Working during the outage

As soon as continuity takes effect, a notification goes to those responsible and a notice appears in the application. Whoever opens the continuity menu entry sees a mailbox with three tabs.

Received

Everything that arrived during the outage, addressed to your own addresses. Aliases count too.

Every message can be read with subject, sender, time and full text. Attachments are present and can be downloaded individually.

Only your own messages are visible. There is no view across other mailboxes, not even for administrators.

Sent

What was sent from the continuity view during the outage.

Every sent message additionally goes as a blind copy to your own address, so that the thread is complete in the mailbox after the outage. That copy however lies in exactly the mailbox that is down and does not help in the meantime. That is why this tab exists: without it nobody sees whom they have already answered, and writes twice when in doubt.

History

The delivered mail of the last few days, that is what arrived before the outage. This helps in finding a message you remember but which sits in the failed mailbox.

Whether and where the history comes from depends on the tenant's setting. It can come from the delivery log or from the archive, if one exists. From the archive it reaches further back.

Searching

Above all three tabs sits a search field. It searches subject, sender and recipient. Several words narrow down together, so it only finds what matches all of them. Umlauts do not matter, "Mueller" finds "Müller" and the other way round.

During an outage, what would otherwise arrive over days piles up within a few hours. The search is then no longer a convenience.

Replying, forwarding, writing

Replying works straight from the message being read. The address the original message went to is used as the sender, not the sign-in address. Subject and reference are set, so the thread stays coherent for the recipient.

Forwarding attaches the original message as a file, including all attachments. The recipient thereby gets the original and not a transcript.

Writing a new message is the most common case during an outage, usually the same message to several people: the mail system is down at the moment, please answer to this address. The recipient field suggests addresses as soon as something is typed. Suggested are the colleagues from the directory as well as everyone with whom mail has already been exchanged. Any address can be typed, the suggestions are an offer and not a restriction.

Sending runs through the normal Conbool path. Disclaimer, signature, content inspection and all other rules of the tenant apply unchanged.

What the continuity view cannot do

• No calendar, no contacts, no tasks.
• No access to the message holding in the failed mailbox, apart from the history.
• When writing and replying, no files can be attached. The reason is traceability: what goes out here is created in the continuity view and exists only there. Forwarded messages keep their attachments.
• A new message goes to one recipient. For several it has to be written several times.
• The message being read cannot be saved as a file as a whole. Individual attachments can.
• There are no folders, flags and rules. The view is built for hours, not for weeks.