SETTING UP FUNCTIONAL MAILBOXES ON THE IPAD

JEFFERY LAY

Last updated: Friday, 16 November 2012

M C T - I T - D E VIT Development in Maths, Computing and Technology

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Functional mailboxesWhat and why?

A functional mailbox - one which isn’t tied to an individual, but to a role that multiple individuals can fulfil - can be used on the iPad, but not as part of your normal mailbox: They have to be set up as a separate account. An example use for this is the MCS-A0-Print-Request mailbox, where MCT staff (it used to be MCS, hence the address) send posters for printing on a special large-scale printer. I normally manage this printer, because it’s wasteful and expensive if a print job goes wrong, so jobs need to be thoroughly checked before processing. However, if I’m unavailable, people can’t wait for their posters, so someone else needs to be able to monitor the associated mailbox too. The functional mailbox allows several members of the MCT IT team to keep an eye on it at once.

How?

These special mailboxes are created by OU IT upon request, and if you think you need one, the first thing to do is talk to your IT Support staff.

If you have a functional mailbox you want to access on your iPad, here’s how to connect to it. The functional mailbox must already be in existence. You don’t have to have your Exchange account set up on the iPad first

1. On your iPad, open the Settings app. Its icon looks like this:

2. You’ll see a list of setting options. Select the Mail, Contacts, Calendars category on the left, which looks like left image below. You can see here that I already have my iCloud and OU accounts set up. Tap the Add Account… button, and you’ll see the list of different accounts, shown on the right below. Tap Other.

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3. You’ll be offered the option to add different kinds of account, and you should select Add Mail Account (below left). Then you’ll be taken through a guided setup, as with other accounts, but you need to use a slightly different format for the details. When you’re asked to enter the account details, enter as follows:

Name: This is the human-readable name you want the mail to come from. It’s the equivalent of the bit which says that emails from my OU Exchange account should come from someone called “Jeffery Lay” even though my account name is jal58 and the email address is J.A.Lay@open.ac.uk . This might be something like “Computing Head of Department”.Email: The actual email address. Note that in some cases, the name or function of the account will be too long to be the same as the address… for example, the functional mailbox called “MCT-Associate-Dean-Curriculum” has to be shortened to “MCT-Associate-Dean-C”. You’ll probably already know if this is the case for your mail address.Password: This should be your OUCU password. You haven’t entered your OUCU yet, but you will in a later step.Description: This is a name by which you will recognise the account. It can be anything you like, but it should be unique to this account. It’s often convenient to use the same thing you entered in the Name field.

Then tap the blue Next button at the top right.

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4. At this point, the iPad will attempt to set up the account, but it’ll realise that this isn’t completely straightforward, and it will ask for more details. There’s a lot to fill in, but don’t worry: The Name, Email, Description and Password fields will already be completed, and the rest follow a simple pattern which you can follow, detailed below.

Incoming Host Name: This will be either ouca.open.ac.uk or legacy.open.ac.uk - whichever server your mail account is on. For almost everyone this will be legacy, as this is the mail server most accounts are on. A few people (including me, in the example above) are using ouca, but they’re the exception, and they will probably already know about it.Incoming User Name: This is the special bit that enables the functional mailbox. Replace my OUCU (jal58) with your own, and the functional mailbox name (mcs-a0-print-request) with the full name of your own functional mailbox, so you enter something like open-university\YourOUCU\FunctionalMailboxName. You can get these details from whoever set up the mailbox for you.Outgoing host name: ouca.open.ac.uk. Even if you use legacy for incoming mail, outgoing mail always uses ouca.Outgoing User Name: Your OUCU.Outgoing Password: Your OUCU’s password.

Once you have entered all this, tap the blue Next button at the top right, and the iPad will confirm the details with the server. If everything’s OK, you’ll see ticks appear, as shown above right. If there are any problems, the iPad will inform you, and you’ll have to correct the errors and try again. The iPad will then ask you which services you want. You’ll only want Mail - Notes can stay switched off unless you already know otherwise.

Finally, tap the blue Save button at the top right to store the account settings and activate it.

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This account is now set up on your iPad, and you’ll receive email on it normally. It will show up in the accounts list in the Settings app, as shown below left.

When you launch the Mail app (the icon of which is on the front page of this document) you’ll be able to tap the mailbox button at the top let of the Mail application (it will show the name of the current mailbox) and select from the list of available mailboxes. The Inboxes list shows all inboxes of all accounts, and a single unified “All Inboxes” section. The accounts list below that will show all other folders in all accounts - just tap on the appropriate section to open it.

If you find you need further information or assistance with your iPad (or an iPhone, or iPod touch, or even a Mac), consider joining the OU’s Mac Users’ Mailing list, which despite its name covers all Apple devices. There, you can ask other users questions about your devices, ways of getting more out of them, applications to solve problems, how to share data among multiple devices, and so on… any questions about iOS and Mac OS usage; hardware, software and services.

You can find and join this mail lists by going to http://mail-lists.open.ac.uk in your browser, signing in, and looking in the “Other lists” section for “Mac-Users-List”. You can then click the “Subscribe” button to be able to send and receive messages to and from that list. You can unsubscribe at any time in the same way (looking for the list in the “Subscribed” section this time).

The list is fairly informal and low-traffic most of the time, but you might find it useful to create a Mailbox Rule which will automatically move messages from that list into a separate folder. You can’t do this directly from the iPad settings, unfortunately, but you can do it in Outlook or in Apple Mail on your desktop computer. You can also create them in the Outlook Web Access interface on a web browser (and this does work on the iPad) by going to http://www.open.ac.uk/owa and signing in, then selecting “Create an Inbox Rule…” from the “Options” menu.

The fastest way of setting up a new iPad is to point its web browser at the Configuration Utility that we in MCT have created, which is at http://MCT-iOS.open.ac.uk . This sets up the iPad for all basic OU network services in a single easy and reversible step, although you might need additional applications for extra functions such as remote desktop sharing, editing Office documents, accessing your Dropbox or Windows-based OU file servers, and so on.

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