If you are thinking about streamlining your communication workflow and becoming a paperless practice, the in-built Genie Email Module is a great way to achieve this.
This article will step you through how to configure the Genie Email Module to send and receive correspondence within Genie via email. If you have already configured the Email module and you are looking for some pointers on how to use this to send email correspondence through Genie, please refer to the Knowledgebase article on Emailing Correspondence.
It is important to mention that email is not a secure method of communication and as such the sending of sensitive patient information via email is not advised. Medically sensitive information should be sent using a secure third-party correspondence program.
Before you begin
It’s a good idea to decide whether you would prefer a single account for the practice, or whether you would like to have separate accounts for different users. An ‘account’ is essentially just a different email address. By default, Genie will create an account with the name of ‘Primary Account’, which is used by all the users on the network.
If you wish for individual users to use their own email account through Genie, each user will need to tick the Create a separate email account for me box in File > User Preferences > General. That user will then need to carry out the steps below to add the details of their specific email account.
Please note: With regards to incoming mail, Genie does not support email accounts that use SSL or TSL encryption. If your chosen email program uses either of these methods of encryption, incoming mail will not be received in Genie.
Due to issues identified in previous Genie versions surrounding the email address book, we strongly recommend only using email correspondence within Genie if you are running v9.3.7 or above.
Accessing the email preferences
For each email account you wish to use in Genie, you must enter the appropriate account details. These details are usually supplied by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or your nominated IT representative. If you are unsure about what these may be, you may be able to copy them from your regular email program’s preferences.
To configure an email account:
- Go to Open > Email
- Select the account you wish to setup by clicking on the Accounts icon
in the top right-hand corner of the window
- Click the Preferences icon
to open the Preferences window
The Account Tab
This is the window you can fill in your email account details. You can use the example text to the right of each field as a guide if you are unsure about what to add:
If you are still unsure about these settings, we have provided some examples of the settings that usually work best for different types of email account below for your reference. In the below tables, all options have the Use Authentication check box ticked:
Account type | Gmail | Outlook/Hotmail |
Incoming Mail (POP3) | ||
POP3 Server | pop.gmail.com | pop-mail.outlook.com |
Account Name | (your full email address) | (your full email address) |
Password | (your email account password) * | (your email account password) |
Outgoing Mail (SMTP) | ||
SMTP Server | smtp.gmail.com | smtp-mail.outlook.com |
Account Name | (your full email address) | (your full email address) |
Password | (your email account password) * | (your email account password) |
Advanced | ||
POP3 Port | 995 | 995 |
SMTP Port | 587 | 587 |
Timeout | 60 seconds | 60 seconds |
Account Type | Bigpond | Yahoo |
Incoming Mail (POP3) | ||
POP3 Server | mail.bigpond.com or imap.outlook.com | pop.mail.yahoo.com |
Account Name | (your full email address) | (your full email address) |
Password | (your email account password) | (your email account password) |
Outgoing Mail (SMTP) | ||
SMTP Server | mail.bigpond.com or smtp-mail.outlook.com | smtp.mail.yahoo.com |
Account Name | (your full email address) | (your full email address) |
Password | (your email account password) | (your email account password) |
Advanced | ||
POP3 Port | 995 | 995 |
SMTP Port | 587 or 465 | 587 |
Timeout | 60 seconds | 60 seconds |
Account Type | Outlook 365 | Other |
Incoming Mail (POP3) | ||
POP3 Server | outlook.office365.com | vmcp04.digitalpacific.com.au |
Account Name | (your full email address) | (your full email address) |
Password | (your email account password) | (your email account password) |
Outgoing Mail (SMTP) | ||
SMTP Server | smtp.office365.com | vmcp04.digitalpacific.com.au |
Account Name | (your full email address) | (your full email address) |
Password | (your email account password) | (your email account password) |
Advanced | ||
POP3 Port | 995 | 995 |
SMTP Port | 587 | 587 |
Timeout | 60 seconds | 60 seconds |
* Gmail users: Please be aware that Gmail has an advanced security setting available called 2-Step-Verification. If this is enabled for your Gmail account, errors may appear when trying to send or receive mail. To avoid this, you may need to create an App Password for the Gmail account you wish to use which should be entered instead of your normal Gmail password; for information on how to create an App Password, please see Google's Account Help page on the subject.
The Detail tab
The Detail tab is where you can adjust the settings for marking emails as read, and when Genie will delete old Sent and Deleted emails from the database, as seen in the image below:
Once Genie has downloaded an email from your Internet Service Provider (ISP), it is deleted from that ISP’s server. However, if you tick the Leave messages on server after download checkbox, Genie will delete them when you next perform a download after the specified number of days.
Note: It is recommended to tick this box, so you can also download the messages into another email program e.g. Outlook or Apple Mail, as it is not generally recommended to use the Genie email as your primary email program due to its simplicity.
If you find that there are messages downloaded into your other email program but are not downloading into Genie email when you click Get Mail icon , then click the Reset Retrieved Msg IDs.
In this window, you can also specify that messages in your 'Sent' and 'Deleted' folders can be automatically deleted after a specified number of days. Deletion of these records occurs when you close the Email window. Only messages in the currently used account are deleted, so if you have multiple Accounts but never open them, these old messages will never be deleted automatically.
The Advanced tab
This tab allows you to change the default mail server ports. You shouldn’t have to change the default POP3 and SMTP Port numbers unless your Internet Service Provider tells you they use different ports. If you click the Default button in this window, the current settings you have entered will be replaced with the default port numbers for your system (usually 110 for POP3 and 25 for SMTP).
Entering an Account Password can be used to prevent other users from accessing this window and changing your settings. You can also adjust the amount of time the Email module takes to timeout from this window, which can be helpful if you are receiving a timeout error when trying to send emails out of Genie.
Before you can begin sending emails, you will need to make sure that you have accurate email addresses recorded in your system. In previous versions of Genie, a separate email address book record was created for each patient and address book record within the email module whenever a new patient/addressee was added.
In Genie v9.3.7 and above, the email address will be pulled directly from within the patient's demographics, next of kin record, or address book record. Due to this, we strongly recommend only using email correspondence if you are on v9.3.7 or above to ensure accuracy of your data. Please see this announcement for more information on these changes.
To add a recipient that does not fit into the categories of a patient, next of kin or normal address book record, navigate to Open > Email then click on the Address Book icon and click the blue plus
to add a new email.
It is also recommended that you add yourself to the Email address book, to allow you to send a test email to yourself to test the functionality of the Email module, and to make sure you have entered your account details correctly in the Preferences window.
- To do this, start by clicking on the New icon
to create a new email.
- In the search bar next to the word To, start typing your first or surname, and a popup will appear displaying any matching email addresses.
- Select the email address you would like to use from the popup list by clicking on it
- If you have done this correctly, you should see your name displayed in the To field
- Once you have selected yourself as the recipient, you can enter a subject for the email in the Subject field e.g. Testing email module
- Press the Tab key on your keyboard to enter a few words in the body of the email
- Click the Send Now icon
to send the email
- If you have an active internet session, Genie should pick up the email and send this to your email address
- If you receive an error message at this point, make sure to read it carefully, as it will often provide information about the reason for why the email has failed to send e.g. incorrect account password or account login name
- If the message is sent successfully, wait a few moments and click the Get Mail icon
- You will be presented with the window below:
- Clicking on the Send and Receive icons in this window will switch these options on and off depending on what you would like to do.
- Because you have already sent your email, you can click on the Send icon to switch this off for the time being, then click OK to retrieve any emails from your Internet Service Provider’s server.
- The test email you just sent you should now be sitting in your Inbox.
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