The following section provides a brief description of email and how email works, and also how to create and manage email messages in orchidmedia using the Mail Activity.
email on the internet
email is a well established method of sending electronic messages to people on the internet. It is different from instant messaging, in that the recipient does not have to be connected to the internet when the message is sent. Using email you can send messages, and the messages are stored on a computer permanently connected to the internet, until the recipients pick them up.
In order to identify one person from another, each person has an email address. The address is a unique sequence of characters, which identifies a computer on the internet, and a person's Mailbox. An email address is usually in the form of a person's name, the @ symbol, followed by a Internet Domain name and Domain suffix. This form of address is used to make it easy to remember and use.
On the internet there are many thousands of computers dedicated to handling and storing email messages, and they perform the task of transferring email messages between themselves using the email address. Whoever supplies you with your internet connection will also provide an email service, and you can obtain an email address from them, if you don't have one already.
Next, you need software like orchidmedia which will connect to their computers on the internet that handle email messages to create and send your email messages, and receive email messages sent to your address.
If you have your email address, and the information from your Internet Provider on how to connect to their email computers, then you can create an email account in orchidmedia using the Email Accounts Page in User Preferences. (See Email Service, Creating Email Accounts for further help). You must create at least one email account in orchidmedia, before you can use the email service.
Once you created an email account in orchidmedia, you can start using the the Mail Activity in the orchidmedia Desktop Companion by selecting the Mail Icon (1) from the Activity List in the Navigation Panel. The Mail activity provides all the functions to create, send and receive emails.
The Mail Activity
The mail folders for the current user are displayed in the Folder tree view (2) in the Navigation Panel. You can navigate to different mail folders by selecting the folder in the tree view.
In order to provide an email service, orchidmedia requires a number of folders, as listed in (2) to store email messages. You can add further email folders to the list shown to divide and organise your email messages, but you cannot remove the special folders shown.
Here is a list of the special email folders with an explanation of their use in orchidmedia :-
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Stores uncompleted email messages |
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Stores email messages received from your contacts |
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Stores email messages from unknown contacts |
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Stores email messages to be sent, messages are moved from Sending to Sent, after the messages are transferred to the email server on the internet |
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Stores email messages sent |
Special email Folders
As part of creating an email account in the User Preferences Window, you can select the special folder to use to store incoming email messages and outgoing email messages. Creating more inbox folders and more than one email account, allows you to organise messages from each account into their own inbox.
Further reading from Mail:
