VI
Customers can now access Virtual Internet POP3 mail over the Internet
through a webmail system, similar in presentation to Hotmail or Yahoo
mail. This is available to all customers with POP3 mail utility.
Logging in to VI Webmail
Access can be found at the following URL:
http://webmail.vi.net
Type in your username and password that can be found in your VI Control Panel.
After you log in you should see a screen below.
Configuring Settings and Options
The followings are the common settings and options available under VI Webmail:
a. PERSONAL INFORMATION: Change the name, address, and signature that people see when they read and reply to your email (so-called "identity" under VI webmail and each user can have multiple identities).
Click the icon (Options) from the toolbar at the top of the screen and click the link "Personal Information".
Fill in the name, email address and signature accordingly. When finished editing the identity, click the "Change" button to update your identity. To create a new identity, click the "Create" button.
You can select a folder or to create a new sent-mail folder to keep the emails sent under your selected identity from the "Sent mail folder" list.
b. DELETING AND MOVING MESSAGES: Set preferences for what happens when you move and delete messages.
Click the icon (Options) from the toolbar at the top of the screen and click the link "Deleting and Moving Messages".
It is recommended to unselect the first option "Return to the mailbox listing after deleting, moving, or copying a message" to reduce the number of time reloading the whole mailbox. It would give performance gain for large size mailbox.
And click the second option (as showed below) if you want your mail to be moved to the trash folder on deletion instead of just mark it deleted and keep it your mail folders. Click the "Save Options" button to confirm the option.
At the first time you delete your message, you will be notified that a trash folder has been created successfully. An additional icon (Empty Trash) will be automatically added in the tool bar at the top of the screen and you can click the icon to permanently remove all the messages kept in the trash folder.
c. DISPLAY OPTIONS: Change display options mainly include sorting criteria, sorting direction, message per page in the mailbox view and spelling errors to show per screen.
Click the icon (Options) from the toolbar at the top of the screen and click the link "Display Options". Then modify the options that you wish to make. Click the "Save Options" button to confirm the changes.
d. NEW MAIL: Control when new mail will be checked for, and whether or not to notify you when it arrives.
You can select to refresh your folders at a certain time interval and to display pop-up notification when new mail arrives.
Click the icon (Options) from the toolbar at the top of the screen and click the link "New Mail". Make your selection and click the "Save Options" button to confirm the options made.
e. MESSAGE COMPOSITION: Customize how you send mail and where drafts are saved.
Click the icon (Options) from the toolbar at the top of the screen and click the link "Message Composition". Then modify the options that you wish to make.
It is recommended to click to select the first option "Compose messages in a separate window" as to reduce number of times reloading the whole mailbox for performance gain. However if your computer has installed third-party pop-up blocker which has blocked the VI Webmail pop-up compose window, it is recommended you either change your pop-up blocker setting to allow webmail opening a separate pop-up window, or change to unselect the first option such that compose message page open in the same browser window.
Another setting that you may want to customize is the default charset for sending messages. Basically the default setting is Unicode(UTF-8) which is already capable to handle any kind of language character set. Depending on your usual practice, you may change the default charset (character set) to Simplified Chinese(GB2312), Traditional Chinese(Big-5), Japanese(ISO-2022-JP), Korean (EUC-KR), etc. Anyway you are still free to choose the character set when you compose a new message.
Click the "Save Options" button to confirm the changes. The options available in composing a message include the followings:
f. FILTERS: Create filtering rules to organize your incoming mail, sort them into folders, or delete spam.
Click the icon (Options) from the toolbar at the top of the screen and click the link "Filters". Then modify the options that you wish to make. Click the "Save Options" button to confirm the changes.
Apply Filter Rules:
You can choose to apply filters based on the contents of the message. Messages can be automatically deleted or moved to a specified folder as you wish.
The default setting would let you to process the filters manually, E-mail will only be processed after you click the icon (Apply Filters on INBOX), the second icon at the INBOX title.
If you want VI Webmail automatically filter the E-mail when you login, click to select the option "Apply filters rules upon logging on" and the click "Save Options".
Edit Your Filter Rules:
In the "Filter Settings" window, you can edit the filter rules to be applied by clicking the link "Edit your filter rules" (as shown above). Define the filter rules in the section "Filter Rule" that you wish to set for filtering your incoming messages. When you finish defining the filter rules, click the "Save" button.
Reminded that the filter rules you defined may not be automatically processed, as the default filtering setting is to process the filters manually. If you want VI Webmail automatically filter the E-mail when you login, in the "Filter Settings" window click to select the option "Apply filters rules upon logging on" and the click "Save Options" (as shown above in "Apply Filter Rules").
Edit Your Blacklist:
In the "Filter Settings" window, you can edit the filter rules to be applied by clicking the link "Edit your blacklist" (as showed above). Define the blacklist sender addresses in the section "Blacklist" and the action for the blacklisted messages (either delete them completely or move them to another folder, say trash). When you finish defining the filter rules, click the "Save" button.
There is another way to define your blacklist addresses. In the "Inbox" window (or any Open Folder), you can add a blacklist rule by highlighting the message that you wish to block and click the link "Blacklist" (next to "Delete"). You will then see the following screen with your newly added filter rule included.
Reminded that the blacklist you defined may not be automatically processed, as the default filtering setting is to process the filters manually. If you want VI Webmail automatically filter the E-mail when you login, in the "Filter Settings" window click to select the option "Apply filters rules upon logging on" and the click "Save Options" (as shown above in "Apply Filter Rules").
Edit Your Whitelist:
Before editing your whitelist, it is important to bypass your default spam mail filtering in your Email account at server level. Otherwise your whitelist Email may be filtered out by the filtering setting at the mail server before reaching VI Webmail. Therefore you have to reset "Spam Filters in Your Email Account" to be "No filter".
Afterward there will be no spam filtering for your Email account at server level, then you can re-enable the filtering rule and define the whitelist at the VI Webmail level.
To re-enable filtering rule at VI Webmail level, click "Option"->"Filters"->"Edit your filter rules"->"New Rule". Enter "Spam filtering rule" to be the "Rule Name" and select field to be "Self-Defined Header:", type "X-MailScanner-SpamScore" in the blank field. And then in the "Contains" field, enter "sssss" if you want basic filtering, or enter "s" if you want most aggressive filtering (Specify less 's' imply more aggressive filtering). Then choose action "Deliver to folder" to the folder "Spam" (You have to periodically clean-up the "Spam" folder manually, another way is to deliver to "trash" which is automatically clean-up after you press "Empty trash"). Finally click "Save" to enable this filtering rule.
After doing this you can define your whitelist. In the "Filter Settings" window ("Option"->"Filters") choose "Edit your whitelist". Enter the whitelist sender addresses in the section "Whitelist". When you finish defining the filter rules, click the "Save" button.
Reminded that the whitelist you defined may not be automatically processed, as the default filtering setting is to process the filters manually. If you want VI Webmail automatically filter the E-mail when you login, in the "Filter Settings" window click to select the option "Apply filters rules upon logging on" and then click "Save Options" (as shown above in "Apply Filter Rules").
Reading Messages
You can select a mail folder from the "Open Folder" list at the top right hand corner. Click the folder that you wish to open and the messages contained in the selected folder will be displayed. To read a message, click the "sender" or "subject" link of the message, then the message window will be appear (as shown).
The Email attachments will also appear at the "Part(s)" of the E-mail header. Normally there would be hyperlink at the filename (except for binary attachment with no suitable application to open), so you can directly click the filename or the (download) to get the attachment. In case an Email have multiple attachment files, another way is to click "Download All Attachment (in zip file) " to get all attachments in a zip file.
Composing and Sending Messages
Click the icon (Compose) from the toolbar at the top of the screen to compose a message. A "Message Composition" window will pop up for you to type your message. When you finish composing your message, click the "Send Message" button.
You can use the "Address Book" function to find an email address by clicking the icon (Address Book) when you compose a message. You can locate it by "Name" or "Email Address". From the list of email addresses, you can select an email address and add it into the appropriate "To", "cc" or "bcc" fields.
By default, a copy of the sent message will be saved in your "sent-mail" folder for your future reference.
Saving Draft Messages and Outgoing Messages
If you are composing a message and want to finish it later, you can click the button "Save Draft" in the "Message Composition" window. The draft messages will be saved under a "drafts" folder (this folder will be automatically created at the first time you use the "Save Draft" button). You can retrieve the draft messages from the "Open Folder" list at the top right hand corner.
You can keep a copy of the outgoing messages in a designated folder. Click the icon (Options) from the toolbar at the top of the screen and click the link "Personal Information". Select the "default identity" under which the outgoing messages are sent and click the link "Edit your identities". Tick the checkbox next to "Save sent mail" and select the "Sent mail folder" that you wish to keep the copy of outgoing messages. To confirm the changes, click the button "Change". You can set the folder to keep the outgoing messages for other "identities" as well.
Relying and Forwarding Messages
Click to open a message that you wish to reply. Click the link "Reply" (to the sender only) or "Reply to All" (to the sender and all other recipients). A window similar to that of "Message Composition" will be displayed. When you finish composing your reply, click the "Send Message" button.
Similarly, click the link "Forward" to forward the opened message to others and click the "Send Message" button to send your message.
Sending Attachments
In the bottom section on "Attachments" in the "Message Composition" window, click the "Browse" button to select from the PC directories and double click the file name to select a file. The selected file will be shown in the Attachment window. Click "Attach", and the file name, size and file type will be shown. Click the "Send Message" button to send your message.
In case you wish to remove the attachment before sending your message, tick the box next to the file name and click the link "Remove Selected". The selected files will be removed from the attachment list accordingly.
Checking Spelling
Click "Spell Check" to check the spelling of your message in the "Message Composition" window. Use the "Next" button to go through the following pages until the end. Select the button "Done" when the spell check is done.
Note: this feature is not yet available in the current version.
Deleting and Moving Messages
To delete a mail message, select the message by clicking the checkbox on the left of the message. Then click the link "Delete" (either at the top or bottom of the page), or you can click the link "Purge Delete" to remove messages from your INBOX permanently.
If you have selected the option to move all deleted messages to the "trash" folder instead of just marking them to eb deleted, then your deleted messages will be put in the trash folder. You can click the icon "Empty Trash" to remove the deleted messages from the trash folder.
Selecting and Marking Messages
You can select the messages in a certain folder from the "Select" pull-down list, e.g. if you want to mark all the messages in a folder for deletion, you can click the option "All" and all the messages in the folder will then be selected. You can also mark the messages under different categories from the "Mark as" pull-down list.
For example, you can mark the messages that are important to you by first highlighting a message and then Mark As "Important". Later you may want to select all the important messages you had marked before by using the Select drop-down list. Now, all the messages that you had marked as important will show up with a tick mark in front of the messages.
Moving or Copying Messages
You can move or duplicate a copy of the messages to different folders. To do so, select the message that you wish to move or copy by selecting the checkbox at the left of the message. Then click the link Move/Copy (the same links appear both at the top and at the bottom page of the messages) and select the folder that you wish to move or copy the messages to from the "Messages to" pull-down list.
Managing Mail Folders
You can manage your mail folders by clicking the icon (Folders) from the tool bar at the top of the screen. After clicking the icon, you can see the following screen:
To create a folder, click the "Choose Action" pull-down window and click "Create Folder". A dialogue box will appear. Type the name of the folder to be created. Then click the "OK" button. The new folder will appear in the "Folder Navigation" window and you can also find it from the Open Folder pull-down list.
You can rename or delete the mail folders by clicking the appropriate options under the "Choose Action" pull-down list. All the messages inside the folder will be deleted if you delete a folder.
Setting up Address Books
Address books can help to store email addresses and personal contact details to provide handy reference.
To edit your address book:
Each user has a personal address book. To edit your address book, click the icon (Addressbook) from the toolbar at the top of the screen.
i. Add an address: Click the icon (Add) button. The mandatory fields are "name" and "email address". When you finish inputting the data, click the "Save" button.
ii. Search an address: Click the icon (Search/Advanced Search) to search a saved address. The "Search" function allows search by "Name" or "Email" and the "Advanced Search" function provides more fields for searching. Input the keyword and click the button "Search" to start searching.
iii. Browse the address book: Click the icon (Browse) to browse the contents of your address book.
iv. Import/Export an address book: Click the icon (Import/Export) to import an address book into your address book under VI Webmail or to export your address book saved under VI Webmail to your own disk.
When you finish editing the address book, click the (Mail) icon on top or the browser's "Back" button to go to the INBOX screen.
Setting up a Contact List
To create a contact list,
Note: you must have at least one email address in your address book before you can make a contact list.
(See 16 i. to add an address.)
0) To edit your address book, click the icon (Addressbook) from the toolbar at the top of the screen.
1) Click 'Browse' to see all the email addresses.
2) Check the boxes in front of the e-mail addresses to be added to the list.
3) In the 'Select List' drop down box on the right, select 'New List' .
4) Click the 'Add to' button to add the selected names to the list.
5) Give a name to the contact list.
To send e-mail to a contact list,
1) Click 'Compose' to create an e-mail
2) In the 'To' field, enter the name of the contact list. Press "Tab".
3) All email addresses in the contact list will be shown in the 'To' field.
4) Compose the mail and send.
How to hide the full contact list of email addresses:
Insert the sender's own email address in the "To:" field and put the distribution list name in the "Bcc:" field. This will hide the email address in the distribution list so recipients will not see the whole distribution list.