Mail is project correspondence with a reference number on it. The same conversation could happen over email, and often does, but it would live in twelve inboxes and be gone the day somebody leaves. Here it is numbered, threaded, attached to the records it is about, and readable by whoever picks the job up in two years.
The register
Mail opens on two tabs. Inbox is everything you have received. Drafts is everything you have started and not sent.
The register columns are the mail number, the content, the date, who it came from and which organisation they belong to, the recipients, the type and the status. Grouping by type reads as a register of RFIs or site instructions; filtering by status finds what is still open. It works like every other register screen.
Mail waiting on you also appears in My Items, so correspondence is not a separate inbox to remember to check.
Mail numbers
Every mail item gets a number of the form ORGPREFIX-TYPEPREFIX-00001, for example ACMECO-RFI-00042.
The first part is your organisation's mail prefix, taken from the first six letters of its name and set in organisation settings. The second is the mail type's own prefix. The sequence runs per organisation and per type, so your RFIs are numbered in one continuous series and your site instructions in another.
This is the string somebody will quote back at you in a meeting, so it is worth knowing where it comes from.
Sending mail
Choose the mail type first, because it decides the number and, on some types, the extra fields further down the form.
To and Cc take three kinds of recipient: people on the project, a distribution group, and a plain email address for somebody with no Teralo account at all. That third one matters more than it sounds, and the next section explains why.
Subject is what makes the item findable later. Write it for somebody searching, not for somebody who already knows the context.
Response and its due date say what you need back and by when: Acknowledge, Approved, Approved with Comments, Not Approved, Revise and Resubmit, For Information, For Review, For Action. Status tracks where the item has got to, from the set your organisation configured.
Attachments are the part worth slowing down for. As well as uploading a file, you can attach anything already in Teralo: a document, a drawing, a whiteboard, a contract, a submittal, an inspection, a permit, a photo, a diary entry, a booking. The attachment is a reference to the record rather than a copy of it, so the recipient opens the live thing.
Attaching a whiteboard does one extra thing: it gives every recipient view access to that whiteboard, so they can open it from the thread without anybody granting access separately. See Whiteboard.
The message itself is a rich text editor with tables, headings and lists, and it can be started from a saved text template.
Replying, and replying by email
From a thread you can Reply, Reply All or Forward, and the thread keeps its full history in order.
Recipients are also emailed, and every recipient can reply to that email directly. The reply comes back into the thread as a proper mail item, with its own number and its attachments, whether or not the person replying has a Teralo account.
This is the feature that makes Mail usable with the parts of a project that are not in Teralo. A consultant who will not create an account still ends up in the register, and their answer is on the record rather than in somebody's personal inbox.
Templates and signatures
Two things save retyping, and they sit in different places because they belong to different owners.
Text templates are reusable message bodies, held at organisation, project or personal level, and optionally restricted to particular mail types. They are inserted from the composition form.
Signatures are yours rather than the project's, set up in your own account settings. You can keep several and choose a different default for new mail, replies and forwards, or pick one by hand as you write.
SettingsHost only
Mail is configured at both levels, and project settings add to the organisation's rather than replacing them. See Organisation level and project level.
Organisation, then Tools, then Mail holds the standard: mail types, statuses, responses and text templates. Teralo ships a sensible default set (General Correspondence, Request for Information, Site Instruction, Variation Request, Meeting Minutes, Progress Report, Safety Notice) and most organisations edit rather than start from nothing.
Project, then Tools, then Mail shows the same four tabs, with the organisation's entries listed first and a project-specific section under each. Add a project mail type where a job genuinely needs one; resist adding a project version of something the organisation already has, because two nearly identical types is how a register stops being groupable.
A mail type can also carry custom fields, in text, number, currency or date. Those appear as the Additional Information block on the composition form, which is the tidy way to make one type capture something the others do not.
PermissionsHost only
Four permissions, and the useful split is between reading and sending.
Viewing mail lets somebody read the register and its threads. Sending is separate, because sending mail on a project is speaking for your organisation on the record. Deleting mail and drafts is separate again. Managing mail templates is its own permission, so somebody can send correspondence all day without being able to change what everyone else's correspondence starts from.
See How permissions work.