Email use and Mailbox maintenance

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Email use

Introduction

Any business email should be written in the same professional way as a business letter or a facsimile because it is still a showcase for Flashbay. In other words it should be properly addressed, well structured and written clearly using normal capitalisation and punctuation.

It should not use abbreviations, slang, humour or sarcasm unless you are sure that the recipient will understand this.

If an email contains 'guarantees' then, prior to sending, it should be authorised by a Director.

A check must be made that the email is not being inadvertently sent to the wrong addressee or the wrong address.

Do not create email congestion by sending trivial messages or unnecessarily copying emails to those who do not have a real need to see them.

Do not attempt to send attachments in excess of 10MB. If you have artwork files in excess of this size, it is very likely that it is in an incorrect format for use by our company and should be modified or re-requested from the customer in a suitable format before internal distribution.

Do not CC your own address on any messages that you send - this can cause a serious problem where some or all of the intended recipients will receive the message many times.

Email size

The system of Email was not designed for sending large amounts of data. Be careful never to send emails bigger than a few MB, and generally keep emails below 1MB where possible.

1MB email - a big email, by anyone's standard

5MB email - a huge email

10MB email- ridiculously big size email, many recipient servers will block such emails.

Because employees of Flashbay are often handling customer data, artwork and images, it is important that you have an appreciation of file sizes.

There is almost never a legitimate occasion to send an email over 10MB, if your email balloons over this size you are doing something wrong e.g. using wrong file format.

Email style/appearance

Be consistent with the format of your emails and pay special attention to this when cutting and pasting recycled content.

The font and colour you use should be standardised in every email unless for effect. The font settings you should use in Zimbra are standardised as:

Font: San Serif
Size: 11pt
Colour: Very Dark Grey

Your Email signature should be setup for you when you arrive at the company. It is your responsibility to alert the IT team to any changes which may be required to the signature in future (such as change in job title, or phone number).

In Zimbra, the signature settings can be found in Preferences Tab - Signatures. You can generate your signature in this tool then cut and paste it into the Zimbra signature window

Email and Holiday

Before you go on Holiday you need to do three things. You can do all of these things in Zimbra yourself, and they are your responsibility to complete before your holiday. It's best to do them 1 working hour before you depart (so the day before your holiday in most cases)

1) Setup an 'Out of Office' Auto responder in Zimbra
2) Set the email address to which your email will be forwarded during your holiday (e.g. email address of your colleague who will be covering for you).

Click on the 'Preferences Tab' -> 'Mail' -> 'Receiving Messages'.

The auto responder text to use is standardised, you can the text from this page: Signature

3) Share your both your 'inbox' and 'sent' folders in Zimbra with the person who will cover for you so they can see your email history.

Share a folder by right clicking it, choose 'share', then enter the email address of the person who you wish to share the folder with. Set the role to 'viewer', the press OK. Check your colleague can see your shared folder after they have accepted the share invitation which will be automatically emailed to them.

Disclosure of emails

You must not set up your email system automatically to forward emails outside Flashbay, as this risks breaching our confidentiality obligations (for example, conflict checks for competitors and price sensitive information might be forwarded, which could be very damaging if in the wrong hands). Note that (where appropriate) emails may be passed on by the recipient to third parties. Please also be aware that, even if it is deleted from your Inbox, material remains on the system and may still be monitored by Flashbay.

Mailbox maintenance

Introduction

Zimbra is an essential tool for each of us and the technical team work as hard as they can to ensure that it runs as quickly and reliably as possible for everyone.
To ensure that we can continue to support the current level of performance, and improve this further in future, we now need your cooperation in ensuring that you keep you mailbox well maintained.

Why do I need to keep a well maintained mailbox?

Every email that you send and receive stays in your account forever unless it is deleted.
This is great as it allows you to search all your old messages and get quick access to every piece of information that you have ever had access to by email.
However, each item stored makes the whole system a tiny amount slower for everyone who uses it - increasing both the cost and effort required to ensure that everything is running as well as possible. Scale that over everyone in the company who uses Zimbra and you can see why we all need to proactively maintain our mailboxes.

How to keep a well maintained mailbox

There are some messages that you don't need to keep forever, these include:

• Old customer data
• Old customer artwork
• Old emails where you sent artwork to virtualproof@flashbay.com and have long since received the related proofs

To help you to locate these messages we have added two saved searches to your account, to be used as follows:

Important: Check and confirm that you do not have 'Include Shared Items' ticked on the mail search options. If this option is ticked in your account it must be unticked before you start the search.

Search 1: "Large old emails" - run it once per week

This search finds messages that are more than 3 months old and contain large attachments.
You should look through the results and decide if you still need the email - you most likely do not. Delete any messages that you no longer need access to.
If you decide that you do need the email because it contains vital information in the email body that is not available to you in any other message then you almost certainly don't need the large attachments and you should delete the attachments using:

1. 'Remove' link next to the attachment (for single attachments)

2. 'Remove all attachments' link at the bottom of the attachment list (for multiple attachments).
Using this method the attachments will be deleted but the email message will be kept.
Do not download and store the attachments on your computer - that just moves the problem to a different system.

Search 2: "Old VP emails" - run it once per week

This search finds messages that were sent to virtualproof@flashbay.com more than 3 months ago.
You can delete all results that this search finds.
As the messages were sentto virtualproof@flashbay.com a copy will be stored in that account.
Any responses that you received from the graphics team will not be included in the search results.

Empty trash after performing maintenance

After you have run both searches and deleted any messages that you no longer need you should perform a final review of the deleted items and then empty your trash.

Frequency of maintenance activity

Because both searches look for messages that are 3 months or older on the day that you run the search you should run them both each week and new results will be found for you to consider for deletion.
You should make this mailbox maintenance part of your weekly routine and set yourself recurring calendar items for the days of the week that you prefer to run them.
The particular days and times are up to you provided you maintain the frequency of running both at least once each and every week.

Caution

As always, be careful when selecting messages to delete and ensure that you are not accidentally deleting messages and folders that you did not intend to.

Setting up Filters

Sometimes you will receive emails, which won’t require immediate action.
In these occasions we strongly recommend to setup email filters to automatically move those emails to a folder, which you can check when, necessary, so they do not interrupt your daily sales work flow.

Do not setup filters for customer emails or any customer related emails, which require immediate action or response.

Here an example:

1) You can find the filter settings in the “Preferences” tab in Zimbra.
2) Press Filters and + New Filter.

3) Choose a Filter Name e.g.: “Password retrieval notification”.
4) You can now choose which filter shall be applied, in the example below we choose “If the Subject contains -> Password retrieval notification”.
5) Perform the following actions: Choose “File into folder” and the press “Browse…”.

6) Choose a “New” folder and name it “Password retrieval notification”.
7) Click on OK and the filter is set up.

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