Before you can start sending email in ACT! you'll need to set up your email preferences. Fortunately ACT! makes the task extremely easy by providing you with an 8 step E-Mail Setup Wizard. Best of all, each step includes recommended options to make progressing your way through the wizard a snap.
You'll need to make sure that Outlook is fully functional prior to installing ACT!. If Outlook is not working properly, or hasn't yet been activated, you'll need to correct the problem and then uninstall and reinstall ACT!.
- Click the Tools menu, and then choose Preferences. The Preferences dialog box opens.
- Select the E-mail & Outlook Sync tab and then click the E-mail System Setup button to start the E-mail Setup Wizard.
- Click Next at the Welcome screen.
- Select Microsoft Outlook and then click Next. The following figure shows you the second screen of the wizard:
- The E-mail - Outlook Address Books dialog box appears. Click Add to fill in your password credentials and then click OK to return to the E-mail-Outlook Address Books dialog box. You can see what this looks like in the following image:
- Click Next to continue to the fourth screen of the E-mail Setup Wizard.
- Choose Microsoft Outlook (recommended) from the drop-down list as your email editor and then click Next to continue. The following screenshot shows you the fourth step of the E-mail Setup Wizard:
- Select the E-mail subject and message (recommended) option from the drop-down list and then click Next to continue. The following image shows you what the fifth step of the E-mail Setup Wizard looks like:
- This page of the wizard allows you to select how ACT! should handle incoming messages. Choose the E-mail subject and message (recommended) option from the first drop-down list and then "From" contact only (recommended) from the second. The following image shows you an example of the sixth step of the E-mail Setup Wizard:
- Click Next to continue to the seventh step of the wizard to select the activity invitation options:
- Select the application that displays the activity alarm: select ACT!, Outlook, or ACT! and Outlook to indicate which program will display an alarm when synchronizing your ACT! activities with Outlook calendar items.
- You can create an ACT! activity when you accept a meeting invitation in Outlook: select whether or not you want the ACT! activity to automatically open when you receive iCalendar invitations.
- Create contacts if they are not found: select this option if you want ACT! to create a new contact record when it cannot match an incoming invitation to an existing contact record.
- The following image shows you the E-mail—Activity Invitation dialog window:
- Click Next to proceed to finishing the E-mail Setup and then click Finish to close the wizard.
Once you integrate Microsoft Outlook to ACT! and choose it as your email editor the two will begin to work seamlessly together. A new Outlook email message will automatically open when you send an email message to one of your ACT! contacts. You'll also notice that several ACT! icons now appear in Outlook.
You'll find that this process will work much faster if Outlook is already open and ready to go prior to sending ACT! email. Once the new Outlook message opens you'll be able to work with it exactly as you do for any other outgoing Outlook email message.
For those of you who are working with multiple ACT! databases, the wizard allows you to add up to three ACT! databases as address books to Outlook so that you can move back and forth between your databases and still continue to send email.
Once you choose the Microsoft Outlook option you will not be allowed to add any other email programs to the ACT! E-mail client such as Outlook Express or Lotus Notes. If you would like to set up more than one email client in ACT!, you're better off choosing ACT! as your email client.
In step 8 you are asked to select the default history option for the email messages that you send. Basically, you can select which part of the message you want to record to history, if at all. Or, you can choose to attach a copy of the message to history. To make email history private so other ACT! users cannot see it, select Make history private.
Your options include the following:
- None: no history of the message will be recorded.
- E-mail Subject Only: records only the subject line of the message.
- E-mail Subject and Message (Recommended): records both the subject line and the contents of the outgoing email message.
- E-mail Subject, Message and all Attachments: creates a file of the outgoing email. This is the only option that will retain the attachments sent with an email. When you compose messages, you can change these settings on an individual basis. For example, you might not want to include the body of the email on messages you send that are based on a template, or you might decide that you don't need to record any history at all for personal email messages.
Many ACT! users love the idea of creating an attachment file for all their outgoing messages. However, this is not a good option to select as the default option. If you're typical of most ACT! users, over a period of time you will have created thousands of files and placed unnecessary pressure on your computer's resources.