Hardly a week passes by that you don't pick up a newspaper or trade magazine and see some case or other centred around racial or sexual harassment or bullying due to e-mails passed around an organisation, or offensive jokes or videos have been circulated which have caused offence. And all of this problem is apart from the vast amount of time spent in the workplace on private e-mailing. At one time the use of the work telephone was tightly restricted to prevent abuse of the facility and to prevent unauthorised expenditure, which could be substantial. The situation with regard to free telephone calls at work in many organisations has been relaxed somewhat but to prevent abuse many companies now have call logging systems which track telephone calls back to a particular extension. No-one ever thought that logging the content of a telephone call would occur. E-mails are different. They often take a long time to type, and some of the jokes or messages passed around an organisation are lengthy and are time consuming to read and to download. And all at a time when there is increasing pressure on achieving productivity and cutting costs in order to stay competitive enough to stay in business.

TCM4000's e-mail system automatically files every e-mail that is sent and every incoming e-mail can be autofiled. It is up to the TCM4000 customer as to what policy they adopt with e-mail (and this policy can be posted in the Reference Section for all to see). In its' standard format, TCM4000 autofiles every e-mail in the main database to be accessible by all users (however, there are ways for management to restrict access to data in the TCM4000 database for security purposes) and this in itself is a deterrent to the abuse of the e-mail facility at work. If the TCM4000 customer wishes to allow private use of e-mail at work then TCM4000 can be configured so that each user has a private path for their e-mail and along with this there is a log which records the number of e-mails in and out and the duration of preparation of the e-mails in the same way that the e-mail activity is logged in the main system. Although the private e-mails can remain private this log can be made visible to designated Users as required in the same way that the telephone logs of certain telephone systems record the time, date, duration and telephone numbers of all calls.

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  E-Mailer
    TCM has a powerful e-mailer which can handle multiple e-mail accounts, internal and external e-mail, bulk e-mailing and even process form submissions from your website.

Once you have set up an e-mail account by clicking on File Setup - E-Mail Accounts you will be able to send and receive e-mail over the internet. If you have not set up an e-mail account before you may need to contact your service provider for certain details such as the POP and SMTP servers.

The e-mail screen lists your accounts down the left-hand side, you have an in-box for each account that holds your new messages, and a mail archive for each account that holds your old e-mails (both in and out). Alternatively, you can view everything all together using the in-box and mail archive at the top of the list.
     
    Writing an e-mail
< Back    There are several ways to write an e-mail.
     
  • You can click the drop-list arrow next to the e-mail button and choose Write an e-mail from the menu which appears.

• If you have selected someone in the Filing screen, you can also choose Write an e-mail to Angela (or whoever is selected) from the menu.
     
    • You can right-click on any person in the Filing screen, Diary, To-Do or Tables screen and choose Write an e-mail from the menu which appears
     
  • You can click the Write an e-mail button in the E-Mailer screen.
If you have multiple accounts set up, you can click the drop-list arrow and choose the account you wish to use.
     
  When the e-mail composer screen appears you will be prompted to search for someone to send the e-mail to. If the person isn't in the database you can click on the New contact button in the search screen and add their details and e-mail address.

You can send the e-mail to other TCM users by selecting them in the search screen. You can have a combination of internal and external users as recipients for the same e-mail. To add additional recipients click either the CC or BCC boxes. People set as CCs will have their e-mail address appear in the message for all the other recipients to see. People set as BCCs will not have their addresses visible to the other recipients.
     
    Sending and Receiving e-mail
  When you have entered your e-mail message, click on the Out basket button on the toolbar to send the message to the Out basket. If you are part-way through the message you can send it to the pending tray and finish it off later. If the button for the Out basket is disabled, it's because you haven't specified a recipient with an e-mail address.
     
  When you click to send your e-mail, TCM will send all the messages from the Out basket and file copies of them into the relevant folders.

You can click the drop-arrow and choose a particular account if you only want to send e-mail through that account rather than all e-mail.
     
  When you click to receive your e-mail, TCM will check all your accounts for new messages.

If you are using the e-mailer in Standard mode, TCM will download your e-mail and then display it in the In basket. If you have been sent e-mails with attachments, TCM will ask whether you want to download them if they are particularly large.

If you are using the e-mailer in Advanced mode, TCM will show the subjects of each e-mail and allow you to choose which ones you want to fetch. This has the benefit that you can delete junk mail and other e-mails without having to download them. TCM will check each account in turn and then wait for you to select e-mails to download, which will then appear in the In basket.

To change between Standard and Advanced modes, click File Setup - E-Mail Screen.
     
    Coping with junk e-mails
    If you are unlucky enough to start receiving junk e-mail, you can set TCM to either delete it automatically or ask for confirmation before deleting it. You can delete e-mail based on the sender's e-mail address or words in the subject such as 'loan' or 'special offer'.

To set TCM to auto-delete e-mails, right-click on a junk e-mail that you're already received and choose Auto-Delete from the menu which appears.

You can change these settings by clicking File Setup - EMail Accounts - Auto Delete.