10 Minute Guide to Lotus Notes Mail 4.5 - 4 - Understanding the Lotus Notes Mail Database Window In this lesson, you learn how to open your Mail database, how to use views and folders, and how the Trash works. Lotus Notes stores your mail in your Lotus Notes Mail database. The stored mail includes copies of messages you send. Your Mail workspace page contains an icon that represents the Mail database. This icon has a small picture of an envelope with your name on it. To open the database, double-click the Mail Database icon. Moving Around the Mail Database Window When you open the Mail database, your screen is divided into two panes (see Figure 4.1). The Navigator pane is on the left. The Mail database has places in which you can store and view your messages. Use the Navigator pane to move to these different locations. Figure 4.1 The Mail database window. As you select different Navigator icons on the left pane of your screen, the documents that appear on the right side of your screen, in the View pane, will change. For example, if you select the Inbox icon on the left, you will see the contents of your Inbox listed like a table of contents on the right. The Inbox view (on the right) shows you who sent the message, the date of the message, and a brief description of the contents of the message. All the unread messages have a red star at the beginning of the line. Panic Button: No Messages? If you're using Mail for the first time, you may not have any messages waiting. That will change quickly as you send mail messages to others and they reply back to you. Timesaver Tip: Resizing the Panes You can change the size of the Navigator and View panes to see more of one side or the other. Point to the line separating the two panes until your mouse pointer turns into a two-headed arrow separated by a black line. Then simply drag to the left or right. Accessing Mail from the status bar (located at the bottom of the screen) indicates whether or not you're currently connected to your Domino server. A lightening bolt at the left of the status bar indicates that you are connected. No lightening bolt means that you are not currently connected to your server. If you click the Mail icon on the right of the status bar, you see a pop-up menu (see Figure 4.2) that lets you choose common mail tasks: Create Memo starts a new mail message. Scan Unread Mail provides a list of the mail you haven't read. Receive Mail gets any new mail from the server. Send Outgoing Mail sends out any messages that you have written. Send & Receive Mail performs both actions at once. Open Mail opens the mail database. Figure 4.2 The Mail pop-up menu. To begin a task, select it from the pop-up menu. This pop-up menu is available in every window of Lotus Notes, so you can send and receive mail and perform other mail functions even when you're in another database or on the workspace itself. You can find the Action bar (see Figure 4.3) at the top of the Mail database window below the SmartIcons. The Action bar is context-sensitive and has several buttons on it. When you click one of the action buttons, it performs a program task such as saving your mail document. Figure 4.3 The Action bar of the Inbox. Plain English: Context-Sensitive The actions available to you depend on your current task or context. For example, if you are reading a document, one of the available actions would be to edit the document. But you couldn't save the document if you were just reading it, so the Save button would not appear. When you're editing a document, editing is no longer an available action (because you are already editing the document), but now you can save it. When you select the Inbox, for example, there are six buttons on the action bar: New Memo creates a new piece of mail, Delete removes a message from the database, Move to Folder moves a document to a specific folder, Forward sends a copy of a message on to someone who did not receive the original, Reply for when you write a reply to a piece of mail, and Reply with History sends a copy of the original message along with your reply (more about these buttons in Lesson 11). Using Folders and Views The Navigator pane (see Figure 4.4) presents several folders and views for you to use when you work with your Mail documents. In Lesson 1, you learned that a view is a list of documents, similar to a table of contents of the database. In the Mail database, a view lists your mail messages. There are different views that you can use to look at a list of mail messages sorted by date or by who sent them. Except for changing the way a view is sorted, you can't alter the contents of the view. But you can create your own folders and determine which messages you want to store in those folders. (In Lesson 13, you'll learn how to create folders.) Figure 4.4 The Navigator pane. The Navigator pane has a series of pre-manufactured views and folders. The first icon on the Navigator is the Inbox. When you click the Inbox icon, you can see a list of all of the messages you have received. Those messages stay there until you move them to another folder or delete them. The Inbox is the default view when you open the Mail database for the first time. From then on, whatever view you have open when you close your Mail database is the view you will see the next time you open it. There are times that you begin to write a message and decide not to send it right away. Maybe you need to add information to it. Perhaps you're being called away from your desk. You can save a message without sending it. The message will be stored in Drafts. When you want to go back to the message and finish it, click the Drafts icon in the Navigator pane to see a list of your drafts. To finish your draft, select and open the document, finish your work, and send the message. Mail stores messages you send in Sent unless you move or delete them. To check the messages you have already sent, click the Sent icon. All Documents displays all the messages that are currently in your Mail database. Calendar allows you to make appointments on your personal calendar and to make appointments with others who use Notes Mail on your server. You'll learn more about calendars in Lesson 19. And what would the well-organized person be without a To Do list? You can use Lotus Notes Mail to assign tasks to other people as well as to yourself. When you click the To Do icon, you will see a list of these tasks. The View pane lists a description of each task, the due date, and the person assigned to do the task. You'll work extensively with tasks in Lesson 17. Meetings is a list of your appointments sorted by date, time and subject. Documents that you mark for deletion are stored in Trash. Folders and views contains two default views: Discussion Thread and Archiving. Use the Discussion Thread view to see messages grouped with their replies so you can follow an entire conversation. The Archiving view lists the documents you archived from this database. You archive messages to save space in your Mail database by creating a new database and sending your old and expired messages to that database. Agents are like macros. They automate tasks such as managing documents, manipulating fields, and importing information from other applications. They are beyond the scope of this book. Design allows you to design Notes databases, views, and forms. This also is beyond the scope of this book. Panic Button: Where Are Those Views? If you can't see the Discussion Thread and Archiving views listed in the Navigator, check the little triangle in front of Folders and Views. This triangle is called a twistee. Is it pointing down or to the right? If it is pointing right, click the twistee triangle and it will turn down. Now you should see those views. Plain English: What Is a Default? A predefined system setting that you can chose to override. For example, the default font for Lotus Notes Mail is Helvetica, but you can change it to another font. Using the All Documents View When you have mail in your mailbox, you'll appreciate these different views. If you don't have any mail yet, don't panic. It's still a good exercise to click through these views. By the time you start receiving mail, you'll have a good grasp on moving around the Mail database. When you click the All Documents icon in the Navigator pane, you can see all of the documents currently in your Mail database displayed in the View pane--both the ones you sent and the ones you received (see Figure 4.5). For each document, you can see who sent it, the date it was sent, and the subject of the message. Figure 4.5 The All Documents view. You can sort the documents by the name of the person (who) or by the date. However, you can't sort all views. How can you tell whether you can sort a view? The column headers have little triangles on them. The Who column header has an up triangle that indicates that this column will sort in ascending order (alphabetically A to Z). The Date column has a down triangle, which means this column will sort in descending order (most recent to oldest). To resort the columns, click the appropriate column header button to change the order (you don't have to click right on the triangle). Clicking the Who column header sorts the documents alphabetically; clicking the Date column header sorts the documents in date order. You don't have the option to sort it both ways (by who, then by date) at the same time in this view. If the option to sort both ways were available in this view, the triangles would point both up and down on the column header. You might see that type of sort option in other databases. If you connect to the server at work, your mail may not appear in your view as quickly as it arrives in your mailbox. Lotus Notes can notify you with a beeping sound or with a message on the screen that says you have new mail. Lesson 20 describes how to set the options for mail notification. To refresh your view and see the new mail listed, click the Refresh icon in the upper left corner of the View pane or press F9. The refresh icon can appear in any view of Lotus Notes if a document has been added or modified during the time you have the view open. Use the F9 key to refresh a view when you see the refresh icon. Understanding Trash As you view your messages, you can mark the ones you don't want by selecting the message and then clicking the Delete button in the action bar or by pressing the Delete key on your keyboard. A Trashcan icon appears in the document row. When you leave the database, Mail displays a message asking if you want to delete the marked items. You can select Yes or No. If you choose No, Mail removes the Trashcan icon and your message remains in its location. If you choose Yes, your messages will be deleted from the database. If you choose No, your messages go right into the Trash, although you can still see them in the All Documents view (they'll have a Trashcan icon in front of the document row). You can decide later if you want to keep them or not. After all, you wouldn't be the first person to go through your trash to find something you shouldn't have thrown out. When you click the Trash icon (see Figure 4.6), you can select a document and pull it out of the Trash by clicking the Remove from Trash Action bar button. You can also empty your Trash, hopefully, without being reminded. Emptying your Trash will permanently remove all the documents listed there from the database, so be very sure you want to do this before you click the Empty Trash Action bar button. Figure 4.6 The Trash view. In this lesson, you learned about opening your Mail database, using the different views and folders, and how to use Trash. In the next lesson, you learn about using Lotus Notes Help.

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