Tutorial / Sending and receiving email

1. Your first SupportByEmail.com email
2. Understanding your Inbox
3. Reading and replying to a message
4. Composing a new message
5. Using folders
6. Searching
7. Attachments

The welcome email that was sent to the email address you gave on the sign up form is also sent to your SupportByEmail.com email address when you register. This means there will always be a message in your incoming mailbox the first time you view it.

You can of course send other messages to your SupportByEmail.com address to get a better idea of how the system works. Remember, your email address is your company keyword followed by @supportbyemail.com, and is available instantly.

Your incoming mailbox page, or Inbox, is the first page shown after you sign up and is always the first thing you will see after you log in for subsequent sessions.

The Inbox will list up to 20 messages on screen, with the most recently received at the top of the list. If there are more than 20 items in your Inbox, you can move through the list a page at a time by clicking the page number at the bottom of the page.

Each row of the Inbox listing contains:

• The date and time the message was received
• The subject
• The sender's email address
• The email address it was sent to
• Options to reply to, forward or print the message
• A checkbox for manipulating more than one message at a time

Clicking Reply or Forward will also display the message text with the option to reply to or forward the message respectively. The Print option opens up a new window containing the message in a plain, printable format.

After you click the subject of a message in your mailbox, you will be taken to a page that displays the full message text, followed by an area where you can type your reply.

The From: address used to reply to a message is selected automatically and will be your SupportByEmail.com address. This ensures that if the person you email hits the reply button in their mail program the message will come back to you.

The To: address and subject are also filled in automatically from the message that you are responding to. If you also wish to include the message text to quote in your reply, press the Include original email text link and the text will appear automatically.

For the time being, we won't worry about the Suggest Responses link as this will be covered later in the tutorial once you know how to use the Knowledge Base. When you have completed your reply, press the Send reply button to send the email.

To send a message from SupportByEmail.com that is not in reply to a message you have received, click the Compose New Message link at the bottom of the Inbox page.

The From: is filled in automatically but you must enter the To: email and Subject. When you have written the message, press the Send button to send the message.

After you send a reply to a message, you are taken back to your Inbox, and you will notice that the message you replied to is no longer in the mailbox listing. SupportByEmail.com has a semi-automatic folder structure, and once you reply to an email, that message is stored in the Responded folder.

The complete list of system folders is:

Inbox is your incoming mail folder, containing messages that you have received but not yet responded to or moved elsewhere.

Sent Mail contains a copy of every message that you have sent through the system. You can choose whether or not a copy is stored here, or if it is sent to some other email address. This is covered later in the tutorial.

Responded contains the messages you have received that you have already sent a reply to. Messages are automatically moved to this folder when you send a reply to keep your Inbox tidy and make it clear which messages still need to be dealt with.

Deleted contains messages that you wish to delete. Messages only stay in this folder for a short amount of time before being deleted permanently from the system.

You can add your own folders too in Manage Emails, which is covered in more detail later in this tutorial.

To view the contents of a folder, click the Search link in the mailbox list. A search form will appear at the top of the mailbox, where you can change Look in to the appropriate folder using the drop down list. Other search options are covered below, so for now just press Search to display the contents of that folder.

You can click the Search link in any mailbox view to bring up the search form. We have already shown how this can be used to display the contents of a folder other than Inbox, but SupportByEmail.com allows some complex searches to be done to find exactly the message you are looking for from your history.

You can use one or all of the search options:

Look In. If you want to search through all your messages, not just one folder, first of all select All next to Look in, otherwise, select the folder you are interested in.

Where .. contains. To search for a keyword within a message, first select either Email Address, Subject or Body and then enter the word to search for. For instance you could enter Where Email contains chris@lightwood.net to find all messages to or from that email address.

Inbetween .. and. To retrict the search to a particular date range, enter the earliest and latest dates in the appropriate fields. By default, the range includes everything sent or received in the last month. To search for messages on a single day, enter the same date in both places.

After you have entered all the criteria you want to use, press the Search button. Bear in mind that some searches may take a short while to come back with the matching messages, and particularly those that look for a word in Body can be particularly slow.

There is a search shortcut available whenever you are viewing a message. In the top right of the screen, there is a link to Customer messages and alongside it shows the number of messages in the system that you have received from or sent to this customer. Click the link to instantly perform a search that looks in Email for the correct email address.

SupportByEmail.com is designed to be a very quick way of reading and answering customer enquiries and so attachments are not generally available as part of the software. If you have a specific need to receive attachments via SupportByEmail.com, please contact us to have this feature enabled.

If you receive an email that contains an attachment, the attachment part is stripped as it is received, and you will see a note to this effect in the message text. A typical example where a JPEG image has been stripped looks like:

[Attachment skipped:  image/jpeg]

If you receive a message that is sent in HTML or Rich Text format, SupportByEmail.com will convert this message into a text-only format without losing any text from the message.

Please bear in mind that many viruses spread themselves by means of an email attachment. By stripping all attachments from your email you can be sure that you will never be infected by a virus or worm through using SupportByEmail.com

Next: Using the Knowledge Base

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