Table of Contents
IRIS uses Mozilla for its email application. Mozilla is cross-platform, robust, and full featured.
For additional help using the Mail Application than what is provided below, click Help->Mozilla Help Contents in the top menu bar of IRIS.
You should have an email account and know which server it is on.
Identify your email account and password.
Identify the incoming and outgoing mail servers.
To set up IRIS's Mail Application, choose "Mail" from the Application selection pane on the left, or from the top menu bar, select Go->IRIS Applications->Mail
For first time setup of the Mail Application on IRIS
The "New Account Setup" window will automatically pop up. Choose "Email account" and click "Next".
The "Identity" window will pop up. Enter your name and email address and click "Next".
The "Server Information" window will appear. Select either "POP" or "IMAP" incoming server type you are using then type in the server name. Enter your outgoing server name and click "Next".
The "User Name" window will appear. Enter the incoming and outgoing user names given to you by your provider (typically these 2 names are the same), click "Next".
Fill in the "Account Name" window with the name you would like to refer to this email account, click "Next".
To edit an existing account, remove an account, or create a new account
From the top menu bar, select Edit->Mail& Newsgroups Account Settings.
This will bring up the "Mail & Newsgroups Account Settings" window.
To add a new account, select "Add Account...". You will be prompted to follow the same process as for the first time setup of the Mail Application.
To edit an account, select the account setting you wish to modify in the left pane, then modify the setting in the right pane. Click "OK" when finished.
To remove an account, select the account name in the left pane, then click "Remove Account".
Now that your account has been set up, you will see the account name in IRIS in the left panel of the Mail Application.
Click on the Inbox and you will be prompted for your password.
Now you are now ready to use your email as you would normally.
First you must set up your email account (see section "Starting the Email Application in IRIS").
After setting up the account and entering the password, you can use the Mail Application as you would use your email normally.
Note that unread messages and new messages are harvested automatically, adding new contacts to your "People" list, and making email queryable through the Query Toolbar.
If you ever want to get back to the initial Mozilla Mail & Newsgroups start page that is displayed when you first start the Mail Application, click Go->Mail Start Page in the top menu bar of IRIS.
Harvesting is a process where application data (in this case, an email message) is stored in IRIS's knowledge base and made available to IRIS plugins for additional processing.
When an email message is harvested, several things happen:
The email is stored in IRIS's knowledge base, and will now be available during structured query results.
Any new people in the "To:" or "CC:" fields of the email will be added to the knowledge base as a new Person in your "People" data application. When a new person is created by the email harvester, IRIS tries to fill in information about that person automatically via the DEX web service. See the section Creating People Data Items for more information.
Other IRIS plugins can inspect the new email and perform other types of inference on it. Forthcoming plugins include the ability to automatically analyze your email and propose new Project data items, the ability to prioritize urgency of email, the ability to determine the type of message it is (e.g. a request for a meeting) and to initiate action related to the message type.
New email is automatically harvested, as is email that is selected (clicked on) by the user. However, pre-existing email messages in your inbox or other IMAP folders are not automatically harvested. If you would like to harvest pre-existing email, please read the following instructions.
To harvest previously read email messages
Select "IRIS Synchronize" in the top menu bar of the Mail Application or from the top menu bar of IRIS, go to file->Synchronize with IRIS. The window shown below will appear.
If you do not wish to synchronize with IRIS at this point, click "Cancel", and a small window, shown below, will pop up to remind you how to synchronize with IRIS later.
Otherwise, select the folders to be included in the synchronization - either by selecting the folders individually in the boxes on the left or by clicking the "Select All" button on the bottom. After making the options selection, click on "Synchronize Now" to start.
During this harvesting process, a horizontal panel will appear at the bottom of the Mail Application panel showing the downloading progress. There are buttons in the lower right corner which show, pause, resume and stop harvesting.
