University Computing Services

Messenger Express FAQ (Part 3)

Note: Messenger Express has been renamed "Communications Express", but the instructions in this FAQ still apply.

How can I customize Messenger Express?

You have a lot of options, many of which will be covered below. In general, though, the customization settings are in the Options tab. When you click that tab, you will see a second tab bar appear on the left side of the page; it is called the "Options tab bar" and contains tabs named Account Summary, Personal Information, Password, Settings, Appearance, Vacation Message, and Delegated Administrator. If I refer to these tabs below but you don't see them on your screen, go to the Options tab in the main tab bar, and then you should see them. In all of the tabs, after you make any changes you need to click the "Save Changes" button at the bottom before moving to a different tab or your changes will be lost.

How do I add a "signature" to the bottom of my messages?

You can set Messenger Express to include a predefined piece of text at the bottom of every message you send. Usually this includes your name and contact information (for an example see the bottom of this message) but it can include anything you want, really. Note that it is often considered rude to have a very long signature; you should only go over four lines if you are including full contact information and need the space. To set up a signature in Messenger Express, go to the Personal Information tab in the Options tab bar. Below the Preferred Language and Reply-to Address sections, you should see the Signature section. In the text box, fill in whatever text you want to use as your signature, then make sure the "Include this text in each message you compose" checkbox is checked.

What is that "vCard" section below the signature section?

A vCard is a special email attachment containing your contact information. When you send email containing a vCard, some email programs (such as Microsoft Outlook) can read it and automatically add your contact information to the recipient's address book. People who don't use a program that can read vCards, however, will just see an attachment. We recommend not using vCards unless you specifically know that most of the people you send to can read them; in today's virus-riddled Internet, it probably isn't a good idea to send an attachment with every email.

How do I change my Messenger Express password?

Simply go to the Password tab and follow the directions. You'll need to enter your old password first, so not just anybody can walk up to your computer when you have Messenger Express open and change your password. Then enter your desired new password; you'll need to do it twice, just to make sure you entered it correctly. Note that this will just change your Messenger Express password, not your main network account password.

Can I set up Messenger Express to forward to another email account?

Yes. Go to the Settings tab in the Options tab bar; at the bottom is a text box where you can enter email addresses to which all your Messenger Express email will be forwarded. From then on, whenever you receive a message at your wou.edu email address, a copy will be forwarded to the addresses) you entered, and the original will remain in Messenger Express. You might want to do this if you have another email account somewhere else that you prefer to use instead of Messenger Express.

Can I forward my wou.edu email to a program like Thunderbird or Outlook Express?

You can use such a program without needing to forward your Messenger Express email. Note that UCS cannot provide support for any email program besides Messenger Express, so you are on your own. There are too many different email programs for me to provide detailed instructions here, but all of them will require this basic information:

-Incoming server (IMAP only): incoming.wou.edu

-Make sure you are connecting securely; different programs have different ways to set this, but it is often a dropdown menu on the page where you enter the incoming server.

-Port number: 993 (This should fill in automatically when you indicate that you want a secure connection.)

-Outgoing server (SMTP): outgoing.wou.edu.

-Port number: 587

-If you want to be able to send mail from off-campus, include your username and password.

What are those other options in the Settings tab?

The first section of the Settings tab tells Messenger Express what to do with deleted messages. We recommend setting it to "Move deleted messages to Trash"; the other option, to mark messages deleted, can be a bit confusing if you aren't used to it. We also recommend checking to box to "Empty folder on logout"; that way you won't have to remember to empty your trash every so often.

The second section simply offers you the option to automatically check spelling on every message; if the box is checked, whenever you hit the Send button in the Compose window, the spell-check window will automatically pop up.

The third section offers you the option of saving copies of messages you send with Messenger Express. The checkbox turns this feature on and off, and there is a menu that lets you specify which folder you want the copies kept in. We recommend using the Sent folder, unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise.

The fourth section lets you choose which folder will be used to store messages when you click the "Save draft" button in the Compose window's toolbar, and the fifth lets you choose whether or not to include the original message as a quotation when you reply.

What can I change about Messenger Express's appearance?

Those settings are in the Appearance tab. The first section lets you choose a color scheme; feel free to play around with this and see what you like. The second section controls whether the various toolbars will contain icons only, text only, or both (which is the default.) The third section controls how many messages will appear in a single window, and whether they will be sorted oldest first or oldest last.

The final section controls the font, font size, and spacing. Note that the font settings only apply to the pages and windows of Messenger Express itself, and will not affect the appearance of email messages that you send.

How do I set up an automatic reply for when I am on vacation?

This is, appropriately enough, in the Vacation Message tab. The first checkbox is the most important; if it is off, none of the other settings will have any effect, though they will still be saved. The next two fields allow you to specify a start and stop date for the automatic reply, so you don't have to wait until right when you leave to get this set up.

The next field lets you specify how many days Messenger Express will wait before sending another vacation message to the same person. If you put "1" here, this means that anyone who sends you main while the vacation message is active will get the message the first time, but if they send you another message in the same day, they will not get the vacation message again. We strongly recommend setting this to at least one day; if it is zero, and someone else sends you a message just before they turn on a vacation message of their own, your automatic reply will trigger theirs, and theirs will immediately trigger yours, and so on back and forth until somebody's email server overloads and crashes. As long as you have this setting on at least one day, this problem can't happen.

The Subject text box lets you specify the subject line of your vacation message. Note that if you put in the code "$SUBJECT" (without the quotes) then your vacation message will have the same subject line as the message that triggered it. You are able to define two separate bodies for your vacation message: the one for internal senders will be sent as a reply to messages from wou.edu addresses, while the other will be sent in reply to messages from any other address.

Note that any messages received while your vacation message is active will be saved normally in your Inbox, so you can deal with them when you return.

How do I set up filters to process messages automatically?

This option is available in the Delegated Administrator, the last tab in the Options tab bar. Unlike the other tabs, this one opens a separate window and requires you to log in again. For this login, you need to enter your full email address as the username, and your Messenger Express password for the password. The reason for this extra login is that some organizations might not want to give all of their users access to these features; WOU does let everyone into the Delegated Administrator, but the extra login is still part of the system.

Note that, due to the system patch that was just applied, the link in the Options tab bar currently does not work. If you try to follow it, you will get a "Page cannot be displayed" error because the patch rest the link back to the default value instead of WOU'd custom location. This will be fixed soon, but for the time being, please use the address " http://www.wou.edu/nda" instead. This will take you to the login screen for the Delegated Administrator.

Once you are logged in, you will see a screen with a tab bar down its left side, somewhat like the Options tab in Messenger Express. The only tab you need to worry about is the bottom one, "Set Mail Filter"; the others either duplicate the functions of Options tabs (such as Account Information or Vacation Auto-responder Rule) or else are not used by WOU (such as Class of Service and the Mail list tabs.)

The Mail filter tab contains a list of all mail filters currently in effect; the list will be empty if this is the first time you are here. If there are filters listed here, you can edit them, remove them, or move them up and down, using the appropriate buttons. The Add button, naturally enough, creates a new filter.

When you click that button, a separate window will pop up, asking you what type of filter you wish to create. There are seven basic filter types; I'll briefly go through them all. Not that all types have one feature in common: you must define a name for them. This name is just the label that will appear in the list of filters; it is for your use only. Since it works the same for all filter types, I'll not bother to mention it each time.

• The first type is "Discard Large Messages". It is designed to throw away messages that exceed a certain size. The only option you have here (besides the name) is the message size; you enter a number and choose whether it is in gigabytes, megabytes, or kilobytes. When you click the OK button, you should get a "Status: OK" message; click the Clear Status button to return to the filter list. Every time you add or edit a filter, you should get that status message.
• The second type is "Reject Large Messages"; it is identical to the previous type except that instead of silently deleting the message, it sends back an error to the sender. You can specify the text of this error message along with the size of the messages that will be rejected.
• The third type, "File To Folder", is quite useful if you get a lot of mail and want to sort it into several folders. This one is a bit more complicated, so I'll use an example. Suppose you want to automatically put all the messages with [PMX:Virus] into a folder named "virus warnings". Create a filter, choose "File To Folder", and give the filter a name. In the "If the header line" menu, choose Subject; in the "Contains the phrase" text box, put in [PMX:Virus]; and in the "Then file into the folder" box type in the name of the folder you want to put the messages into. You can use any folder, as long it already exists. You can use this to file messages from a specific sender by choosing From" instead of subject in the header line menu, and putting their address in the "Contains the phrase" box. You can even filter messages from an entire domain, by simply entering the domain name instead of an exact address. All of the remaining filter types work this way.
• The fourth type is called "Spam Messages" but really is more generic than that; it can be used to silently delete any message based on subject line, sender, or recipient. It isn't very useful for catching actual spam, since spammers change their sending address and subject lines too often; luckily, we have PureMessage for that. This filter is still useful in cases where an individual is bothering you, or you find yourself on a mailing list with no way to get off of it. It works just like the "File To Folder" filter, except that there is no need to choose a folder since the message will simply be deleted.
• The fifth type, "Redirect Messages" is similar to the previous two except that it simply forwards the message to a specified address. It is set up just like "File To Folder" except that you specify an email address instead of a folder name.
• The sixth type is named "Accept", and it specifies certain messages that should be accepted into your Inbox. This may seem useless at first, since all unfiltered messages end up in your Inbox anyway. However, there is indeed a method to this madness, so to speak; for instance, if you have used the Spam Messages filter to delete all email from hotmail.com (which we do not recommend, by the way) but you have one friend with a hotmail address, you can create an Accept filter with your friend's hotmail address and make sure it comes before your spam filter in the filters list. That way messages from that one address will be accepted but mail from any other hotmail address will be silently deleted.
• The final filter type is "Reject". It is similar to the "Spam Messages" filter except that instead of silently deleting messages, it returns an error message to the sender. You can put in text that will be included in that error message.

Once you have your filters set up, click the Save button in the filter list; you will get the usual "Status: OK" message. Click through it, and then log out of the Delegated Administrator. After logging out, you will get an error saying that your session has timed out; this is just a minor bug that doesn't really affect anything. Just close out of that window and you will be fine.

Contact

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