How-to · everyone who handles mail
Finding it, filing it, and answering it
Overview
CaseLoop’s mail page is not a second inbox to keep on top of. It is your mail with the case context attached — who this family is, which referral it belongs to, what has already been filed — and a search that finds a thread you half-remember from March.
The layout
Three columns: your folders on the left, the message list in the middle, the conversation on the right.
The Inbox is your whole mailbox, not a subset waiting to be sorted. Folders narrow it; nothing is hidden from you because a rule has not run yet.
Every number you see counts conversations, not messages. A thread with fourteen replies counts once, which is what makes the numbers mean anything.
If you have connected more than one, mail from all of them appears in the same lists and each message keeps its own account, so you can narrow to one when you need to.
Finding things
Type in Search mail and attachments… and the list becomes your results. Clear it and you are back where you were — you never leave the page or lose your place.
Search reads attachment contents too, not just subjects and bodies. A case number that only ever appeared inside a PDF is findable.
It is not only keyword matching: CaseLoop indexes your mail on this machine so a search for what you meant can find a thread that never used your exact words.
Search gets better as this finishes. On a big mailbox it runs for a while after the first sync, and it does not block anything — the mail is all there and readable while it works.
The filter control narrows by things like Has attachments, direction (inbound or outbound), and account. Useful when you know the shape of what you want but not its words.
Folders
A CaseLoop folder is not a place you move mail into. It is a standing question — “everything tagged as a referral”, “everything from social workers” — answered fresh every time you open it.
Move to… in the toolbar moves mail into your provider’s folders or labels — the ones you see in Gmail or Outlook. CaseLoop’s own folders are the left-hand list and are a different thing. The toolbar names whichever vocabulary your provider uses.
Cases
This is the part that makes the mail page more than a mail client. A linked thread shows the family’s context above it, and turns up when anyone looks at that case.
Most mail links itself — CaseLoop matches addresses and case references against your practice system and shows the family above the conversation. When it has not been able to, it says so rather than guessing.
Add to a case… opens the case picker. It searches your practice systems together and matches on the case number — never on a family name, because two families share a surname far more often than two cases share a number.
A thread can belong to more than one case. File to a second case… adds another without replacing the first.
Filing writes the conversation into the family’s record in your practice system. The header shows what has been filed and what has not, and only reports a thread as filed once every message in it is.
Tag to case + archive does the common pair in one action: link it, then archive it out of your mailbox.
Filing writes to a system that generally has no delete. Confirm the case before you file — the dialog asks you to, and that prompt is doing real work.
The attachments are listed under the subject, each with its own ⋯ menu. Add to Hovi files that one file into the family’s record — the referral packet, the signed consent — without filing the conversation around it.
It does not go immediately. The chip says Sending in 10s with an Undo beside it, and only then does it upload; if it fails, the menu offers Retry upload to Hovi instead.
The menu item is absent, not greyed, when your agency has no Hovi integration. An action that belongs to a system you do not have is not a disabled action — it is not an action.
Mark as logged elsewhere records that this conversation is already in the family’s record by another route, so it stops being chased.
Never file mail from this sender is for the addresses that will never belong to a case — newsletters, system notices, your own vendors.
Acting on mail
Select one message or fifty — the toolbar’s labels carry the count, so you always know how much you are about to act on.
| N | New mail |
| R | Reply |
| Shift + R | Reply all |
| Shift + F | Forward |
| E | Archive |
| Delete | Delete |
| U | Mark read or unread |
| V | Move to a provider folder or label |
| Ctrl / ⌘ + Z | Undo the last action |
Archive, delete, junk, move and mark-read happen in Gmail or Outlook too — this is your mailbox, not a copy of it. Snooze and pin are the exceptions and exist only inside CaseLoop.
Tags
Tags are how mail is classified, and how folders get filled. You do not have to open a rules editor to add one.
Both are covered properly in Tagging rules.
Troubleshooting
| What you see | What to do |
|---|---|
| The list says there is no mail, but there is mail in your inbox. | Check the folder selected on the left and clear any search. If the Inbox itself is empty, the sync is the thing to look at — see the next row. |
| “The last sync ran but found nothing new”, and you know there is. | Usually the mailbox needs reconnecting. The Email page’s settings, Mailbox tab, shows each mailbox’s state and gives you a reconnect. Signing in again costs nothing and loses nothing. |
| “Background sync is failing.” | Open Mailbox in the Email settings — the log there names a reason per mailbox rather than a general failure. Most often it is an expired connection. |
| Search does not find a thread you know exists. | If Indexing your mail is still running, it is genuinely not searchable yet. Otherwise try a distinctive word rather than a phrase — an exact sentence is a harder target than an unusual name. |
| A thread is linked to the wrong family. | Open the case picker and set the right one. Link changes are local to CaseLoop and reversible; what has already been filed into your practice system is not, so fix that there. |
| The header does not show a thread as filed even though you filed part of it. | Correct, and deliberate. A thread reads as filed only when every message in it is. A partly filed thread is a thread somebody will assume is done. |
| You archived something by mistake. | Ctrl / ⌘ + Z. Undo covers the mailbox actions, including a bulk one. |
| A mailbox is labelled as outside your organisation’s agreement. | That is a personal account rather than a work one. Connect your work mailbox for anything involving a family’s information. |
The next thing worth learning is how the tagging works, because that is what fills your folders and your referral queue: Tagging rules.