These options are set from the E-mail tab of the Options Manager interface.

To invoke the e-mail administration command configuration interface, click the "Configure" link next to "Reply by e-mail -- administrative features enabled." This will pop up a separate window for configuring the commands.

IMPORTANT: The administration by e-mail configuration screen pops up in a new window. In order to use this dialog box, your browser must support JavaScript and pop-up windows. If the screen described in these instructions does not appear, turn off your personal firewall or enable JavaScript in your browser as needed.

All Discus e-mail administration commands must appear as a single word surrounded by curly braces. DiscusWare recommends that you use all capital letters when you are creating these commands. And, of course, choosing names that describe what the command will do is the easiest for the moderators.

To define a new command, enter the name of the command, in curly braces, in the "Command" column. Choose the action from the "Actions" column. Leave the "Param" box blank, unless you've selected "Move" as the action, in which case you should read the note below to learn about the parameters you can give. Click the "Save Settings" button to save your settings.

Suppose that you want to define an e-mail reply command that deletes a message. In the "Command" box enter {DELETE} (those are curly braces, {}, around the word "DELETE"). In the "Actions" column select "Delete Message." Leave "Param" blank. Click "Save Settings." The screen will refresh with your new command defined.

For the command you wish to delete, change the "Actions" column to "--Delete Command--" and save your settings. That command will disappear from the list.

In understanding these commands, it is assumed that the reader is familiar with the basic structure of Discus (e.g., what a message is, what a page is, and what queued messages are). It is also noteworthy that Discus sends e-mail notification of each message separately, and when these commands are given in an e-mail reply to a message, they act upon the message being replied to (or in some cases, the page to which the message was originally posted).

• Delete Message: Deletes the message that is being replied to.

• Delete Page: Deletes the page on which the message was originally posted.

• Approve Queued Message: Approves the queued message, just as if you had gone into Queue Manager and clicked to approve the message.

• Reject Queued Message: Rejects the queued message, just as if you had gone into Queue Manager and clicked to reject the message.

• Move Message: Moves the message to a pre-defined page. For this command to work, in the "Param" column, enter the topic number and page number to which the message will be moved, separated by a slash. For example, to define a command to move a message to topic number 5, page number 10, enter "5/10" in the "Param" column (without the quotes). Note that this command moves the message to a pre-defined page, defined in this screen. There is no page selection when the command is actually entered in a reply e-mail message.

• Close Conversation: Removes the "Add a Message" box from the page on which the message was originally posted, effectively closing that thread.

• Annotate on Top: Edits the post, adding whatever text you place in the reply message portion of the e-mail to the top of the original message.

• Annotate on Bottom: Edits the post, adding whatever text you place in the reply message portion of the e-mail to the bottom of the original message.

To use a command, when replying to an e-mail notification message, enter the command anywhere outside of the reply message portion (between the arrow lines). You can enter multiple commands in each message, and they will be processed in the order they were entered.

For example, suppose a "test" message was posted to an active, non-test conversation on your board. You may have received an e-mail such as the following:

You wish to delete this message using the "{DELETE}" command that you have previously defined using the example above. (There is nothing magic about "{DELETE}" - you must first have defined it as a command before you can use it.) You would reply to the message such as the following:

Assuming you have reply by e-mail set up correctly and you've defined the sequence "{DELETE}" as a command to delete the message, when you send this message back to your board and it is received, the message will be deleted. You will then get a confirmation e-mail that your command was received.