| Bulk Operations: Applying Commands to a Group of Messages | ||
|---|---|---|
 | Chapter 6. Message List Commands |  |
| Bulk Operations: Applying Commands to a Group of Messages | ||
|---|---|---|
| | Chapter 6. Message List Commands | |
|
Entire document Available as PDF |
GatorLink WebMail provides the ability to manage large numbers of messages very efficiently, via "bulk operations." You can select a group of messages and perform an operation on all of them at once. You may delete messages in bulk, move them to a different folder, or copy them to a folder.
While you can "manually" select a set of messages (by clicking the individual 'check-boxes' next to each message), the real power of bulk operations comes from a combination of 3 controls:
The "show all" control
The Filter Control
The "Check All" control
Let's examine the steps needed to perform an operation on a group of messages.
Use the "show all" control so that all the messages in the current folder are displayed on a single page.
Using the Filter control, you can change your view of the list so that it includes only the subset of messages which meet some criteria that you specify. See the "Filtering the List" section for detailed information on how filters work.
Next, you use the "Check All" control to select all of the messages which appear on the page. Remember that this set of messages contains only the messages selected by the Filter you specified in the previous step.
The "Check All" control appears in 2 different forms, in 2 different places on the "list of messages" page.
At the top of the list of messages, immediately to the left of the "Flags" header is a simple check-box.
Clicking this box will cause the individual check-boxes for every message on the page to be checked, thus selecting all of the messages. Clicking the box again will "un-check" all of the individual-message check-boxes.
At the bottom of the list of messages are a pair of controls: "Check All / Clear All".
These work exactly the way their names suggest.
The Check All / Clear All controls apply to all messages displayed in the current window only. So if you have not first selected "show all" then you are probably not selecting all the relevant messages; only the ones on this page.
Once you have all the messages checked, you can UN-check individual messages if you wish, by clicking on their check-boxes. You might wish to do this before applying a bulk operation if your filter/selection had inadvertently selected a few messages which you didn't want to delete/move/copy.
Finally, you issue the command you want to apply to all the selected messages. You can either:
Click the "Delete Checked" button just above the top of the list of messages. This is discussed in more detail in a following section.
Select a Folder and click the "Move" button to move all the selected messages to that folder. This is discussed in more detail in a following section.
Select a Folder and click the "Copy" button to create an additional copy of all the selected messages in that folder. This is discussed in more detail in a following section.
The "Delete Checked" button is located within the light-blue area of the GatorLink WebMail message-list page, directly below the "Filter" controls. It allows you to delete a group of messages in a single operation.
To the left of each message is a little "check-box" you can use to select one or more messages in preparation for executing a command on them as a group.
You can scan through a message-list and manually check obvious "Junk," or you can use the Filters available to display only a group of messages you know you don't want to save, and then use the "check-all" control to check them all at once.
Once you have a group of messages checked, you can use the "Delete Checked" button to move the entire group to the Trash.
As with the "Delete Checked" button (discussed above), the "Move" and "Copy" buttons work in conjunction with the individual message check-boxes to allow you to move or copy groups of messages to another folder.
They are also tied to the "Select a Folder" drop-down menu which appears immediately to the left of the buttons. Check the boxes next to the messages you wish to move or copy; you may either do this "manually" by clicking the individual check-boxes, or by using Filters in conjunction with the "check-all" control.
Once you have the group of messages checked, select the target folder (where you want the messages moved or copied to) from the "Select a Folder" drop-down.
Finally, click either the Move or the Copy button, according to whether you want the messages moved to the selected target folder, or copied. "Moving" messages places the message in the new/target folder and deletes it from the current folder. "Copying" creates a copy of the message in the new/target folder, but leaves a copy in the current folder. You may have multiple copies of the same message in different folders, if you wish.
In the Folder-Selection/Management & Storage Management Menu (gray box on the left-hand side of the page) are two buttons: "Empty Current Folder" and "Empty Trash".
"Empty Trash" works just the way you might expect. Because you have a separate space-allotment for Trash, you should empty your trash folder periodically. This is covered in detail in the "Trash Quota" section of the "Edit Folders Page" part of this document.
The "Empty Current Folder" feature works this way: when you click the "Empty Current Folder" button, you are taken to a query screen.
Here, you must confirm your action or cancel it. There is nothing automatic about this part. You also have the opportunity to choose from the drop-down menu whether the mail should go into your trash folder or just be deleted (note that the default destination is "Trash"). There is no way to do this accidentally.
| |  | |
| Filtering The List |  | Part IV. The View Message Page |