Tips and tricks about Kolab Now usage

E-mail

John is opening Kolab Now Webmail on his laptop:

1. To reply to an incoming email, John opens it and clicks Reply in the top toolbar. In case several people are part of the communication, he can as well select Reply All.
2. He checks his e-mail address- in the From: field. To choose a different alias he can click on his e-mail address to do so.
3. John types the recipients name or e-mail address- in the To: field and selects the suggestions (based on his contacts in his address book). John can enter multiple recipients here, separated by a ,
4. John clicks Cc: or Bcc: to send a copy of the e-mail to others
5. John fills out the Subject line and starts to compose his message
6. John has his email signature enabled, and can see it at the bottom
7. John clicks Send

Advanced settings for composing/displaying e-mails and the mailbox view can be set under: Settings -> Preferences –> Composing Messages or Displaying Messages

John has many more options when composing e-mails:

Attachments: While he is composing an e-mail he can add an attachment to his e-mail. Note: Files that are not bigger than 60MB can be attached.

Encryption of the message (PGP): John can change the main options of encryption of e-mails under Preferences -> Settings -> Encryption

Attachment of Public key: If John wants to setup PGP encryption he is following this guide and can manage his public keys under Settings -> Preferences -> PGP keys

Prepared responses: John is using his saved responses on a regular basis what is saving time & effort. Under Settings -> Preferences -> Responses John can manage his personal boilerplates, add and delete them to have them ready as prepared response when needed. While composing an e-mail he can choose and select a response by clicking the icon Responses.

Identities & e-mail signatures: John has several identities and signatures that he is using for different purposes with different aliases. When composing an e-mail he can easily switch between his sales@ identity and his personal one with separate signatures. John can find this settings under Preferences -> Settings -> Identities. 

Tip: If you want to add a logo to your signature you need to switch to HTML (the tiny icon in the top left corner of the signature frame).

E-mail import: John needs to import a bundle of mails from one place to the other. He can chose either MIME or Mbox data to add e-mail messages to a selected folder.

Organizing Johns inbox

User interface: John sets his language and timezone as well as the Interface skin in Settings -> Preferences -> User Interface. Currently Kolab Now offers the Kolab Now version of the responsive skin as well as the Larry skin. Note: Kolab Now is offering LTR as well as RTL language support. In total John could choose from 80 plus languages.

Switching to Dark Mode: If John wants to work late at night he simply clicks the small moon on the left sidebar to do so.

Tags: Similar to folders, John is using Tags to separate and organize his e-mails. Tags are showing up as a colored reference in the subject line of the referenced e-mails. The nice thing: Tags can be reused across the Kolab components – E-mail, Calendar, Notes, Files and Tasks. Here is a guide how to manage tags and add them to emails.

Out of office: John is going on vacation and can be sure that Kolab Now’s integrated vacation auto-responder will let people know when and for how long he will be out of the office. When enabling the auto-responder he can enter a message, set the dates and even redirect the mail to a colleague. Here is an explanation how it is done.

Filters: Kolab Now is offering a mail filtering feature. That makes it possible for John to apply a series of actions to specifically selected incoming e-mails, so that incoming mail meeting a criteria can be automatically processed by the server and handled/organized according to the defined actions. For example the server can move the message to a specified folder, redirect it to another account, send a reply, discard, delete, etc for as long as the defined criteria is fulfilled.

Filtering is based on the Sieve language, which means that under the hood all filters are stored in one or more Sieve scripts on the server. The filters can be managed through the Kolab Now webclient and allows John to define rules and actions in an easy way without the need to know the language. Here are some useful links on this topic:

Get spam out of your inbox

How do I import a Sieve Filter script

Sieve Mail Filters

1. John navigates to: Settings -> Preferences -> Folders
2. John creates a new folder by pressing the small +, gives it a name and chooses the parent folder.
3. John saves the new “shared sales” folder and can give access to users
4. According users can now subscribe to the folder and use it

Shortcut Menu: John likes the Shortcut Menu that Kolab Now is offering. Almost for any action there is a shortcut menu available, one just needs to look out for 3 dots or small arrow symbols.

Using the calendar

Calendar sharing: The calendar gives John access to his personal and shared calendars and scheduling functions. In order to better distinguish events between various calendars in the calendar view, John uses different colors for different calendars that than colorize the events on the screen (by editing the calendar in calendar > shortcut menu next to calendars > Edit/Share). Events are added to the calendar by one click, allowing John to set the date, invite participants and add recurrences. Notifications for upcoming events make sure to not miss out on something.

This Blog post gives a small overview of the strengths of the Kolab Now calendar.

Handling event invitations: John receives an event invitation from his colleague and can now decide if he wants to accept or decline this invitation. By clicking the according button an automated response will be send to the event organizer so her/she can update the status of the participant in the calendar. John accepts the event and it is being copied to his personal calendar.

Shared calendar folders: Sharing calendars is a powerful feature in Kolab. How do I share a calendar with another Kolab Now user?

Contacts & Address book

Collected Recipients: John is using collected addresses for collected recipients (storing outgoing mails). He can edit this under Settings ->Preferences-> Contacts

Trusted Senders: This part is a bit tricky – so a small explanation regarding the trusted sender topic. John cannot add contacts to this special address book. This source is used when Preferences > Displaying Messages > Allow remote resources (images, styles) is set to “from trusted senders“. When John opens a mail message from an untrusted sender and it contains remote resources John will see a warning box with buttons that allow to add the sender to this address book.

Importing contacts: John can upload contacts from an existing address book. Kolab Now currently supports importing addresses from the vCard or CSV (comma-separated) data format.

Notes

1. John navigates to Notes
2. John clicks the three dot shortcut menu
3. John choses Edit/Share Notebook
4. John gives access rights to selected users

Sending Notes: John likes to send his minutes he took in his Notes feature to colleagues under Notes > Select Note > Send

Tasks & assignments

Files

Collaborative editing: John needs to be able to edit and share documents with his colleagues. Kolab Now is offering collaborative editing based on Collabora Online (Libre Office). It lets John create documents and presentations and his colleagues can edit those documents in an easy manner (he simply shares the documents with colleagues in the same domain).

Kolab Meet

Number of participants:The number of participants in an event depends on many factors, but letting participants join as Silent audience members (see the kb article), makes it possible to host more participants in the room during an event. John had events with 50+ Silent audience members with no problem. For events with a number of active (non silent) participants above 15, things started to get a bit wild. In this knowledge base article John finds out more about this topic.

Tipp: Kolab Meet is still in beta. This means, that support may not be able to assist if running into troubles with it. We are however eager to hear your feedback on the tool, as we use that to drive the direction of the final work and releases.

Payment & Billing

Everything related to payments at Kolab John will find here. Kolab Now changed its payment system over the last years and one can manage one time or automatic payments and payment methods easily.