Mail

Mail at mail.cactive.com.au sends and receives email at your organization's own domains. A mailbox is an address, like support@example.com, with members: everyone in it reads and sends from it. A person can belong to several mailboxes.

Each mailbox also has its own calendars, in Calendar at calendar.cactive.com.au, and contacts, in Contacts at contacts.cactive.com.au. The calendar icon in Mail's header shows today's events, with Yes, Maybe and No on invitations. A sender's name in a message opens their contact card, with Open in Contacts or Add to Contacts.

Access

Being an admin doesn't open a mailbox: admins read only the mailboxes they're members of. Keys have no mailboxes. See Roles and scopes.

Set up a domain

Mail → Settings → Domains → Add a domain (needs mail:admin). A domain belongs to one organization, and only the platform organization can add domains under cactive.com.au, cactivecloud.com or gov.vin.

Mail then lists the DNS records to add, named relative to your zone:

Copy all and Download zone file give the records as a zone file snippet for DNS hosts that import one. On Cloudflare, set the CNAME record to DNS only.

Domains set up before the platform moved to cactive.com.au point at _spf.mail.gov.vin and a key under dkim.mail.gov.vin. Those names stay published with the same contents and keep working: checks accept either, and a key rotation updates both. To move a domain, replace include:_spf.mail.gov.vin with include:_spf.mail.cactive.com.au in the SPF records at the domain and at bounce (leave the rest of each record as it is), and point si1._domainkey at the name Mail shows.

Mail runs in the region the location registry assigns to mail for the default location. Where mail isn't available yet, adding a domain says so.

The domain then moves through:

Domains are checked in the background on the same schedule as custom domains: every 5 minutes on the first day, hourly for a week, every 6 hours up to 30 days. Check now checks right away. Checks ask your zone's own nameservers.

Rotate DKIM key (the key icon on an active domain) replaces the domain's signing key with a new one; your DNS records stay the same, since the si1._domainkey record points at the key the platform publishes. For about five minutes afterwards, receivers that cached the old key may fail the DKIM check on new mail; the SPF record keeps it passing DMARC. Rotations are recorded in the audit log. Domains set up with three SES DKIM records (older domains) rotate on their own.

Remove domain stops accepting and sending mail for it. Delete its mailboxes first.

Mailboxes and aliases

Settings → Mailboxes → New mailbox (needs mail:admin):

• Address: the part before @ (letters, digits, dots, dashes and underscores) and one of your domains.
• Sender name: shown to recipients.
• Members: people in the organization who read and send from it.

Each address belongs to one mailbox. Aliases are more addresses at your domains that deliver to the same mailbox. Delete mailbox deletes all of its mail, drafts, aliases, filters, calendars and contacts, app passwords that opened only that mailbox and Apple Mail sign-ins to it; it can't be undone. The mailbox and its addresses go at once; the mail of a large mailbox is removed in the background over the following minutes.

Receiving

Mail to one of your domains goes to:

1. the mailbox or alias with that exact address, else
2. the same address without a +tag (sales+leads@example.com goes to sales@), else
3. the domain's catch-all mailbox, if one is set (Settings → Domains → Catch-all).

Mail to any other address is dropped without a bounce, so forged senders never receive backscatter. Messages with a virus are discarded. Messages SES marks as spam, and messages that fail DMARC for a domain whose policy is reject, go to Spam.

Reading and organizing

Views: Inbox, Starred, Snoozed, Sent, Drafts, Scheduled, Archive, All Mail, Spam, Trash and your labels. Conversations are grouped into threads.

With more than one mailbox, All Inboxes (at the top of the sidebar, and in the phone app's drawer and mailbox list) shows every mailbox's inbox together, newest first; All Starred, All Sent and All Drafts work the same way. If you have mailboxes in more than one organization, All Inboxes covers all of them, whichever organization you're in. Each conversation names the mailbox it's in (and its organization, across organizations); opening, replying, moving and categories act in that mailbox. Searching in All Inboxes searches every mailbox, a page at a time.

• Archive, move to inbox, trash, mark as spam or not spam, mark read or unread, star, snooze, and label conversations, up to 100 at a time.
• Snooze archives a conversation until a time you choose (later today, tomorrow, the weekend, next week or any date within a year); it then comes back to the top of the inbox, unread. Moving a snoozed conversation yourself ends the snooze.
• Previews and collapsed messages show what the sender wrote: quoted replies (> lines, the "On … wrote:" line before them and Outlook's original-message block) are left out. In an open message, quoted history at the end is folded behind ….
• Unsubscribe appears on mailing-list mail that says how to leave (List-Unsubscribe). Mail unsubscribes in one click when the sender supports it (RFC 8058), otherwise sends the list's unsubscribe email from your mailbox or opens the sender's page.
• Under the sender of received mail, a small line names roughly where it was sent from (city, region, country), looked up once from the first public address in its Received headers; hover it for the address. IP location data: DB-IP (CC BY 4.0).
• The arrow next to the recipients shows the message's details: addresses, date, the envelope sender (Mailed by), the domains that signed it (Signed by) and the SPF, DKIM, DMARC and ARC results.
• Invitations show as a card with the meeting's time and place; answer Yes, Maybe or No there (the organizer is emailed) or open it in Calendar. Events sent without an invitation (tickets, bookings, forwarded invitations) have Add to calendar.
• Delete permanently works from Trash and Spam only.
• Labels belong to a mailbox; a mailbox can have up to 200.
• Search matches every word (2 characters or more, up to 5 words) against senders, recipients, subjects and the start of each message's text, outside Trash and Spam (or within them while you're in that view). Large mailboxes are indexed in the background: words then match at the start (eng finds "engine"), and the newest mail is searched directly until it's indexed.
• Show the original of a received message (.eml), and download attachments.

Categories

The inbox is sorted into Primary, Transactions (receipts, orders, shipping, bookings), Updates (notifications, newsletters, social networks) and Promotions, with All Mail for everything in it. Pick one in the bar above the list: each category is an icon, the chosen one shows its name and unread count, and a dot marks the others with unread mail.

Each message is sorted when it arrives, from its sender and headers, never by reading it with AI:

1. Senders you moved go where you put them.
2. People in the mailbox's contacts, people the mailbox has written to, replies in conversations it replied in, and meeting invitations are Primary.
3. Known services, sender names such as receipts@, and subjects about codes, receipts, orders, shipping or bookings decide next.
4. Mailing-list and bulk mail (List-Unsubscribe, List-Id, Precedence: bulk, automatic replies, no-reply senders, marketing platforms' headers) is a Promotion when its subject is a sale or offer, otherwise an Update.
5. Everything else is Primary.

To move a sender, use Move to Category in the toolbar, or Move Sender To in a message's menu (long press a conversation on the phone). Their conversations in the inbox move now, and their later mail follows. Turn categories off under Settings → Notifications. Apple devices see the whole inbox, as before.

Notifications

New mail can reach your phones: in the Mail app, or another Cactive app where the Mail app isn't installed (or its notifications are off). Tapping one opens the conversation. Choose per mailbox under Settings → Notifications (on the web, or Notifications and Categories in the phone app's menu):

Mail in Spam or Trash, mail a filter archives or marks read, and mail you or the mailbox sent never notify. Nothing arrives during your quiet hours, and mail from a VIP whose notice already reaches your phone isn't notified twice. The Mail app's icon shows how many Primary conversations are unread in the mailboxes you get notifications for.

Filters

Settings → Filters sorts new mail as it arrives, per mailbox. A filter's conditions (sender, To or Cc, subject, words, has an attachment) must all match; its actions apply to the conversation: skip the inbox, mark as read, star, apply a label, delete, or forward the message. Every matching filter applies. Spam is never filtered. A mailbox can have up to 100 filters.

Forward to sends matching new mail on to an address you've confirmed: under Forwarding addresses, add the address, then enter the code it receives. Forwarded messages come from the mailbox's address (the sender's name, "via" the mailbox) with replies going to the original sender, and count toward the daily sending limit. Mail forwarded this way isn't forwarded again.

Tick Also apply to matching conversations already here when saving to run the filter over the mail already received too (not spam or the trash, and never forwarding it); large mailboxes finish in the background. "Has the words" is checked against the stored search text of those messages (subject, people and the first 8,000 characters), so words further into a long message aren't seen.

Sending

Compose has a rich text editor, attachments, and Cc and Bcc. Replies are threaded with the original. Mail warns about recipients that bounced or complained before. Drafts save as you write.

• While you type an address, Mail suggests your contacts and people you recently wrote to or heard from.

• Undo appears for 5 seconds after Send; until then the message waits as a draft on the server, and undoing reopens it. Closing the tab doesn't stop it: the message goes out when the 5 seconds are up.

• Schedule send (the arrow next to Send) sends at a time you choose, up to a year ahead. Scheduled messages are listed under Scheduled; open one to edit it or Cancel schedule. If it can't be sent then, it stays in Drafts with the reason; a domain that isn't verified yet gets two more tries, 5 minutes apart.

• The domain must be active to send.

• Your signature, under Settings → Signatures, is added below new messages, replies and forwards.

• Your organization's plan sets how many messages it can send per day, how many recipients a message can have, and how large a message can be; Mail shows them in compose. Messages are at most 40 MB, the Amazon SES maximum.

The mail administration API reports messages sent, received, bounced and complained about per day.