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Managing Folders on the Mail Server with Netscape 4

  Arnaud Taddei IT/DIS (for the Mail Support team)

How to create a simple folder on the Mail Server

When you want to create a folder on the Mail Server, the recommended way is to

• open the Message Center (Communicator/Message Center),
• make sure that the root of the Mail Server data, "userid.mailbox.cern.ch" is selected,
• select File/New Folder,
• enter the folder name you want and validate your choice.
  (We recommend that you choose names using the characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9 '-' and '.'. Other characters are supported but not recommended.)

Then you will have a new folder created in which you can file messages.

Difference between folders and parent folders on the Mail Server

On the Mail Server what you call a folder can be:

a message folder: it contains only messages.

a parent folder: it contains only subfolders.

A folder can contain either messages or folders but not both! A message folder corresponds to a file on your file system while a parent folder corresponds to a directory.

If you want to create a parent folder you have to append the symbol '/' at the end of its name, as you will see in the example in the next section.

Managing a hierarchy of folders on the Mail Server

Assume that you want to create a hierarchy of folders on the Mail Server because you want to categorize a lot of messages in many folders and having all folders in a flat way on the server would be impractical. So let's assume you want to create a structure like the following:

In this case, Project, Friends, Ski and Rugby will be "message folders", which can contain messages, and they translate into files on the Mail Server. On the contrary, Private and Hobbies are called "parent folders" and they translate into directories on the Mail Server. This means that they cannot contain any message but they can contain folders, which will contain messages.

Creating the hierarchy

To create this structure, as for the case of the simple folder, you can simply open the Message Center, and go to File/New Folder . Now assume you want to create the parent folder Private , what you have to type is:

The symbol '/' is important because it tells Netscape to create a parent folder (i.e.: a directory) on the mail server. You can then create a new folder:

which will contain messages. Alternatively you could enter:

which will create at the same time the parent folder Hobbies and the folder Ski

Deleting a folder

Now assume you have not saved any mail messages into the Hobbies category and you decide to delete the entire Hobbies subdirectory. Go to the Message Center, select the folder you want to delete and enter the Delete key. This will prompt you if you really want to do it and will delete everything.

Modifying a hierarchy

Now assume you want to create subfolders below Friends because you want to breakdown your messages according to your friends, say, Cathy or Paul Here Friends exists as a folder which means it cannot contain subfolders. So what you need to do is to create:

Then you just need to move all your messages from Private/Friends to Private/Friends2/Other by going to Edit/Select/All then File . You then need to delete Private/Friends which is empty and now you can rename Private/Friends2 into Private/Friends by going to File/New Folder. You then end up with the following hierarchy: