E-Mails

Feng Office can act as a web mail client for its users, and this is really useful as you will then be able to share your emails with your colleagues without actually having to forward them.

What happens in case you are not available in your office, but your colleagues need to make sure of certain emails? In case you have classified your incoming and outgoing emails into the right Project, Client, Folder or Workspace - as long as your colleagues have reading access over the emails there - they will be able to read it and know what is going on.

Another useful thing to have along this module are the Email Rules, which are real time saver!

Note: E-mail integration module relies on the users mail server. The service provided is for downloading e-mail into Feng Office, classifying it, and integrating it within Feng Office system and DataBase. This means you need to possess an email account before setting it up within Feng Office.

The following picture will show the toolbar used to manage emails within Feng Office, and you may find further information about its actions below.

Most used actions:

• New: Creates a new e-mail message.
• Check mails: Manually checks all the e-mail accounts where the users have permissions for new messages.

Note:In case you are subscribed to Feng Sky or Feng OnSite services, the emails will be automatically checked every certain amount of minutes.

Accounts:

• Add Email account: Lets you add an e-mail account.
• Edit account: Lets you edit an existing e-mail account - as long as you have permissions -

Email boxes:

• Inbox: Shows e-mail messages that have been received.
• Sent: Shows e-mail messages that have been sent.
• Draft: Shows e-mail messages that have been saved as a draft (and not sent yet).
• Junk: Shows e-mail messages that have been recieved and considered as junk.
• Outbox: Shows e-mail messages that have yet to be sent.

Deleting & Archiving:

• Move to trash: Moves the currently selected e-mail messages to the trash.
• Archive: Archives the currently selected e-mail messages.

Mark as:

• Mark as read: Marks the selected e-mail messages as read.
• Mark as unread: Marks the selected e-mail messages as unread.
• Mark as spam: Marks the selected e-mail messages as spam (junk). Bear in mind that the system remembers this selection for future e-mails that come from the address marked as spam.

Email Rules

• You need the Advanced Email plugin

Filter By State:

• View all: All e-mails will be listed, whether they have been read or not.
• Read: Only read e-mails will be shown.
• Unread: Only unread e-mails will be shown.

Filter By Classification:

• View all: All e-mails will be listed, whether they have been classified or not.
• Classified: Only classified e-mails will be shown.
• Unclassified: Only unclassified e-mails will be shown.

Filter By Account:

• View all: E-mails from all accounts will be shown (you need to have the right reading permissions)
• [Account Name]: You will be able to select on of your own email accounts to filter the e-mail messages by it.

In order to send a new email within Feng Office, you have to make sure that the logged user has at least one e-mail account of his own or permissions within other e-mail account.

In case the user has multiple email accounts, the user can select from which account sending the email message through the From option. By default, the selected email account will be the one he set as default account.

Adding an e-mail account to Feng Office is similar to adding an e-mail account to your desktop mail client (i.e. Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail). You basically have to enter your e-mail address, the mail server addresses (POP3/IMAP and SMTP), your login details, and encryption settings.

If you are going to set up a Gmail account, please have a look at these instructions first.

You have two options for adding an e-mail account:

1 - Go to the e-mail module and click on “Accounts” - “Add E-mail Account”

2 - (For SuperAdministrators only) Go to “Settings” - “Configuration” - “Email Module” - “Email Accounts”. You will be redirected to the following screen where you can add, edit and delete e-mail accounts:

Lets see how to do this step by step:

Account name: Name used to identify the email account within Feng Office.

Email Address: Your email address.

Account ID: Your email address or username for the server.

Password: Your email account password.

Server address: The address to your POP3/IMAP email server.

Connection Method:

1. POP3
2. IMAP: When selected, you will then have to click on Fetch IMAP folders to select the boxes where you will be looking for emails. For Feng Office Professional and Enterprise editions, the IMAP sync plugin has an extended set of tools. Please follow this article to find out more.

Use SSL for incoming e-mail connection: If you email server requires SSL encryption, please enable this option.

Delete emails from server: In case you would like to delete the emails from your Mail Server and keep them exclusively within Feng Office, you should enable this option, and select an amount of days. For instance, if you select 5, emails older than 5 days ago will be automatically deleted from your email server.

Mark e-mails as read in the e-mail server when receiving them in Feng Office

Preserve e-mails state (read, unread) when receiving them in Feng Office

Autoclassify to workspace: You may select a client, project, folder, workspace, or even a tag, where to classify the emails by default if you wish to. In case you do this, any other user with access to the client, project, folder or workspace in question will be able to read all of your incoming emails. If you wish not to do this, you may select nothing and emails will be unclassified, and only you will be able to read them until you reclassify them. Otherwise, you may select a specific folder or workspace for you where to keep the emails.

SMTP Server: The address to your SMTP email server.

SMTP Server Port: The port required to connect to the SMTP server.

SMTP Server Authentication:

1. Use incoming: use the same username/email address and password as your incoming settings
2. No authentication: in case it does not require it
3. Input SMTP username and password: you will be prompted to add the username and password

Secure Connection:

1. SSL
2. None
3. TLS

NOTE: If you are unsure of the incoming and/or outgoing settings for your e-mail account, please take a look at this article on the most common mail account settings (gmail, outlook, office365, yahoo, etc)

Sender Name: The name that will appear when you send emails.

Default Account: Enable this option if this is going to be the main account for the logged user.

Signature: Signature to be used by default for the logged user and this email account.

When enabling the Account Permissions section above (like in the screenshot from this section), you will be able to manage the permissions for this email account. This means you can share it with other users in different ways:

1. No access: The user will not have access to the email account
2. Can read/write emails: The user will be able to read and write emails related to/from this account. In this case the user will also be able to edit it and set up his own Personal Settings for the account.
3. Can read/write emails and edit account: Same as below, but the user will also be able to change the email account settings

You can delete an existing e-mail account at any time. To do so, open the account settings form and click the “Delete mail account” button:

An alert dialogue will then ask you to confirm this action and gives you the option to delete any existing e-mails of that account as well:

In case you choose to delete all of the emails, it may take a while to process depending on the amount of emails you have there, so please be patient.

• Reply: Click here to make a reply forwarded to the e-mail account where the e-mail message comes from. You may add more e-mail accounts as recipients if you would like to do so.
• Reply to all: Click here to make a reply forwarded to every single e-mail account which have been contacted, plus the e-mail account where the e-mail message comes from. You may add/remove e-mail accounts as recipients if you would like to do so.
• Forward: Click here to forward the e-mail message you have recieved to anyone you want.
• Move to trash: Lets you move this e-mail message to the trash.
• Print view: Displays a printable version of this e-mail message and calls the print command.
• Classify: Allows to assign this e-mail message to a certain workspace (classify).
• Archive: Lets you archive this e-mail message into the Archived Objetcs folder.
• Report as Spam: Moves this e-mail message to the Junk folder. Not Spam: Moves this e-mail message to its previous folder. Bear in mind that the system remembers this selection for future e-mails that come from the address marked as spam.
• Mark as unread: Marks this e-mail message as an unread one. Mark as read: Marks this e-mail message as a read one.
• Download e-mail: Allows you to download the e-mail message to your computer.
• View History: Lets you read the e-mail message's history.

• Subscribers: People who are subscribed to this e-mail message. Clicking on a subscriber name takes you to the corresponding user profile.
• Created by: Users who recieved this e-mail message. Clicking on this users name takes you to the corresponding user profile.

This section will help you organize better your files, explaining how to choose what to do with the documents attached to your incoming mails.

If you go to: settings (top on the right clicking your user name) → edit preferences → email options You will find the following configurations:

“Automatically classify email attachments when receiving emails”: When new emails arrive, and they are automatically classified to certain spaces, if they have attachments they will be classified with them, helping you keep all related information in the same spaces automatically.

“Action to take with attachments when classifying emails manually”: this configuration applies when classifying emails by drag and drop or by clicking in the classify button. If the option selected is “prompt user for an action” there are two possible ways of choosing whether to classify the attachments or not:

• 1-Using drag and drop: a pop up will appear asking you what to do:

• 2-Clicking the “classify to” button: from inside the mail or from the mails list, there will be a checkbox in the pop up in order to choose:

Note: images within the mail body are not considered as attachments to prevent saving unnecessary documents (as it is the case of images included in signatures).

When composing an email, you may send any of the following:

1. files uploaded to Feng Office
2. files from your computer

Feng Office also provides with the possibility of sending a link to the file instead of actually sending it over, which makes it faster, but in that case the other user needs to log in to Feng Office to see the file in question (and have permissions wherever it is classified at). By default this option is disabled. If you would like to make use of this, you have to disable the Attach contents option, right next to the attachment.

Feng Office offers the possibility to send e-mails to a group of contacts from the “Contacts” tab.

Steps:

• Go to the “Contacts” tab and select the contacts that you want to send the group e-mail to. Click on “Send email”

• The following pop-up window will appear, in which you will be prompted to choose the recipient type.

• Select the desired option and click on “OK”. This will take you to the e-mail creation common form, with the recipients added in the field you selected in the previous step.

The notifications and newsletters module allows the creation of e-mails and to select a set of contacts for sending the same message to all of them. The selection of contacts can be made through all of your data base relevant attributes. It also counts with the option to include recipients on the field “To”, “CC” or “BCC”. Users will also be able to track the delivery status of their newsletter.

For more information on how to work with the Newsletters Module, please access this article.

Note: this module is only available in the Professional (optional) and Enterprise (included) editions of Feng Office.

By default the spam filter is rather high, so many emails may get into the Junk or Spam folder.

In order to decrease this level, you should do the following:

1. Click on your name (top right corner)
2. Go to Account
3. Click on Edit preferences on your right
4. Get to Email options
5. Look for the option named Maximum spam level allowed and lower its value (may be to 4 or 5.. depending on your needs).
6. Save the changes

Does Feng Office support SSL/TLS encryption?

Yes, for incoming (POP3/IMAP) and for outgoing (SMTP) mails.¹⁾

Does Feng Office support GPG encryption?

Not at this time (Feng Office 1.5).

Does Feng Office support POP3?

Yes.

Does Feng Office support IMAP?

Yes.(Since Feng Office 1.2)

Feng Office IMAP offers a basic sync feature for the Community Edition. Full IMAP sync is included in Feng Office´s Professional and Enteprise editions. For more information, please refer to this article.

Feng Office auto-detects and auto-adjusts Gmail settings, though it might be a bit tricky sometimes to get it all running, so make sure you check out the Gmail configuration and troubleshooting guidelines.

Enable 2-Step Verification:

- Navigate to the Google Account settings page. - Select “Security” from the menu on the left. - Under “Signing in to Google,” choose “2-Step Verification.” - Follow the prompts to set up 2-Step Verification by adding a secondary method of verification, such as a phone number.

Create an App Password for Feng:

- In the Google Account settings page, go to “Security.” - Scroll down to “Signing in to Google” and click on “App passwords.” - Select the app and device for which you want to generate the app password (e.g., “Mail” for Feng's email client). - Click “Generate” and follow the instructions to create the app password. - Provide the generated app password to Feng to use in their email client settings.

- Enable “Less Secure App Access”: - Sign in to the Google Admin console using an administrator account. - Navigate to “Security” and then “Basic settings.” - In the “Less secure apps” section, click “Go to settings for less secure apps.” - Select the option to allow less secure apps. - Save the changes.

Yes. You may receive your Hotmail account e-mails, however, you will not be able to send any e-mail message at all unless you subscribe to their services to enable this option.