to put Remove Deleted Messages, and add that to our toolbar. Okay? So now we see, right here, a new icon, so whenever we press this, all the deleted messages are gone.
Sharing Email Folders
One other thing that may be very useful is the ability to share folders with other people. If you go right-click on your folder and choose either Folder Properties or go directly to Share Folder, you'll have options to share this folder with particular people, everybody in your account, if you have domains in your account you can share with people in particular domains, if you're using application user groups you can share with particular groups of people. In this case, I'm going to share the folder with everybody, and I can make it Read-Only or Read-Write. In this case I'll do Read-Only. Read-Only is going to give everybody else in this account access to read all of the messages in this folder, but they won't be able to delete them, to annotate them, to remove them, or do anything that would otherwise alter them. In fact, messages that are unread will remain unread, even if they read them, because changing any of those flags would be a write operation on the folder.
Message Attachments
If you have a message that has attachments, particularly many attachments, you'll see that there is an attachments tab here. If you click on that, this will give you a list of all of the attachments in the message that aren't already displayed, and a button to download all attachments. So, for example, let's say that your friend sent you a list of pictures from the weekend and there's about 10 or 15 pictures there. Instead of downloading them all individually, one by one, you can click on this, and it will give you a zip file to download. You click on that, and you will have all of the attachments from the message in one zip file downloaded all at once. Amazing if you have lots of things to download.
Viewing Email Headers
If you ever need to look at the headers of an email message, to look at what servers it went through, who it's from, all the little nitty-gritty metadata information about the message, just click on the Headers tab, and it's all there nice and neatly parsed out for you. This can be copied and pasted and sent to support if you ever have any questions. Similarly, if you go under this menu, you can download the message as an eml file or view the full message source to see what's really in the message, all the headers, and the fully encoded MIME body just like it appears in the folders, and just like it was delivered to you originally. So, if you ever need to save a copy of a message, or provide the full message to someone for analysis, you can use the Download Message feature.
Clearing the WebMail Cache
The last thing to mention is Clear Cache here in WebMail. If you've been using WebMail for a long time, and somehow it's getting slower or weird behavior is happening, use Clear Cache. This gets rid of and resets all of the saved information in the browser about all of the messages that have been viewed and downloaded. Cleaning this up often solves a lot of little problems with slowness as the browser gets full. So, first thing to do when you're having a problem, clear cache, refresh the page, and see if it goes away.
