Divmod Mail Help

Divmod Mail (henceforth Mail) is part of the Divmod service. The goal of Mail is allow you to deal with your email as efficiently as possible. When viewing a message you can take one of the following actions:

• Reply
• Forward
• Archive
• Defer
• Delete
• Mark Spam

Reply & Forward

These should be familiar actions to email users.

Archive

Mail encourages you to keep empty your inbox by acting on messages and moving them out of your Inbox. When you archive a message it is moved from your inbox into your archive where it is still available to be searched and read but will not clutter you inbox. Most messages will eventually end up in your archive.

Defer

Sometimes you don't have time to deal with an important messages right away. In these cases Mail allows you to defer the message. When deferred a message is removed from your inbox and will reappear in your inbox at a later point in time. There is a duration selector next to the defer button that allows you to specify the length of time that the message will be absent from your inbox before reappearing. Messages that have been deferred can be viewed in the deferred view. Once a message reappears it will have a boomerang icon on it to remind you that this was a message that you deferred.

Delete

Deleting a message moves it out of your inbox into the trash. It will not show up in search. Once you empty the trash the message will be lost forever.

Mark Spam

Mail has an integrated spam filter and this option allows you to tell the system that a particular message is unsolicited mail. Clicking this button will move the message from you inbox into the spam view.

Mail Modes

Mail can be used in any combination of 3 modes:

• TouchOnce?
• Classic
• Enhanced

You can switch modes using the mode selector, show here with TouchOnce? mode selected:

The three symbols, left to right, represent Enhaced, Classic and TouchOnce?.

TouchOnce? Mode

TouchOnce? mode was inspired by the story of a high ranking executive at an international conglomerate who dealt with his huge volume of paper mail with the simple rule of touching each piece of mail once. Similar in method to the Getting Things Done system he'd either respond to it right away, file it in his archive, put in the trash and in rare occasions he'd defer the next step putting the mail in a desk drawer for later action.

In TouchOnce? mode you are presented with a view that simply shows you the next message for you to deal with starting with the oldest message first. You have to deal with the current message before you are presented with the next. Once you act on a message by, say, archiving it the next message is presented.

Classic Mode

Classic mode presents you with a list of messages in you inbox as well as the message detail view. In this mode you can read and act on messages in any order.

Enhanced Mode

This mode allows you to select which list of messages to view in the message list by selecting various tags.