The "Actions" popup 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:
- Delete - Moves any currently selected messages to the Trash folder. If currently in the Trash folder, permanently delete any selected messages.
- Report spam - Marks the selected emails as spam in the internal database to train the spam filter, and then moves the email to Junk Mail.
- Report non-spam - Marks the selected emails as ham (not spam) in the internal database to train the spam filter and then moves the email to the Inbox.
- 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.
- Redirect to people - Redirects any selected messages to addresses specified in the People text box.
- Archive - Archives the selected messages in your mailbox.
- Save all/sender/recipient addresses - Prompts to save all/sender/recipient addresses in the currently selected mails in the mailbox.
- Forward - Forwards 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 recipient(s) of the message and add any additional text you want.
- 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.
- Select/Deselect - Selects or deselects all messages, or, if a search is in place, applies only to messages which meet the current search criteria. Note that this may select/deselect more messages than are currently visible on the current page since there may be more messages than fit on one page.
- Check POP link - Retrieves messages from the specified POP link or from all POP links if <All> was selected.
- Empty Trash folder - Permanently deletes all items from your Trash folder.
- Purge deleted - Removes 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.
Clicking the "Do" button will actually perform the action selected in the pop up menu on the left hand side of the screen.
To apply actions to Mail messages you first have to select one or more messages. Messages can be selected in a number of ways.
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If you want to select all mails in a 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.
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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).
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To select individual mails, click their checkboxes.
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To select a group of mails, select the top most mail of the group you want, and hold Shift while selecting the lowest of the group. All mails in between will get selected as well.
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To deselect mails simply click on the checkbox again. You can also use Shift+click to deselect groups of emails.
To move messages to other folders, 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. If the folder tree is hidden, you have to choose the destination folder from the 'Folder' popup and click on the 'Move' button.
Select 'Copy' from the 'Move/Copy' popup if you want to copy the messages instead. Also, if you hold down the 'Ctrl' key when you click [>>], then the 'Action' menu will change to 'Copy to folder' and the selected messages will be copied to the destination folder.
By entering an email address in the People text box and performing 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, and 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, but annoying for you, and that's definitely not our policy.
The action 'Redirect to people' requires a person/list of people to send the message(s) to. You can enter their email address with the "People" text box. At the moment, you can't use nicknames or partial full names.
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.
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bounce: Most commonly, what happens when a mail server ("MTA") refuses, fails to accept mail to an address (e.g. gives the error: '550 username, User Unknown', 'mailbox full', 'blacklisted IP', or 'server unavailable'), or for some other reason, the mail server (MTA) refuses the message before the body of the message has been received.
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reject: A FastMail.FM term or Sieve filter command that causes an 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.
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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.
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discard: a sieve command synonymous with the FastMail.FM term reject silently.
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block sender : a FastMail.FM term for either rejecting or discarding.
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.