AlphaMail is our recommended web email for the University of Oregon. Its rich feature set and ease of use have made it a popular choice. Not only is AlphaMail 100% Unicode compliant and capable of handling all your foreign correspondence needs, it offers convenient searching and customizing options. If you're interested in trying AlphaMail, here are a few tips to get you started.

Getting Started

Logging in. Go to http://email.uoregon.edu/ and select the link AlphaMail. You’ll be presented with a login page that asks for your uoregon.edu username and password.

Setting Preferences. After you’ve successfully logged in to AlphaMail for the first time, you’ll see a request to set your initial preferences (your addressing preference, how you wish to handle sent mail and deleted mail, and the mail folders you wish to have displayed). You can change any of these choices later by simply opening the Settings menu at the top of the page and selecting new preferences:

The folders you choose to display under "Subscribed Folders" will appear in the "Other Folders" list in the left margin of your Inbox.

After you've established your initial preferences, subsequent Alpha Mail logins will take you directly to a list of messages in your Inbox (see below). By using the Settings menu, you may choose the number of messages to display per page.

AlphaMail Inbox

At the top of the AlphaMail page is a row of frequently used menu items, such as Compose, Settings, Address Book, and Logout, and  in the left margin of the page, you’ll see the list of mail folders you’ve chosen to display:

Color coding and other visual aids. Unread messages are shown in boldface.

If you opt not to store deleted messages in the Trash folder, they are displayed with a line through them before they are purged.

If you flag a message, it's displayed in red for quick reference. (To flag a message, select it by clicking the checkbox, open the More Actions menu--which is both directly above and below the mailbox index, as shown in the example below--and choose Flag.)

The green letter R next to a message indicates you've replied to it.

A paperclip symbol indicates that the message contains an attachment.

Managing Messages

1. Selecting messages for more actions. If you want to move messages to another folder, report them as spam, or flag them in red, click in the box to their left, then open the More Actions… menu to select an action:

2. Optional Trash Can. If you prefer to delete and purge your messages directly from the mailbox index page instead of storing deleted messages in the Trash Can, you can set that option under
Settings ->Folders. Under Utility Folders->Trash Folder, simply choose “None (delete messages on purge).” Thereafter, the messages you choose to delete will be displayed with a line through them in the mailbox index. To delete them permanently, hit the Purge Deleted button at the top/bottom of the mailbox index page.

3. Message Filtering. Type keywords in the Filter box in the upper right corner of your mailbox index to display only those messages that match. Filtering instructions and examples appear when you hover over the Filter box with your mouse. Our example shows a filter request to display all messages from "Joe":

Other Useful Features

Alpha Mail has additional user-friendly features for managing your email, such as:

1. Address Book Importing. You can easily import your address book from UO "Green" WebMail and many other email clients by going to Address Book-> Import and following the instructions.

2. Quick View of Disk Quota Usage. There's no need to get caught short on disk space! You can easily monitor your disk space usage by clicking the Space Usage link at the top of your Alpha Mail page. Disk use information is updated every five minutes.

3. Large file sharing. If your file is too big to email, use Alpha Mail file sharing. Click the "Share a Large File" link in the top left margin and fill out the interactive form. File sharing allows you to make a large file available on the web. It also password-protects the file so you can control who has access.

4. Customize your signature with random tag lines. You may add as many sub-signatures to your account as you want. Open Settings->Signatures->Sub-Signatures, type the desired text in the Sub-Signatures box, and "Compose" will automatically randomly select one and place it under your base signature whenever you write a new message.