Two types of email address
IAM has two types of email address:
1. Name based email addresses – these directly reflect the user of the email account. If you have one of these it will operate as a normal email address. It will be equipped with webmail for reading your email without your own computer and auto responder capabilities for replying automatically to senders while you are away (among other capabilities).
2. Role based email addresses – these reflect a position within the organisation. These only forward messages to name based email addresses and do no store any messages on the server.
If you are a user of the IAM email system there are some useful links you should know about. Note that for all of these, when you are prompted to login you must enter the full email address of the account you are trying to access and the password for that account. IAM email accounts (ending in @iam-afghanistan.org) should only be used for IAM business. Use personal email accounts for personal matters.
Name based email addresses
Using a mail application on your computer
This is the normal way you would read your email. Webmail is provided (see below) for times when this is not possible to do. Please follow this link to see more about how to setup your computer to read mail using a mail program. http://it.iam-afghanistan.org/setup-iam-e-mail-in-windows-live-mail/
Note that we recommend that you use POP3 rather than IMAP to download your messages.
We recommend that you configure the display name on your name based address to indicate your role. Eg. “Andrea Jones (IAM Executive Assistant)” would be the display name for andrea.jones@iam-afghanistan.org
Reading your messages from your personal email account on a cloud based mail system
We do not recommend this. Please use a mail application on your computer instead. If you really mus t do this please see these notes:
Setup Yahoo mail fetcher (these are not our instructions – please refer to the ‘setup google mail fetcher’ instructions for IAM specific settings)
Setup outlook.com/hotmail.com mail fetcher (these are not our instructions – please refer to the ‘setup google mail fetcher’ instructions for IAM specific settings)
What if someone sends me email that is too big to download to the mail program on my computer?
Sometimes people will accidentally send you emails that are too large for you to download to your computer. If this happens you will need to use webmail to locate the large message, read it online, and remove it so that your email program no longer tries to download it. You can use the webmail link above or if you’d like to go directly to a specific email program you can use one of these links :
Horde – http://webmail.iam-afghanistan.org/horde/index.php
Roundcube – http://webmail.iam-afghanistan.org/3rdparty/roundcube/index.php
Squirrelmail – http://webmail.iam-afghanistan.org/3rdparty/squirrelmail/index.php
Webmail
If you need to read your IAM email from a different computer (please avoid internet cafes) you can do this at http://webmail.iam-afghanistan.org
That will take you to a screen where you can change your password, setup autoresponders, setup forwarding, or use one of 3 different email programs to read your mail (you can set one as your default if you like so that it automatically opens after a number of seconds).
Setting an auto-responder for while you are away
If you need to setup an auto-responder for while you are away from the office for a period of time you can do this at http://webmail.iam-afghanistan.org/webmail/x3/mail/autores.html
Suggested settings for this are:
Character set: utf-8
Interval: 48 hours (this means that if someone sends you multiple emails while you are away you will only respond to the first one in a 48 hour period with your auto responder message)
From: this is your friendly email name and we recommend you include your job title in brackets after your name eg. Najeeb Abdullah (Gardener)
Subject: Out of office – %subject%
(by including %subject% in the subject it will replace %subject% with the subject of the email that the person sent you. It helps mail software to identify the message as belonging to a particular conversation)
Body:
“Thanks for your email. I am out of the office and unable to respond to your email. If your message is urgent you may prefer to contact my manager (give their name and email address here) while I am away.”
Start and stop dates: Set the start date if you want to pre-set your message in advance of your absence. Set the stop date so you don’t have to remember to turn the message off when you return (but you will need to update this if you stay away longer than originally planned).
WARNING:
- Do not set up an auto responder on your role based email address AND your name based email address as people who write to you at your role based email address would get two replies. Instead, just set it up on your name based email address. You could word it something like this (remove the options that don’t apply to you):I am currently away from the office {I’ll reply to you when I get back OR I’m still reading emails but will be slower to respond than usual OR if you wrote to [position email address here], [name of person reading position emails] will get back to you on my behalf shortly.}
Role based email addresses
Role based email addresses are always forwarded to another email address where you will read them. But if you want to write a message that appears to come from your role based email address how do you do that? You set up your email so that you can send mail using different identities.
Using identities
Follow the instructions at this link to enable your mail program to work with different identities: http://it.iam-afghanistan.org/sending-email-with-different-identities/
Recommendations:
- We recommend that you configure the display name on your role based email address to indicate who you are. Eg. “Andrea Jones (IAM Executive Assistant)” would be the display name for ea@iam-afghanistan.org.
- It is recommended that you store your messages in sensibly labelled folders in your email. Then, when you leave, you can hand over relevant folders, along with relevant documents stored on your harddrive, to your replacement or your manager.
Managing forwarding
If you need to change the forwarding destination of your IAM role based email address you can do this at http://webmail.iam-afghanistan.org/webmail/x3/mail/fwds.html
WARNING:
- If you remove all the forwarding rules on your role based email address your messages will simply vanish rather than going anywhere. We don’t keep messages on our server for role based email addresses. The sender will not know that they haven’t been delivered and you will not know that they have arrived.
- All forwarding destinations must be on our mail server, ie. they must end in @iam-afghanistan.org. If we find other destinations we will delete them. The reason for this is that when email is forwarded to other mail systems, if junk mail is delivered to you it is also forwarded. Then when the recipient marks that message as junk mail it thinks it was sent by OUR servers rather than the original sender, and it gives our server a bad reputation on the internet – which ultimately makes real messages from us often get mis-identified as SPAM.
Note:
- if you need to, you can set multiple forwarding rules on your account. This is useful if you need someone else to read your messages while you are away. Some roles require the message to always go to a number of people – you’ll know if this applies to you
Recommendations for use:
- When you set up forwarding for someone to cover your role during an absence we recommend that you keep the forwarding address to yourself and ADD the forwarding to your cover. This will ensure that you will continue to receive the correspondence that takes place in your absence and you can just file it while you are away. You should ask the person who is reading your email in your absence to Bcc or CC you on all their replies so that you get the full history of any correspondence they conduct on your behalf.
Setting up email filtering
This is not commonly needed and is very complicated to get working correctly. But if you really have a need for it it is accessible from http://webmail.iam-afghanistan.org/webmail/x3/mail/filters/userfilters.html. It enables you to set processing rules based on the contents of incoming mail in order to send them to different destinations. It would normally only be used for a role based email address where a forwarding rule was in place so that one person still receives all the messages sent to it, even if a filter doesn’t send the message to anyone else.
Like I said, it is really hard to get it working correctly – so generally it is better to stay away from this.
Frequently Asked Questions
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