FastMail.FM FAQ - Mailbox screen

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Questions

  1. How can I find how much space is being used in my account/a folder?
  2. How do I empty my Trash, or delete all emails in a folder?
  3. How do I view another folder, for instance to see my sent items?
  4. How do I select which mails my actions apply to?
  5. How do I move messages to other folders?
  6. How do I sort messages?
  7. I'm sorting by date, but messages aren't all being sorted correctly. Why?
  8. What does the 'Search' button do?
  9. What does the 'Goto' button do?
  10. What is the 'Action' popup menu for?
  11. What does the 'Do' button do?
  12. What is the 'Folder' popup menu for?
  13. What is the 'Go' button for?
  14. What is the 'Move' button for?
  15. What does the 'Redirect' action do?
  16. What is the 'People' text box for?
  17. What does the 'Bounce' action do?
  18. What does the 'Retrieve' action do?
  19. What does the 'Poll' link do?
  20. What does the '[+]' link do?
  21. What does the '[-]' on the folder tree menu do?
  22. Why does the 'Action' menu change to 'Copy to folder' when I hold down the Ctrl key?
  23. What does the folder popup do?
  24. What does the 'Resource Usage' section show?
  25. A message on the mailbox screen has an attachment, but it doesn't appear on the view message screen. Why?
  26. How do I set the column to sort by permanently?
  27. Why doesn't FastMail.FM remember the number of rows I want to display in my folders?
  28. How do I get rid of the message preview?

Answers

  1. How can I find how much space is being used in my account/a folder?
  2. Simply click Preferences, and then Quota Usage. You'll be sent a warning email when you reach 80% of this. You can quickly delete/zip archive old messages from your account from the 'Folders' screen where you'll find a 'Purge/archive' link at the top of the screen.

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  3. How do I empty my Trash, or delete all emails in a folder?
  4. On the mailbox page, select the 'Select All' item in the Action popup at the bottom of the screen, and click 'Do'. Then, ensure that 'Delete' is selected in the Action popup at the bottom of the screen, and then click the 'Do' button. If you are in the Trash folder, it will be emptied; in any other folder the contents will be moved to the Trash.

    You can permanently delete all the items in the Trash folder by selecting the 'Empty Trash Folder' item from the Action popup at the bottom of the screen and then clicking the 'Do' button.

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  5. How do I view another folder, for instance to see my sent items?
  6. If the folder tree is not hidden, just click 'Sent Items' on the tree.

    If the folder tree is hidden, select 'Sent Items' from the 'Folder' popup then click the 'Go' button.

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  7. How do I select which mails my actions apply to?
  8. You can select mails in a number of ways.

    1. If you want to select all mails in folder (that is, also on the pages that you are not viewing currently, within the same folder) use the 'Select All/Searched' dropdown from the Actions menu.
    2. To select all mails on the current page select the top most checkbox in the checkbox column. (This is not available on older browsers, instead use the 'Select Page' dropdown from the Actions menu)
    3. To select individual mails, click their checkboxes.
    4. To select a group of mails, select the top most mail of the group you want, and hold Shift while select the lowest of the group. All mails in between will get selected as well.
    5. To deselect mails simply click on the checkbox again. You can also use Shift+click to deselect groups of emails.

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  9. How do I move messages to other folders?
  10. On the mailbox page, select the messages that you want to move by checking their checkboxes.

    There is a [«] button with each folder on the folder tree. Make sure that 'Move' is selected with the 'Move/Copy' popup. Then click the [«] button corresponding to the destination folder. Select 'Copy' from the 'Move/Copy' menu if you want to copy the messages instead.

    If the folder tree is hidden, you have to choose the destination folder from the 'Folder' popup and click on the 'Move' button.

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  11. How do I sort messages?
  12. You can sort your messages by date, size, subject, etc simply by clicking on the name of the column you want to sort by. By default, email is sorted in reverse date order (that is, most recent emails appear at the top). When you have sorted by a particular column you will see a /\ or a \/ beside the column name to indicate that the column is sorted in ascending or descending order, respectively. You can reverse the sort order by clicking on the same column name again.

    The meanings of each column are:

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  13. I'm sorting by date, but messages aren't all being sorted correctly. Why?
  14. The specified format for email dates is very precise. Unfortunately, despite 10 years of having the exact same format, some email programs generate incorrect date formats.

    If you view a message, and select 'Show Full Header', you'll be able to look for the 'Date' line. It should look like this:

    Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2002 15:10:58 +0300

    Unfortunately, our underlying IMAP server is very standards compliant, and if it can't parse an address correctly, it displays 'undefined' behaviour, putting the message in a basically random position.

    There's not a lot we can do at the moment. Actually, this actually shows that we're sorting incorrectly by 'Sent' time, rather than 'Received' time, which is what we claim. This is a known bug, and will eventually be fixed, providing a selectable option to choose "Sent" or "Received" columns.

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  15. What does the 'Search' button do?
  16. If you enter search criteria in the Search text box and press 'Search', the mailbox will only show messages where the sender address or the subject matches entered criteria.

    If the Search text box is left emtpy, or you click the Advanced button, you will be taken to a separate Search screen which will allow you to select a number of criteria to search the current folder on. After constructing the search, the mailbox will only show messages that meet the specified search criteria.

    Searches saved from the Search screen are available from the Action menu to be applied quickly at any time.

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  17. What does the 'Goto' button do?
  18. You can view messages in a different folder by selecting the folder you want to view messages in from the popup menu, and then clicking the 'Goto' button.

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  19. What is the 'Action' popup menu for?
  20. This menu allows you to select an action to perform on messages in the current folder. Use the 'Apply Action' button to actually perform the action. The currently available actions are:

    1. Delete - Move any currently selected messages to the Trash folder. If currently in the Trash folder, permanently delete any selected messages.
    2. Report spam - Marks the selected emails as spam in the internal database to train the spam filter on and then moves the email to Junk Mail.
    3. Report non-spam - Marks the selected emails as ham (not spam) in the internal database to train the spam filter on and then moves the email to Inbox.
    4. Bounce - Bounce any selected messages as undeliverable.
    5. Mark read/unread - Marks any currently selected messages as read or unread. Unread messages appear in bold, and also potentially have their body previewed. See the Folders screen for details on turning message preview on and off.
    6. Redirect to people - Redirect any selected messages to addresses specified in the People text box.
    7. Archive - Archive the selected messages in your mailbox.
    8. Save all/sender/recipient addresses - Prompts to save all/sender/recipient addresses in the currently selected mails in the mailbox.
    9. Forward - Forward all the selected messages, making them message attachments as part of a single new message. You'll be sent to the compose screen where you can select the receipient(s) of the message and add any additional text you want.
    10. Searches - Any saved searches you made by going to the Advanced search screen will be displayed here. Selecting one of them will clear any existing search and immediately use that search.
    11. Select/Deselect - Select or unselects all messages or, if a search is in place, only messages which meet the current search criteria. Note that this may select/unselect more messages than are currently visible on the current page since there may be more messages than fit on one page.
    12. Check POP link - Retrieve messages from the specified POP link or from all POP links if <All> was selected.
    13. Empty Trash folder - Permanently delete all items from your Trash folder.
    14. Purge deleted - Remove(expunge) all mails marked for deletion in the mailbox.

    Note: The actions performed on selected messages include ALL selected messages, not just those visible on the current screen. Say I have 2 messages. I select the first, and then perform a search which only displays the second. I then apply the action 'Flag searched' which selects the second message. If I then do a 'Move' action, both messages will be moved since both are currently selected, even though the first isn't currently visible.

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  21. What does the 'Do' button do?
  22. Clicking this button will actually perform the action selected in the pop up menu on the left hand side of the screen. See the question above for details on what the actions do.

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  23. What is the 'Folder' popup menu for?
  24. The buttons 'Go' and 'Move' require a folder to go to or to move the selected messages to. You can choose that folder with this popup menu.

    Note: This popup will only appear if the folder tree is hidden.

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  25. What is the 'Go' button for?
  26. Select the folder you want to go to from the 'Folder' popup menu and press 'Go' to go to that folder.

    Note: This button will only appear if the folder tree is hidden.

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  27. What is the 'Move' button for?
  28. Pressing 'Move' will move all selected messages to the folder specified in the 'Folder' popup.

    Note: This button will only appear if the folder tree is hidden.

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  29. What does the 'Redirect' action do?
  30. By entering an email address in the People text box and doing the 'Redirect to people' action, you will effectively forward all the currently selected emails to the given address. The main difference between forwarding and redirecting is that emails will preserve the original senders name when redirected. For example, if my name is 'Andrew' and I have an email from 'Susan' and forward it to 'John', for John, the email will appear to have come from Andrew. If I redirect the email to John, the email will appear to have come from Susan, not Andrew. When you redirect a collection of emails, the emails will be sent, but not deleted.

    The main use of this is to move a set of emails from your FastMail.FM account to another email address you might have, but to preserve the original sender so it doesn't appear like they all came from you at FastMail.FM, which generally isn't what you want to see at the other end when you pick up your emails at the other account.

    This is exactly the type of feature other email providers don't want you to have because a) they want you to click as many times as possible to get banner ad revenues so you have to forward one email at a time b) they want every email to appear to come from their address so they can add their tag-line at the bottom and get more free advertising. Nice for them, annoying for you, and that's definitely not our policy.

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  31. What is the 'People' text box for?
  32. The action Redirect to people requires a person/list of people to send the message(s) to. You can enter their email address with this text box. At the moment, you can't use nicknames or partial full names.

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  33. What does the 'Bounce' action do?
  34. 'Bounce' takes the currently selected emails and sends back an email to the addresses the 'From' address provided in the email(s), saying basically that 'the email address does not exist' in a standard internet email protocol way. Some more organised spammers remove these from their lists, although many spammers forge the 'From' address, so it is possible that your bounces will go to an innocent third party rather than the spammer. We recommend not using the 'Bounce' action unless you are confident that the 'From' address is accurate. After sending the bounce response, the messages are deleted.

    There has been some confusion about the terms bounce, reject, block sender, discard, and reject silently. There are subtle differences, though some people won't care about them.

    bounce: Most commonly, what happens when a mail server ("MTA") refuses, or fails to accept mail to an address e.g. give the error:

    550 username, User Unknown.
    or mailbox full, or these days, blacklisted IP, server unavailable, or for some other reason, the mail server (MTA) refuses the message before the body of the message has been received.

    reject: A FastMail.FM term or Sieve filter command to that causes action very similar to a traditional bounce, but occurs after the MTA has received the whole message for further processing.

    All processing by the antivirus software and the Define rules settings (including Sieve filter commands), hence these messages cannot "be bounced by FastMail.FM", in the sense of the term as defined above. HOWEVER, such messages can be rejected, which DOES cause the apparent sender to be sent a bounce message. A spammer may be able to tell the difference between a bounce and a reject, but a normal emailer probably won't.

    Since FastMail.FM pays for the bandwidth to receive the body of rejected email, users are charged for it. Little bandwidth is used to bounce messages, so users are not charged for that.

    reject silently : a FastMail.FM term synonymous with the action of the sieve command discard. Send to the bit bucket; destroy; file in /dev/null.

    discard: a sieve command synonymous with the FastMail.FM term reject silently.

    block sender : a FastMail.FM term for either rejecting or discarding


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  35. What does the 'Retrieve' action do?
  36. On the Pop Links screen, you may set up as many external POP links as you'd like. By selecting one of the Pop Links names from the Action drop down and clicking 'Do', FastMail.FM will connect to that POP server and retrieve any emails from that server and add them to your Inbox on FastMail.FM. You can select the special name <All> to connect to all servers.

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  37. What does the 'Poll' link do?
  38. This link opens a new window that automatically refreshes itself every 5-60 minutes, depending on your service level. It lists the number of new/existing emails in your inbox. It also changes the title of the browser window to "number of new/number of existing" emails, so on a Windows machine, you can minimise the window to the taskbar, and just glance down every now and then to see if you have new email.

    This feature is not available to 'guest' accounts, you must have a 'member' account or above. See the different membership levels for more information on how to upgrade.

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  39. What does the '[+]' link do?
  40. The '[+]' link turns on the folder tree on the mailbox screen.

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  41. What does the '[-]' on the folder tree menu do?
  42. Pressing the '[-]' will hide the folder tree from the mailbox screen.

    You can at any time unhide the folder tree.

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  43. Why does the 'Action' menu change to 'Copy to folder' when I hold down the Ctrl key?
  44. Normally when you use the [«] buttons the selected messages are moved to the destination folder. If you click [«] whilst holding down the Ctrl key then the selected messages will be copied to the destination folder.

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  45. What does the folder popup do?
  46. You can select a destination folder where the selected messages should be moved or copied to from this menu.

    The reason for this popup is that you might want to move the messages to a particular folder that just happens to be collapsed. Without this popup you'd have to expand the folder, move the messages and collapse the folder again.

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  47. What does the 'Resource Usage' section show?
  48. When the folder tree is visible, at the bottom of the tree is an area titled 'Resource Usage'. In this section you'll see two rows.

    MB - This row shows the amount of mailbox quota you've got, and how much you've used.
    BW - This row shows the amount of bandwidth you've got available this month, and how much you've used this month. The used figure is reset on the first of each month

    You can click on the 'MB' or 'BW' part to go to a screen with more detailed information on each resource

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  49. A message on the mailbox screen has an attachment, but it doesn't appear on the view message screen. Why?
  50. The message probably has some complex MIME structure that the server doesn't understand properly. If you can direct a copy of the email to us, we will look into what is happening and try and fix the problem

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  51. How do I set the column to sort by permanently?
  52. No, there isn't at the moment, but it is a planned feature.

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  53. Why doesn't FastMail.FM remember the number of rows I want to display in my folders?
  54. The dropdown menu on the Mailbox Window is only for one-time changes. In order to change it permanently go to Options and then the Folders screen. There you can set the 'Rows to display' for each folder.

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  55. How do I get rid of the message preview?
  56. Yes, go to the Options screen and select Folders. You can have no preview, a 1-line preview, or a 3-line preview for each mailbox.

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