First Class Email Tips and Tricks

Saving Your Email

I guess it was bound to happen! With so many people all getting connected to the First Class Email and Conferencing System, the system was literally choking itself to death with all of the messages stored in conferences and in personal mailboxes.

Despite pleas to the contrary, mail just kept accumulating in personal mailbox. (Remember my tips about how to speed up First Class?) Well, a forced housekeeping process was put into place.

In the past, old messages that weren't deleted were allowed to sit a collect electronic dust for 180 days before purging. With hundreds of users keeping hundreds of messages, that's a great deal of electronic dust! The First Class Administrator determined that a lower retention setting was required. Now, mail that has been dated more than 30 days will be automatically purged from the system.

What's an email collector supposed to do?

Attachments

If the message that you're bound and determined to keep contains an attachment (i.e. a file attached to a message), then you had better download the file and save it to your local hard drive. Otherwise, the message and the attachment are history after 30 days.

Save As Text

This isn't a new concept. But, it's very efficient. Open the message that contains the desired text and, from the FILE MENU, select the option to "Save As Text". In that manner, your message(s) can be saved away from the First Class system for reference at a future date. A further suggestion is to create a New Folder on your computer and entitle it "SAVED MESSAGES" and always remember to save your message as text in that folder. Afterwards, it's a one stop trip to that folder to find your archived messages.

Print the Message and Put it in a Binder

Yeah, right! There goes years of preparing for the paperless society right down the tubes!

Create Your Own Diary of Archived Messages

If you get a great deal of important messages, then saving them as text can get a little tedious after a while. With one or two messages, it can be relatively easy to find things afterwards. But, archive a hundred messages, and it becomes a challenge. Archive a thousand, and even finding a new filename that wasn't already in use can be next to impossible!

Enter Filemaker Pro or some other database program. Design your own database of important messages. You'll want to include fields for the original author, the subject, the date, and perhaps some additional fields of your own to categorise the messages. Then, have one big field for the contents of the message itself.

Open your database and create a new record. Fill in any of the fields that require manual input and then highlight the parts of the original message you wish to keep and copy it. Then, switch to your Filemaker database and paste the message into your message contents field. Done is as done does.

Isn't this a lot of work? Perhaps in the beginning, yes. But, in the long run, you have your messages all indexed and archived. Here comes the best part. Because they are part of a database, you have database manipulation features. You can sort your messages by date or by person. Or, if you know that there is a message somewhere with the word "kangaroo" in it, perform a search of the database!