Squirrel Mail is the new replacement web-mail system for Mail-Gear. It has lots of nice features and is a big improvement over the old web-mail system. This document will help introduce you to the new system.

You can login to the new system by clicking on the "Check Your Email" link on our main home page. Use the same login name and password that you used for Mail-Gear. After clicking the "Login" button, you will be taken to the main web-mail screen.

The main web-mail screen is composed of the mailbox list on the left, a menu across the top right, and information about your current mailbox on the bottom right of the screen. The mailbox list on the left has links to all your mailboxes. You will probably only see "Inbox" right now. All your old Mail-Gear mailboxes are here as well, you just haven't "Subscribed" to them yet.

Once you login, you will be able to access the User Manual for Squirrel Mail. Click on the Help link at the top right of the screen to access the manual. It will initially take you to a context-sensitive help page. You can access the manual's Table of Contents by clicking the Table of Contents link at the top of the Help screen. We'll go over some features that aren't covered in the manual below.

We have installed a system-wide address book for Squirrel Mail. This means that you can lookup the e-mail address for anyone in the school system from within Squirrel Mail. Click on Compose at the top of the screen to type in a new e-mail message. Click the Addresses button to bring up the address search screen. Type in a partial name and click Search. It will return a list of results from which you can select the user you wish to send mail to. Note that you can also limit searching to just your personal address book or just the county-wide address book.

Squirrel Mail will also allow you to Spell Check your message before sending it. Note that this feature doesn't work properly on Macintosh computers with a Netscape web browser. It will work properly on PCs with Netscape or Internet Explorer and on Macintoshes with Internet Explorer.

Squirrel Mail allows you to setup as many message folders as you would like. To do this, click on the Folders link at the top of the screen. From here you can create folders, delete folders, rename folders, and subscribe/unsubscribe to folders. Subscriptions are very powerful. They allow you only see the folders that you want to see. For example, if you had other folders besides Inbox in Mail-Gear, your extra folders will show up here, but you will not be subscribed to them. To Subscribe to them, highlight the folder name and click Subscribe. The folder will then show up in your folder list at the left of the screen.

The Options link takes you to all the customization items for your e-mail. Personal Information allows you to set your real name, your e-mail address, and a signature that will appear at the end of every e-mail. Most of this information should already be entered for you. If you would like a signature, you can enter it here. Display Preferences allows you to change the way Squirrel Mail looks. There are several "themes" installed that will change the colors for you. There are also a few other options you may be interested in.

Message Highlighting and Message Filtering are two powerful e-mail management options. Message Highlighting allows you to have Squirrel Mail automatically highlight certain messages for you in the folder list. For example, you could click New to setup a new message highlight rule, give it a name, set the color for the highlight, and the rule to highlight by. You could set the system to automatically highlight messages that are from jlester@wcs.k12.va.us for example. Squirrel Mail can also automatically file messages in certain folders for you. Message Filtering allows you to setup these rules. This works the same as the Message Highlighting rules, except you chose the folder the message should go to when it is received. If you were on a mailing list for example, you could setup a special folder for those e-mails and then create a Message Filtering rule to automatically move messages from that mailing list into the special folder you created.

Index Order lets you set the order of the columns in case you don't like the defaults. Folder Options allows you to set some custom folder use options. You can elect to use a Trash folder and/or a Sent folder if you would like. Change Password allows you to change your e-mail password. Spellchecker allows you to set custom words for your dictionary. For example, if there is a certain word that you use frequently and the Spell Check thinks it is spelled incorrectly, you can add it to your personal dictionary so that it isn't flagged as misspelled when you run Spell Check.

We're sure many of you will find the new Search feature useful. It allows you to search all your e-mail messages using a certain criteria such as From, To, etc. This is very handy if you have many messages to sort through to find a particular message.

Squirrel Mail now has the "Drafts" feature that was in Mail-Gear. Also, Squirrel Mail should not automatically log you out when you are composing a message like Mail-Gear was prone to doing. Squirrel Mail also does not automatically put your sent messages into a Sent folder. You will need to set this up yourself if you would like this feature. It can be found in the Message Folders section of Options. The same goes for Trash. By default, Squirrel Mail completely deletes a message when you tell it to. If you would like it to instead move the messages to a Trash folder, this can also be found in the Message Folders section of Options.

If you use Outlook or another third-party program to check your school mail, you can also use many of the features of our new mail system with them as well. For example, you can use Outlook to check your e-mail on your own computer, but also use Squirrel Mail to see the same messages. This allows you to access your e-mail from anywhere. You can also setup your e-mail program to use our system-wide address book. If you would like more info on these features, let us know.