Welcome to the Helium Inbox, where you will find direct communications from other Helium members and staff. It works just like email and messaging systems found on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking websites.

Your Helium Inbox is meant to be one handy place to view your Helium messaging, as well as messages from Helium Beta systems such as Helium Beta groups, How To, Zones and News. It will develop over time to include many other messages from Helium. For now, your Inbox will mostly contain messages from other members and from some Helium staff. You cannot forward a message from your Inbox to an outside email, nor can an outside email client access your Helium Inbox. Additionally, you cannot reach either help@helium or content@helium from this inbox.

Here you will also see all messages sent to you through Contact This Writer, whether from your About Me page, one of your articles or one of your articles seen during Rating. You can now reply to anyone’s message in the Inbox and the recipient will never see your personal email.

You can reach your Inbox from the top primary navigation bar,

or by clicking on the Inbox text on your My Helium page.

On your My Helium page, you’ll also see the first five messages displayed below the Inbox icon. Click the Inbox word to go to your Inbox.

Using your Inbox

You’ll see four folders set up in the left nav where emails can go: Received, Sent, Archived, Deleted. You will be able to compose a message from each of these folders. For now, you cannot create your own folders.

There are also two sections for managing your email: Mailing Lists and My Settings.

Read on for more information about each folder or section.

Received:

Any messages sent to you will show up in your Received box.

You can respond to individual messages or you can "reply all" if the originator of a group message sets up the group parameters this way in his or her original email.

Sent:

Any messages you send out will be kept here.

Archived:

Moving messages to this folder gets them out of your received messages. It is mostly an organizational tool. Keep messages that you’ll want to view again in this folder and not in your Deleted folder.

Deleted:

Moving messages you don’t want anymore to the deleted folder will not remove them completely. This is simply a folder to put messages away that you are quite certain you don't want anymore. Currently, deleted messages will be held there and available to you, but eventually they may be removed so don't put anything in this folder that you think you might want at a later date.

Mailing Lists:

This is a place to create group message lists that will allow you to contact everyone in the group with one message. Be aware that the names that appear are pen names, and there can be duplicate pen names on the site. If you see duplicates, click on the name and see if the About Me page is the one you want for that name. Site stewards may find this particularly helpful.

My Settings:

This is an open folder by default, so you won't be able to collapse it. Within this folder are three subfolders: Blocked Senders, Signatures and Message Preferences.

• Blocked senders: These are the senders that you have blocked from being able to contact you using any messaging on the site. If you want to block a sender, you will be able to block only individual members from being able to send you messages. You can also block a person who has sent you a message in which you are part of a mailing group they have created. You will not be able to turn this system off and block messaging altogether. To block a sender, you must do this directly from a message that person sent to you. This is a change from the old CTW tool that allowed you to block all senders.
• Signatures: These are templates and you can add a footer signature to include in your messages. Note: Among the signatures you’ll see an option called "Block Manager User": This adds a signature box for a Zone Manager (The "block" in this case is for a Zone box, and not to deny signatures).

• Message Preferences. You can set your inbox to send an email notification to your external email account (the one you have validated your account with) when you have Helium Inbox messages and set the frequency of this action. You can also set it to not send any messages to your external email. The settings are: 
  • Immediately when an alert arrives in my inbox.
  • Bundle up alerts and send a few times a day as needed.
  • Bundle up alerts and send daily as needed. (This is the default setting.)
  • Bundle up alerts and send weekly as needed.
  • Never
  • Collapse Notifications in Inbox:  This is useful if you are active on the Helium Beta Groups. Say you do a new posting. You don’t want 30 individual messages showing up in your Inbox every time someone answers you, nor do you want to try to figure out what they’re responding too. This enables you to collapse the responses under one heading.