Using Webmail: Special Topics

If you already have an address book in Pine or Eudora, or can export your current address book into a comma delimited text file, then you can start your Webmail address book by converting your current address book into Webmail format using the ACCC Email Addressbook Conversion Utility. See Converting a Eudora or Pine Address Book to (or from) Webmail for more information.

Like the other ACCC-supported email client systems (specifically pine and Eudora), Webmail allows you to create and use an "address book" containing the names and email address of the people (or groups of people) that you send email to most often. The bad news is that each email system's address book has a different format, so you can not readily share that information between them if you use more than one of the systems.

The easiest way to to add an address to a Webmail address book is to add the From: addresses of your incoming email messages -- click Add to Address Book (a button between the header and body when you're viewing an email message that you've received. (See Reading, Replying, and Forwarding Mail).

After you've added email addresses to your Webmail address book, you should think twice about using the convert utility again. Any email addresses that you had added to it would be lost the next time you converted your Eudora or Pine address book to Webmail.

Figure 1. Add to Addressbook Example Here is a message from musicnotes@npr.org, and the personal address book entry that Squirrel Webmail generates when Ada clicks on the Add to Address Book link in the Options: line between the headers and the body of the message. (Note that this is an HTML-formatted message. Click on View as HTML to view the message -- without its images -- in HTML format. See Viewing HTML Messages below.

Webmail generates the following Addresses book entry. Ada must click the Add address button to add the address to her Webmail personal address book.

You can also add email addresses to your address book by hand:

1. In any Webmail white frame, click the Addresses from the Webmail main menu at the top.
   
   
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the white frame, where the Add to Personal address book fields are. The fields are exactly the same as in figure 1 above.
   
   
3. Fill in the Nickname:, E-mail address:, First name:, and Last name: boxes with the appropriate information and click Add address (As in figure 1 above.)
   
   
4. If you want to define a list of email addresses, do the Nickname:, First name:, and Last name: as usual, but make the E-mail address: the list of email addresses, separated by commas, for example:
   
   document@uic.edu, connect@uic.edu, acccwebstaff@uic.edu
   
   You can't use a list of nicknames, unfortunately.
   
   
5. To leave the Personal Address Book frame, save the address book entry you are working on, if you want to keep it. Then click Compose, click on the INBOX in the Folder list, or whatever else you want to do next.

If you are going to receive other HTML-formatted messages from an email address that you are going to want to see the images in, you can tell Squirrel Webmail to automatically show the images from that email address when you click on View as HTML in them. You have to do two things:

1. Turn the Unsafe Image Rules on: (You only have to do this once.)
   1. Click Options -> Unsafe Image Rules.
   2. Then click in the box beside Trust sources in defined sources. You might want to check Trust sources in the address book also.
   3. Click the Save button.
2. In a message from the person or organization that you want to see the images from, click Add as Safe Sender from the Options: menu just below the headers. It will be there when you're viewing the message as text or as HTML with images.

Now, the next time you open an HTML message from that address, it will still be displayed as plain text. But when you click on View as HTML in it, it will go straight to displaying your message with its images.