What’s New in Webmail

• Homepage – Create your own email ‘home’ page with mini-summaries of your mail folders, your calendar, or your tasks.
• Choose Your Own Color Scheme – Personalize your Webmail account by choosing your own color scheme. 
• HTML Editor – Format your emails using the new HTML editor menu bar (only works on certain Mac & PC browsers). 
• Mail Previews – See the first few lines of an email message in your inbox without having to open up the message itself. 
• Virtual Inbox - A collective inbox of all your new mail, in all your folders, displayed as a single mailbox.       
• Attachments – Save and remove attachments without deleting the message.
• Address Book – Automatically store the emails of people you correspond with in your improved Address Book.  
• Auto-Completion of Email Addresses - Compose emails and your contacts’ addresses appear automatically in the compose window.
• Improved Mail Filtering – Use an ‘allowlist’, ‘blocklist’, and improved mail filtering options to keep unwanted mail out of your inbox and organize your incoming messages effectively.   

Homepage                                                         

To use the layout feature:

• Click on the icon labeled ‘Layout’ located in the top horizontal menu bar.  There will be a window that says “Add Here:”, open up the menu and locate the item which you wish to add (address book: contact search, tasks summary, etc), and push the ‘add’ button.  At this time, other similar “Add Here:” windows will open up, allowing you to add more elements to your home page.  The black arrows allow you to move the element in a particular direction.  To view your home page, click on “Home” on the top horizontal menu bar.

• Tip:  You can create a mini-summary of the new messages in all your folders in your ‘home’ page.  To do this, click on the ‘Layout’ button from the top menu bar, and in the ‘Add Here:’ window select ‘Mail: Folder Summary’ and click the ‘Add’ button.  Next, click on the ‘Mail’ button on the left menu and the ‘Folders’ button on the top menu.  Check the boxes next to the folders you wish to see on your mini-summary, and select the “Check Folder(s) for New Mail’ from the pull down menu.   

• Tip:  If you want Webmail to open up another application on log-in by default (like your inbox, or your calendar), click on the ‘Home’ button on the top horizontal menu bar, and then on the ‘Options’ button, and click the link that says ‘Display Options’.  At the first drop down menu, choose the application you would like Webmail to display at login.   

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Choose your own color scheme                       

To choose a color scheme for your account:

• Click on ‘Home’ from the left vertical menu bar and ‘Options’ from the top horizontal menu bar.  Under ‘Other Information’ click on ‘Display Options’ and you will see a menu including an option field to ‘Select your color scheme’.  Click on this pull-down menu to see your cool color scheme options. 
• Tip: Under ‘Width of the home menu on the left’ you can also set the width, in pixels, of your left vertical menu bar.  If you set this value for less than the default of 150, then your navigation bar will be cut-off. 
• Remember to click ‘Save Options’ to put your changes into effect.  

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HTML Editor                                                     

To access the HTML editor to format text (only works on the following browsers: Mozilla 1.3+ Mac & Win, Internet Explorer 5.5+ Win):

• Open up new message composition window, and click on the link that says “Switch to HTML composition”.  A HTML editor toolbar will appear which you can use to format your text. 
• Tip: If you know HTML and want to see the code, you can press the “<>” button towards the right of the menu to toggle to ‘code’ view.

• Tip: You can set the Webmail options to open up the HTML editor by default whenever you compose a new message.  To do this, click on the ‘Options’ button from your Inbox, click on the ‘Message Composition’ heading, and check the box that says “Compose messages with an HTML GUI by default”. 

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Mail Previews                                                   

To set the Mail Previews option:

• Click on the ‘Mail’ button from the left vertical menu bar, and then click on ‘Options’ from the top horizontal menu bar.  Under ‘Message Options’ choose ‘Mail Previews’ and check the ‘Enable Message Previews?’ checkbox and select the number of characters you would like to see previewed.  Remember to click ‘Save Changes’ to put the options into effect.

• Tip: Set the number of characters to 250 for a good mail preview display in your inbox.    

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Virtual Inbox                                                    

Your virtual inbox is like a collective inbox of all your new mail.  The virtual inbox feature allows you to see, at one glance, all the new or unread messages in all your folders, displayed as a single mailbox.       

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Attachments                                                    

When you open mail with attachments, you can view, download or strip (delete) them from a message.  To strip an attachment:

• Open up the mail message, and click on the trash icon next to the attachment link in the header of the message. 
• Tip: If you don’t want to fill up your disk space with attachments but you want to save the original email, this ‘Strip Attachment’ button is very handy.   

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Address Book                                          

To automatically store the names and email addresses of people you send mail to (mail recipients) in your address book:

• Click on the ‘Mail’ button on the left menu bar, and ‘Options’ from the top menu bar.  Click on the heading ‘Address Books’ under “Other Options” and check the box that says, “Save recipients automatically to the default address book?”.  From the option that says “Choose the address book to use when adding addresses”, select ‘My Addressbook’ from the drop-down menu.  Click ‘Save Options’ to save your changes.     

• Tip: an easy way to store email addresses of senders in your address book  -- open the message and click on the small address book icon next to the senders’ email address, and it will be added to your address book.  Note: ‘My Addressbook’ must be selected as your default address book, see above step.      

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Auto-Completion of Email Addresses                

This feature automatically expands the names and email addresses of your contacts (those in your address book) when composing a new message.  To set auto-completion as a default feature:

• Click on ‘Mail’ from the left menu bar and ‘Options’ from the top menu.  Under “Other Options” click on ‘Address Books’.  Check the box that says, “Expand names in the compose window automatically in the background?”.  Click ‘Save Options’ to save your changes.
• To use, enter the first few letters of your contact’s name in the compose window, and then either press the ‘Tab’ key or click away from the field.  If the person is in your address book, the address should appear automatically.  If the letters you enter match more than one name or address, you will get the message, “more than one address found”.  To get a pop-down menu of all the matches found, click the ‘Expand Names’ link. 

• Tip: Webmail will automatically append ‘@alumnae.mills.edu’ or ‘@mills.edu’ (depending on whether you are a student or alum) by default to names that it doesn’t find in your address book.  To change this default to other domains (like @yahoo.com):
• Click on ‘Mail’ from the left menu bar and ‘Options’ from the top menu.  Under “Message Options” click on ‘Message Composition’.  Where it says, “When sending mail or expanding addresses, what domain should we append to unqualified addresses (email addresses without "@")?” enter the domain you want to appear by default.  Click ‘Save Options’ to save your changes.

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Improved Mail Filtering                                    

An allowlist is a list of email addresses whose mail you want to always be delivered to your inbox.  A blocklist will ‘block’ (delete or move messages to a folder you specify) messages from email addresses that you define.

To enter addresses into your allowlist or blocklist:

• Click on the ‘Filters’ button from the top menu bar, and then on ‘Allowlist’ or ‘Blocklist’ from the same menu bar.  Enter the addresses you want to allow or block, (only enter one address per line), and then push the ‘Save’ button to save your options.
• You can also enter addresses into these lists directly from your Inbox.  To do this, go to your Inbox, and then check the box next to the message whose sender you would like to block or allow, and then click on the ‘Allowlist’ or ‘Blocklist’ links in the mail menu.    
• Tip:  If you enter partial addresses, you will block or allow all addresses that match. 

Mail Filters automatically redirect incoming mail into folders based on content (‘From’ fields, ‘Subject’ keywords, etc.) that you specify.  With our new mail filtering options you can specify more than one filtering parameter in a rule, and you can set parameters on fields that both ‘Contain’ or ‘Doesn’t Contain’ certain words, phrases or addresses.   

• Tip:  To get the most effective mail filtering, create an Allowlist at the top of your filtering rules with addresses that you definitely want to be delivered into your inbox (like mail from vendors that you trust such as amazon.com or ebay.com).  Second, create a Blocklist with addresses that you want blocked.  Third, create your mail filtering rules to organize your incoming mail into folders and prevent spam from filling up your account.     

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