Sending plain text messages plus attached documents per email to a BSCW folder is an alternative to the conventional BSCW upload via BSCW’s Web-based interface by invoking  File    New    Document .

Please note that the email 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 email upload.

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

• Select   Access    Upload per Email  in the action menu of the folder that you want to open for email upload. By default, this action is only available for managers of a folder.
• The form ‘Upload per Email’ lets you specify who is permitted to send email to the folder:
  • only members of the respective folder;
  • only registered users of your BSCW server — even if they are not members of the respective folder;
  • everybody, i.e. the folder is open to receive email from the general public.
  Furthermore you may have a message sent to the members of the folder containing the email address of the folder, normally of the form bscw+folderId@your-bscw-server or bscw-folderId@your-bscw-server, depending on the email system used for receiving the messages. We recommend that you wait for this message to arrive before uploading is started.

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

• Compose an email 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 email to the folder.

When the email message has been successfully received by the folder, there will be a new object of type email message in the folder with the subject of the message as its name. If the message had no subject, the object will be named ‘Message from user-name’. The object is a document conforming to Internet standard RFC822 containing the text of the email message as well as its attachments (MIME type message/rfc822).

• Click on the email object name to read the text of the message (and eventual plain text or HTML attachments).
• Select   Extract  in the action menu of the message in order to view the attachments of the message. This works exactly as with archives (see 9.1): The attachments are put into your clipboard, from where you may paste them to some location within your workspaces.

BSCW identifies the sender of an email message by its address. In case of an unknown email address or missing access rights, the message will be returned with a corresponding note. You should add further email addresses to your BSCW profile if you want to upload email messages from several email accounts (see 4.1.1).

You may disable email upload for a folder at any time:

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

Attention:

Think twice before you allow email upload for non-members of a workspace. Allowing all registered users to upload via email may grant this right to thousands of users, most of which you probably do not know. Granting the right to upload via email to the general public should be handled with extreme caution, since it opens a folder to junk mail and spamming.