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!

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.

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.

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 for your incoming emails' email server.

Connection Method:

1. IMAP: When selected, you will then have to click on Fetch IMAP folders to select the boxes where you will be looking for emails. Please note that Feng Office currently does not support full IMAP synchronization as to marking an email as read in one place will mark it as read on the other. It just uses it as a connection method, and the emails are downloaded to Feng Office.
2. POP3

Use SSL: 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.

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.

If you wish 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:

Screenshot to be added...

• 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.
• 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.

E-mail accounts are independent of workspaces - they are personal to each user. This means that your e-mail messages are visible only to you by default. Only when you assign one or more e-mail messages to a workspace then every user with permissions to read e-mails on that workspace will be able to access those e-mails.

When an email is classified in a workspace, all users with Permissions to see emails in that workspace will be able to see the email (as for all types of objects).

To prevent users from seeing all classified emails workspace permissions should be adjusted. This can be achieved by denying email read permission for all users in that workspace. This has a limitation, it will prevent users from viewing any email in that workspace.

A workaround is to create a sub workspace that is only visible to the user who should see the emails, and then classify emails into that sub workspace. In this way the user with permissions on that sub workspace will be able to see the emails when viewing the original workspace. Other users won't be able to see the new sub workspace although they will still see emails directly classified in the original workspace.

To make point 2) clearer:

  All
    +--Workspace A
         +--Sub Workspace B

Email is classified to Sub Workspace B. Only User 1 has permissions to see emails in Sub Workspace B. When User 1 selects Workspace A he will see all emails in Workspace A plus all emails in Sub Workspace B, while other users will only see emails in Workspace A.

Moving e-mails with attachments into a workspace will place these attachments into the document area.

When composing an email, Feng Office files and Local FileSystem files can be attached.

While attaching a file, the user has two possibilities:

• Send a regular attachment. This way the complete attachment is sent with the email.
• Send a link to the file in Feng Office. This way the user must downloaded the file from his local Feng Office installation.

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 client does “sync” with the server but not in the complete sense:

• From 1.7.1 version onwards, Feng Office IMAP client sends a copy to your IMAP server whenever you send an e-mail IF you have set your email account (in Feng Office) correctly. In order to do this, when adding/editing your account, you should change the “Sent Mails Synchronization Settings” (this feature will only be available if your Feng Office administrator enables such option at the Admin Panel).
• If you already have an IMAP e-mail account, and you wish to synchronize your old sent e-mail messages with your IMAP server, you can do it by asking your Feng office Administrator to synchronize it through Administration>Email Accounts and then clicking on “Sync”. Or you may do it yourself through adding this line in the browser after the root:
  public/tools/mailsyncscript.php?email=[email]&username=[username]
  where [email] stands for your e-mail account, and [username] stands for your Feng Office username.
  Note: Sent e-mails synchronization may take a long time if you have sent many e-mail messages before and would like to synchronize them with your server.

• If mails were trashed in FengOffice they are still downloaded as new mail when connecting from a different mail client, and vice versa (i.e. deleting a mail from a different mail client does not cause the OpenGoo mail client to also reflect the removed email).

Does Feng Office support Gmail?

Yes. To set up Feng Office with your Gmail account please make sure that the desired protocol (POP3 or IMAP) is activated in your Gmail account's settings. On the same page you will find a link that brings you to a page in Gmail help with information about how to configure your email client.

Does Feng Office support Hotmail?

For the time being, you may recieve your Hotmail account e-mails, however, you will not be able to send any e-mail message at all.