This guide is for users who are using Outlook without Exchange as their mail server. If your Outlook account is connected to an Exchange server, you need to follow the instructions for Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010, depending on the version your organisation is using.

Note that you may need configuration settings changed by your Exchange administrator.

How can I tell if I'm using Exchange?

The main way to tell if you're using Exchange as your mail server (from Outlook) is to look at your accounts.

From the Accounts page, you'll be able to see a list of your accounts; if there's one there with "Exchange" in its title, you're using Exchange. If not, odds are you're using a POP3 or IMAP email server, which is great news.

For users of Exchange Servers

If you're using an Exchange server, you can follow the first half of the instructions for either Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007, related to capturing incoming email.

• The instructions for Capturing Incoming Email are the same, no matter which version of Exchange you're using.

While normal users without any knowledge of Exchange can capture their incoming email this way fairly easily, capturing outgoing email requires the cooperation of your IT team. If you can't get this cooperation, you need to make sure:

1. You send your emails out to clients as activities via AffinityLive, or
2. You include log@yourcompany.affinitylive.com as a BCC recipient of any emails you send that you want to get captured in AffinityLive. Adding this log@ address to your address book under a short name like "Log" can make this a lot quicker and easier.

For non-Exchange Server Users

For non-exchange users, there are a few options for setting up both Incoming and Outgoing email capture, that the rest of this document is dedicated to helping you work through.

Incoming Email

• NB: This document is going to assume you're using a POP3 or IMAP mail server for your email. If you have another email configuration, please contact support@hiivesystems.com today and we'll help you get incoming email going on your own configuration.

Incoming email is handled in AffinityLive by forwarding emails you receive over to a special email address tied to each user account. For example:

• Affinity domain: demo.affinitylive.com
• User’s username: richard
• Address to forward incoming email to: richard@demo.affinitylive.com

Forwarding email from your mail host/server

Forwarding this email across to AffinityLive is best done at the mail server level - this way, even if you're not online and checking your emails, the mail is still being forwarded across into AffinityLive. This makes the date and time values that AffinityLive stores with captured email more relevant, helps to ensure that your colleagues are up to date with the latest client emails you're receiving, and is generally just better.

The key to forwarding emails across from your mail server - which is likely to be a web host of some description - is to log into a control panel provided by your email providers, and choosing to "forward" your emails to the address in the format provided above.

Forwarding is often provided so that users who are travelling - or otherwise unable to easily check their email account the normal way - are able to get their email sent to a different address.

• NB: When you choose to forward your email from your mail server's control panel, make sure you choose to "forward and retain a copy on the server" or similar if you have such an option; this ensures that your emails both go into AffinityLive and also end up at your desktop. If you turn on forwarding, and emails stop coming through into Outlook, then all of your emails are being sent into AffinityLive and potentially lost; make sure you don't do this, and whenever you make a change, test it quickly by sending yourself an email, or even better, getting someone external to send you an email (friend, family, or a webmail account you have access to).

Different mail server and hosting companies will have their own method of configuring email forwarding, but rest assured that almost all of them can provide this functionality. It is mostly a case of just asking for access to the control panel, either from your internal IT staff, or from your hosting/email company.

Hints for determining your email server

If you don't know who provides your email/hosting service, there are a couple of tricks for helping to work it out.

1. Looking at the mail account name

Using the technique above in "How can I tell if I'm using Exchange", see if the name of the account gives you any hints to who's providing it for you.

2. Looking at the incoming email server

Picking up at the end of the "How can I tell if I'm using Exchange" section above, double-click on your default account. Depending on your version of Outlook, you might need to click on a "Servers" tab.

The secret is to look for the "Incoming Mail Server", especially if the Account Type is POP3. The incoming email server - in this case of the above screenshot, smtp.hostingcompany.com - will help you work out who is hosting your email - in this case, www.hostingcompany.com - and from there, you need to try and contact them to try and get access to the necessary control panel(s) to get your email forwarded to your Affinity address.

Forwarding email from Outlook itself using Rules

If you can't get in to set up forwarding at the Mail Server level, you can still set up forwarding directly from Outlook. The only downside of this is that the forwarding of messages only occurs when Outlook is online and receiving email messages; if you're offline and mail is queuing up at your mail server, it won't be being forwarded to AffinityLive.

Capturing incoming email into AffinityLive requires that each user forward their emails to a specific email address for that user. This way, even if an email is BCC'ed to a user, AffinityLive can still make sense of who it was originally sent to.

In line with this, one of the easiest ways to capture incoming emails is to set up an Outlook message rule for a particular user, that redirects their email to the AffinityLive capture system. Using this method, the emails remain in the user's inbox/mailbox, but they also get forwarded across to AffinityLive with all their header information intact.

• NB: The version of Outlook doesn't matter a great deal here. Additionally, these rules can be set up via Outlook Web Access to make them client independent.

Step 1: Create a New Message Rule

• NB: The screens in this example are from Outlook 2007, however, the menu locations, fields and screens in previous versions of Outlook are very similar.

Firstly, create a new, blank message rule, firstly by clicking on "Tools" and then"Rules and Alerts".

Once there, choose a "blank" rule that applies whenever email arrives.

There's no need to specify any conditions on the rule; leave all of the check-boxes blank.

Outlook will confirm you really want to do this by asking you whether you're sure. Choose Yes.

Step 2: Redirect emails to AffinityLive

The next step is to add some actions to your rule - this is where you tell it to forward the emails to AffinityLive.

Firstly, choose the Redirect option.

Once you've selected that you want to redirect your email, you need to tell it where to redirect it to. Click on the blue "people or distribution list" to type in the all important email address for your user account in AffinityLive.

Once on this screen, manually type in the email address that matches the format of [yourusername]@[yourdomain].affinitylive.com into the "To" section (as highlighted in red above).

To confirm the format of the address with an example:

• If your Affinity domain is demo.affinitylive.com
• And your user's username is richard
• Then the address to forward incoming email to is richard@demo.affinitylive.com

From here, click on "OK", and your screen should look just like the one below.

Now your message rule will be configured to redirect all emails when they arrive to [username]@[yourdomain].affinitylive.com, as shown above.

From here, click on "Next", and enter any exceptions you wish to manually maintain.

• NB: Affinity lets you control all of the privacy settings on capturing email, and it only captures emails that match contacts in AffinityLive's database. For more information on Privacy check out our Overview and Privacy Settings pages.

Click on "Next", and now you're done and the rule is set.

Leave the "turn rule on" box ticked, but DO NOT tick the "Run this rule now on messages..."

Click on "Finish", and you're done.

Testing Incoming Email Capture

Testing the Incoming Email Capture process is best done with the help of someone outside your organisation. If you can't convince one of your clients, suppliers or friends to help you, register for one of the free email accounts at places like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo.

Once you've identified who is going to send you the test email - it is best to get them to send you one, just so you can be sure - make sure their exact email address is entered in as the email address of a Contact in AffinityLive.

Remember, the incoming email capture requires an exact match between the email address of the sender of the email, and the email address stored in AffinityLive.

Once you've got the address in AffinityLive, send yourself an email from your friend, or via your webmail account, and have a look at the Company or Contact view screen for this Contact. By looking at the activities tab at the bottom of the View screen, you should see - within about 3 minutes - a an activity from this external contact. Additionally, hitting on "To-Do" in the top taskbar of Affinity should show you an unactioned item on your to-do list from this contact.

If you've done all of this, and you're still having trouble, contact our support team via support@hiivesystems.com.

Outgoing Email

Capturing Outgoing Email in Affinity is best achieved by using Affinity's servers as your outgoing email server; that way, we take care of the rest. Using us as your outgoing server means you benefit from our systems being configured to automatically BCC all emails from your domain into your own log account, so just by using this email server for all emails that go off-site, you’ll benefit from automatic logging.

To enable the outgoing email settings for your AffinityLive domain, go to "Integrations" under your user account, and then scroll down until you see the Outgoing SMTP box.

Hit "Connect", and you'll be presented with a box like the one below. Note, however, that in place of the red text, you'll have details that you can use to configure your mail server.

While different mail clients use different words, you'll probably find the details you need are:

• Outgoing Server: The server address listed in the Outgoing SMTP server section.
• Outgoing Port: Either Port 25 or Port 587 will work. Some ISPs block outgoing connections on Port 25, so if you're not sure, use Port 587.
• Outgoing Server Username: Your username will be provided once you enable the Outgoing SMTP server section.
• Outgoing Server Password: Your password will be provided once you enable the Outgoing SMTP server section.
• Security: use Basic or TLS as your authentication mechanism.

Alternatively, if all of this is Greek to you (and you're not Greek), then relax as we take you through the steps, one at a time.

Step 1 - open your default email account

The first step is to get into your email account settings, as described above in "How can I tell if I'm using Exchange?".

Go to "Tools" and click on "Email Accounts" (previous versions of Outlook just call them "Accounts" or "Account Settings")

Once there, doube click on your default email account from the list.

Step 2 - change your outgoing (SMTP) mail server

Once you've opened your account, go down to the Outgoing or "SMTP" server section, and change the setting to be your AffinityLive domain, eg, yourcompany.affinitylive.com.

• NB: Before making any changes, however, make sure you note the old SMTP server name, just in case it doesn't work for one reason or another, and you need to change it back.

Once you've made this change in the "Outgoing Server" or SMTP section, click on "Advanced Settings" or "Authentication" buttons.

Step 3 - ensure you're using Authentication

By clicking on "Advanced Settings" and then the "Outgoing Server" tab, or by clicking on "Authentication" or similarly labelled buttons in older versions of Outlook, bring up the box that allows you to enter a username/password combination for your outgoing server.

Once there, tick the checkbox that says you need to log on to use this outgoing server.

Use the username and password provided on the Outgoing SMTP section of the Integrations screen (which you can find by clicking on your own name in the top right, and then choosing "Integrations" from the list).

Step 4 - be prepared to change your outgoing port

Before you finish, it is worth noting that a lot of ISPs (the people you connect to the internet through) have disabled outgoing email access via the default SMTP port (like a channel) of 25. As a result, it is a good idea to change the Outgoing Port number to overcome these sorts of restrictions.

By going to the "Advanced" tab, you're able to change the Outgoing Port to 587.

Testing Outgoing Email Capture

Testing the Outgoing Email Capture process is as easy as sending an email to a contact who’s listed in AffinityLive. Send an email, and then open their company or contact record in Affinity and look at the Activities tab down the bottom; you should see a captured version of email there as a an activity.

Troubleshooting

Make sure the email address in AffinityLive exactly matches the email address you’re sending to, and also make sure the email address you appear to send your email “from” exactly matches the address stored in your user account. If in doubt, test the way your “from” email address appears by using a web-based email service like Gmail.

If you're unable to send emails at all, then the combination of SMTP server, Username/Password and/or Port Number aren't correct. Given there are so many things in this set of combinations that could be off the mark, it is best if you contact support@hiivesystems.com (or call us if you can't send email!) to work through your configuration challenges.