Using Squirrelmail

Table of Contents

Introduction	2

Logging In	2

Inside the office	2

Outside the office	2

Getting Help	2

Personalizing Squirrelmail	3

Personal Information - IMPORTANT	3

Display Preferences	4

Other Settings	4

Reading Email & Working With Folders	5

Working with a folder	6

Working with emails	6

Writing Emails	7

Using Addressbooks	7

Adding New Contacts to Your Address Book	8

Sending Mail to a Contact	8

Using the Address Books When Composing an Email	8

Calendars	9

Looking for Events	9

Adding Events	10

Logging out	11

Copyright Notice	12

Introduction

Squirrelmail is a web based mail system that allows P&P staff secure remote access to email.

It has been developed as free software, which is a good thing.

For more on free software, see \\st\it\training\general_introductory\free_software_10%_slot .

Squirrelmail is developed by the Squirrelmail Team, who hang out at http://www.squirrelmail.org .

It is fairly intuitive to use, and pretty well documented. This document is intended as a very brief guide to help you get started.

For a fuller and more in depth guide to Squirrelmail, you should check out the online user manual, at http://www.squirrelmail.org/wiki/en_US/UserManual .

Logging In

Inside the office

Open firefox, and go to https://maui

In the Name field, type your username

In the password field, type the password you were supplied

If you don't know your username or password, ask Charlie.

Outside the office

Open your browser, and go to https://papmail.cjb.net

In the Name field, type your username

In the password field, type the password you were supplied

If you don't know your username or password, ask Charlie.

Getting Help

Squirrelmail provides a really useful context sensitive help system.

At any time, click the “Help” link. This will take you to the help page for the part of Squirrelmail you are currently in.

For in depth discussion of Squirrelmail, see the online manual at http://www.squirrelmail.org/wiki/en_US/UserManual

If you get really stuck you can also get in touch with the Squirrelmail team at http://www.squirrelmail.org/wiki/en_US/MailingLists (it would be better to ask Charlie first!)

Personalizing Squirrelmail

There are lots of ways in which you can personalize squirrelmail. This section takes you through the bits you need to have set up.

First open the 'Options Link' (See Below)

You're now presented with a list of different things you can personalize. I won't cover all of these here, but feel free to play around with them as much as you like – remember you can't break anything!

Personal Information - IMPORTANT

It's crucial you have this set up correctly before using squirrelmail.

Open the personal information link (top left of page)

Set 'Full Name' to your full name as you wanty it to appear on outgoing email.

Email Address and Reply To should both be set to your peopleandplanet.org address (e.g. mine is charlie@peopleandplanet.org )

You should cut and paste your signature from pegasus into the signature box.

The 'Edit Advanced Identities' Link lets you 'pretend' to be different people, by changing the 'From' and Signatures of your emails, ask Charlie if you need that ability.

Display Preferences

In this section you can change the colours and fonts that Squirrelmail displays in.

The main things you may want to change here are both in the General Display Options part.

Theme will be set to P&P (default). You can change it thus:

Selecting another theme from the dropdown.

Scroll to the bottom of the page

Click submit. You'll now be on the options page again

There will be a 'refresh page' link in the centre at the top of the page, click this to apply your settings.

To change the font, go through the same process as changing the theme, but select a font from the “custom stylesheet” dropdown, rather than a theme(!)

The rest of the settings should be pretty well what you need, but, as always feel free to experiment!

Other Settings

These settings should be fine already for most people, so I'll briefly discuss what each section on the options page gives you control over.

Message Highlighting: Lets you change the colours of messages based on stuff in the messages, like you could turn urgent messages red, for example.

Folder preferences: Controls the folder bar on the left of the page, as well as some default folders like trash and sent mail.

Index Order: Lets you choose which email fields are displayed in your folders, and which order they're sorted in.

Message Filters: Are like filtering rules in Pegasus. You could have everything arriving from a mailing list get moved into a seperate folder. I can provide training on how to do this should people require.

SPAM filters && Spam Cop Settings: These aren't set up yet, but they should let you block and report spam automatically.

New Mail Options: Lets you pop up window or play sound when a new message arrives. For this to work you'll also need to :

Open Folder Preferences

Set 'Auto Refresh Folder List ' to 1 minute (or however often you want your mail checked)

Click 'Submit'.

Spellchecker Options: Lets you edit your personal dictionary, or choose whether to use an English or Spanish dictionary for spell checking.

Reading Email & Working With Folders

When you first start Squirrelmail, you will be in your INBOX folder.

The right hand of the screen has a list of all the emails in your inbox at the moment. Mine looks like this:

Working with a folder

You can open folders using the list of folders on the left of the screen, as shown here --->

When you're in a folder, the subject of each email is a link.

You can click this link to work with that email (see ).

On the left of the screen, the checkboxes let you select one or more emails.

When the box is checked you can

Delete emails by clicking the 'delete' button.

Move them to another folder, by selecting the folder you want to move them to from the dropdown, and then clicking the 'Move' button.

Forward them by clicking the 'Forward' button.

Mark them as Read or Unread with the 'Read' and 'Unread' buttons.

Clicking the boxes next to the field names (From, Date, Subject, etc.) lets you change the order emails are sorted in.

Working with emails

When you've opened an email (for example by clicking on the 'Subject' link in a folder, it is displayed like this:

The 'Move' button/s let you move the email to another location.

The 'Message List' link takes you back into the folder which the email is in.

The 'Delete' button deletes the email, then takes you back into the folder which the email was in.

The 'Previous' and 'Next' links let you scroll through other emails in the current folder.

The 'Delete & Prev' and 'Delete & Next' delete this email, and move you to the previous or next email in the current folder.

The 'Forward' link forwards this email to someone else, similarly 'Forward as Attachment' forwards this email as an attachment.

'Reply' lets you reply to the email.

'Reply All' replies to all recipients of the email.

'View Full Header' is mainly useful for debugging – it displays the full headers from the email. You probably won't need to use this.

'View Printable Version' opens a new window, with the email nicely formatted for the printer.

'Download This as a File' lets you make a copy of the current email as a plain text file on your PC. Again, you probably won't need to use this.

Writing Emails

To write a new email, just click the 'compose' link on the top bar.

When it's finished, you can check the spelling with the 'Check Spelling' button, or send it straight away, using 'Send'

The 'Save Draft' button saves a copy of the email in a folder called 'drafts', for sending later.

See also Using the Address Books When Composing an Email

Using Addressbooks

Squirrelmail provides 2 addressbooks – A global one, which is set up with the email addresses of the staff team, and a personal one which you can use to store your own contacts.

To open your address books, click the 'Addresses' link towards the top of the page. This displays all of your contacts.

Adding New Contacts to Your Address Book

Click the “Add address link at the top and centre of the page.

Fill in the details in the form

Click the 'Add address button'

Sending Mail to a Contact

Click the contact email address.

This opens up the compose window ready to write an email to the contact.

Using the Address Books When Composing an Email

This is a more useful way to use your address books, as it makes it easier to send to multiple contacts.

Open a new email with the 'Compose' link (just next to the 'Addresses' link).

Click the addresses button. A new window pops up, with contacts from your personal address book listed.

You can type part of a name and click search to find a contact.

You can narrow down your search to just your personal address book, or just the global address book using the dropdown.

Or you can just see everyone by clicking the 'list all' button.

To send mail to a contact, click the 'To' Link next to their name.

Or to CC or BCC them, click those links.

When you're finished, the 'Close' Button will close up your address books.

Calendars

Squirrelmail provides a 'Personal Calendar', but also 'Shared Calendars' which we all have access too, and 'Public Calendars', which a group of people can have access to.

You get to the Calendars page by clicking the 'Calendar' link at the top of the page:

I've chosen to refer to events when talking about 'things that you can put into a calendar' as it seems the most generic term. By all means feel free to substitute appointments, meetings, etc if that makes things clearer for you.

Looking for Events

When you open the calendars page you'll see a list of calendars which can be clicked to open them.

Your personal calendar will be at the bottom of the list, with shared and public calendars before it.

When you first open a calendar, you are presented with a view of the current month.

Links at the top left can be clicked to change the view between this monthly view, the whole year, or just one day.

There are also links on either side of the screen, at the top that allow you to move to the previous or next month, or year.

In the monthly view, clicking on the date of a day can be used to show that day.

There is a marker saying '[ TODAY ]' next to the current day.

Events will be listed in the appropriate box (just like a normal paper calendar). --->

To find out more information about the events on a particular day:

Click the link for that day (i.e. it's date) to show what's happening on that day.

You can now view the times of the meetings, and who posted them, and the details of the events of the day.

In your personal calendar, and some of the shared and public calendars, you can also edit and delete events (see adding events )

Adding Events

To add an event you first need to open up the day on which the event will take place (see looking for events ).

Not all calendars allow everyone to add an event. You can always add events to your personal calendar, however.

When you have the correct day open, you should see a table with times on the left, and 'ADD' links on the right.

Click the 'ADD' link for the time you want your event to start at.

Your now taken to a form that lets you fill in the details of your event.

Start time is set with 2 dropdowns, and is when your event starts

Length is another dropdown, where you set how long the event goes on for.

The Priority dropdown lets you choose how important the event is.

The title should be (ideally) a short description of what the event is

Any more detail can be added in the big box at the bottom

When you've filled in all the details, click the 'Set Event' button.

You will see an 'Event Has Been Added' page, to confirm that the event is now in the calendar (as shown to the left).

At the bottom left of this screen is a 'Day View' link to take you back to the page where you started.

Alternatively you could use the 'Day/Month/Year View' Links at the top left to go to your preferred page.

Logging out

You can log out of squirrelmail using the 'Sign Out' link at the top right of the screen.

The 'SquirrelMail' link just under the 'Sign Out' link takes you to the Squirrelmail homepage.

Copyright Notice

This document is © Charlie Harvey 2005.

It is issued under a The Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence.

See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

You are free:

To copy, distribute, and display the work.

To make derivative works.

Under the following conditions:

Attribution. You must give the original author credit.

Non-commercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.

Using Squirrelmail	Page: 12/12

\\st\it\training\email\using_squirrelmail.sxw	Contents	Modified: 2005-02-28 13:11:35

charlie harvey

2005-02-25T11:22:40

charlie harvey