Upload per e-mail

Sending plain text messages plus attached documents per e-mail to a BSCW folder is an alternative to the conventional BSCW upload via drag & drop or by invoking  File    New    Document .

Please note that the e-mail upload feature has to be explicitly enabled and configured by your BSCW server administrator. For security reasons, the standard BSCW installation routines do not enable e-mail upload.

In order to be able to upload text messages and documents to a folder per e-mail, you first have to open the folder for this kind of upload:

•      Select   Access    Upload per E-Mail  in the action menu of the folder that you want to open for e-mail upload. By default, this action is only available for managers of a folder.

•      The form ‘Upload per E-Mail’ lets you specify who is permitted to send e-mail to the folder:

o  only members of the respective folder;

o  only registered users of your BSCW server – even if they are not members of the respective folder;

o  everybody, i.e. the folder is open to receive e-mail from the general public.

You may also determine whether attachments are to be automatically extracted from e-mails sent to the folder. In this case, the attachments are separately stored in a subfolder and you don’t need to extract the attachments manually using the action   Extract  as described below.

Furthermore, you may have a message sent to the members of the folder containing the e-mail address of the folder, normally of the form bscw+folderId@your-bscw-server or bscw-folderId@your-bscw-server, depending on the e-mail system used for receiving the messages. We recommend that you wait for this message to arrive before uploading is started.

Folders open for e-mail upload are indicated by the  icon.

To upload an e-mail message plus attachments to the folder opened for e-mail upload, you proceed as follows:

•      Compose an e-mail message, attach documents you want to upload and send the message to the address of the folder. This action may of course also be carried out by all persons that have permission to send e-mail to the folder.

•      When the e-mail message has been successfully received in the folder, there will be a new object of type e-mail message with the subject of the message as its name. If you have activated the option for automatic extraction, the new object will be a subfolder with the same name, which contains the message itself and all its attachment as documents. If the message had no subject, the object will be named ‘Message from user-name’.

•      In the former case, the new object is a document conforming to Internet standard RFC822 containing the text of the e-mail message as well as its attachments (MIME type message/rfc822).

•      Click on the e-mail object to read the message itself and eventual attachments using a local e-mail program, or

•      select   Extract  in the action menu of the message in order to unpack the attachments of the message. This works exactly as with archives. The message itself and its attachments are put into a folder, which is named after the subject of the message. You have several options concerning the place where this folder is to be stored: your clipboard, from where you may paste it to suitable locations within your workspaces, or the current folder.

•      In the latter case, the new subfolder named after the subject of the message contains the message itself and all its attachments. The message document is named again after the subject of the message, the attachments bear the names of the original files. Additionally, message and attachment names are numbered.

BSCW identifies the sender of an e-mail message by its address. In case of an unknown e-mail address or missing access rights, the message will be returned with a corresponding note. You should add further e-mail addresses to your BSCW profile if you want to upload e-mail messages from several e-mail accounts (see 2.1.4 Registering an additional e-mail address).

You may disable e-mail upload for a folder at any time:

•      Select   Access    Upload per E-Mail  in the action menu of a folder that you have opened to e-mail upload, activate the option ‘disabled’ in the ‘Upload per E-Mail’ form and confirm with [OK].