Webmail Tips

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Webmail 101
3. Using webmail
4. Customizing webmail
5. Working with folders
6. Notes

1. Introduction

2. Webmail 101

1. Folders (aka mailboxes) are listed on the left frame. The main folder is "INBOX"; this is where new messages are initially stored, and it's the equivalent of the "spool file", e.g., /var/mail/hildebr, on the old server.
2. To display an index of the messages in a folder, click on this folder. Unread messages are marked in boldface; a plus sign (+) marks messages with an attachment.
3. To display/read a message, click on its subject line.
4. To act on a message (print, delete, reply, forward, etc.) click on the appropriate button at the top of the message.
5. To get help, click on the help button. The help pages are context sensitive; for example, clicking help when the message index is displayed pops up the "Message Index" section of the manual.

3. Using webmail

• Changing the message order: The messages displayed in the message index can be sorted by any of the headings in the index: "From" (Sender), "Date", and "Subject". Simply click on the icon to the right of the heading by which you want to sort. If you do that, the originally rectangular shape of the icon turns into a triangle pointing upwards or downwards, to indicate an increasing or decreasing (reverse) sort order. To reverse the sort order, click on the icon again. To change back to the original sort order, click a third time. A main benefit of this feature is that it allows one to group message collections by sender, or by subject. This can be very helpful when dealing with large volumes of mail.
• Viewing the spam score of a message: If you get a message that is obviously spam and wonder why it got through the filter, clicking on the "View Full Header" button (under "Options") while viewing the message, may provide some insight. In particular, check if there is a header "X-Spam-Score:" with score attached. If there is, it is probably a number between 0 and 80 (since scores are measured on a 0 - 100 scale and 80 is the current cutoff for systemwide filtering), and you can see if setting up an additional spam filter with a lower cutoff (see the page Mail Filtering Tips) would have caught this message. (Don't be surprised if a message that is obviously spam, has a spam score of 0. The CITES spam filter is not perfect, and a score of 0 is not guarantee that the message is not spam.)
• Refreshing webmail: Webmail is set to automatically refresh every few minutes or so. If you want to check for new mail, simply force a refresh by clicking on the "Refresh/Reload" button of your browser.
• Keeping webmail open at all times: If you have your own machine into which you are permanently logged in, you might want to keep a webmail window (or tab) open in your browser at all times; this makes it easy to check for new mail with a simple mouse click (to activate the webmail window or bring it to the foreground), without having to go through the login process again. There is no harm in doing this, as the impact on the computer's resources is negligible and webmail doesn't "time out" or "expire" after a certain period of time. If you are not using webmail, just minimize the window or put it in the background.

4. Customizing webmail

• Changing the folder listing to a more informative one: Go to the "Options" menu, choose "Folder Preferences", scroll down to "Enable Unread Message Notification", set this to "All Folders", and set the next entry, "Unread Message Notification Type", to "Unseen and Total". This causes the folder list on the left frame of the main screen to be displayed in a more informative manner, with each folder showing the total number of messages it contains, and the number of unread messages. Moreover, folders that contain unread messages appear in boldface.
• Changing the number of messages per page: I always find it annoying when web documents (e.g., online newspaper articles) get delivered in installments and force one to click through multiple pages to read the whole article; whenever possible I try to get the whole thing in a single page and use the scroll bar to scroll up and down. The same goes for the message index in webmail, where the default is to display 15 messages per page. Luckily, this can easily be changed: Go to "Options", "Display Preferences", and change the entry under "Number of Messages per Page" to a larger value, e.g., 100.
• Color-coding messages: A nifty, but little-known, and underused and under-appreciated, feature of the pine and mutt mail readers is the ability to have messages in the index color-coded by various criteria. Webmail has this capability as well. Here is how to do it: Go to "Options", then "Message Highlighting", click on "New", to set up a new color coding recipe. The rest is pretty much self-explanatory: Pick a color, pick a header (choices are "From", "To", "Cc", "Subject"), and specify a pattern to match within this header (e.g., "chancellor", "help@math.uiuc.edu", "spam", "math 241", "MASSMAIL", "241"), click on "Submit", then "Done".

5. Working with folders

• Organizing mail automatically into folders: If you want to have incoming mail automatically routed into appropriate folders by sender or subject, you can do so by setting up filtering rules, via the "Filters" link at the top of the main window. This is described on a separate page, Mail Filtering Tips.
• Subscribed versus unsubscribed folders: Webmail has a notion of "subscribed" and "unsubscribed" folders. The only difference between these two types of folders is in the way they are displayed: A "subscribed" folder is included in the folder listing in the left frame; an "unsubscribed" folder is hidden from that listing. To see both types of folders, click on "Folders" from the main window. At the bottom of the page are two columns, the left containing a listing of subscribed folders, and the right containing a listing of unsubscribed folders. To move a folder from one list to the other, click on its name, and click "Unsubscribe" or "Subscribe". If you have a large number of folders, you might want to move most of your folders to the "unsubscribed" column and reserve the "subscribed" list for those folders that you access on a regular basis.
• Displaying migrated folders: As part of the migration process, mailboxes/folders in standard locations in users' home directories are copied over to the new server. Note, however, that such migrated folders may be initially "unsubscribed", so they may not show up in the folder listing to the left of the main window. To see all of these folders, check for unsubscribed folders via the "Folders" option, as described above; you can then add the migrated folders to the folder listing, by moving them from the "unsubscribed" to the "subscribed" column.

6. Notes

• Mail filtering with webmail: SquirrelMail comes with a plugin that allows setting up mail filtering and forwarding via a web interface. This is covered on a separate page, Mail Filtering Tips. Note that the filtering tool can be used regardless of whether you access your mail with webmail or with another (IMAP capable) mail reader such as pine or mutt.
• Alternatives to webmail: Webmail is not the only option for reading mail on the new server. Pine and mutt work fine with the new server, after some minor changes in the setup (see the separate page, ???, for instructions), so if you are comfortable using pine or mutt, you can continue to do so, and use webmail as a backup mail reader when you don't have access to your account. (However, elm (a precursor of mutt), mail/mailx (the standard terminal-based mail reader), and dtmail (the Sun desktop mail program), do not work with the new server.)

  I personally use mutt as my primary mail reader, because of the almost unlimited flexibility it provides (at the expense of a somewhat steep learning curve), and since I am more comfortable with a plain old text-based mail reader than a graphical reader like webmail or dtmail. For the majority of users, however, such considerations do not apply, and webmail is a more than adequate option. For those wanting more features or preferring a text-based mail reader, pine is a good compromise: it is more userfriendly than mutt, but is nearly as powerful.

• Using webmail in conjunction with other mail readers: One of the main benefits of the new server is that, unlike standard mail servers, it allows easy and safe access by different mail readers, even if it occurs simultaneously. Thus, for example, you can use pine to read mail from your office machine, and webmail to read mail from your home computer. In fact, can you can have a webmail window permanently open on your home computer, without affecting your ability to access and process mail with pine from an office or lab machine. After refreshing the browser window, the webmail display will reflect any changes you have made to your mail with other mail readers; e.g., deleted messages will have disappeared, and messages filed into folders will show up in the appropriate folder.