Managing client messages

The 'All client messages' dashboard is similar to the current 'All client mail' service. You can filter messages to us from your staff and messages from us within a date range of up to 2 weeks at a time. You can sort the results by clicking on the column headers and filter the results by account type or message direction.

Other features include:

• being able to view the web logon of the person in your agency who sent or received a client message (for messages received, you can see when your staff member opened it or if it’s still unread)
• the ability to open a message thread and any associated attachments
• an export tool to create a PDF of the selected message content to file into your own client management system.

This service is only for viewing messages. You'll still need to use the 'Messages' service to reply to us.

To minimise the security risk of opening up access to all client messages, the following applies:

• Owner, administrator and restricted administrator logons can access the dashboard. The existing client list security settings are applied.
• The dashboard is only for client-specific messages between us and an intermediary. It does not show messages between us and the client, or their third party (such as their nominated person).
• Messages relating to your agency's IRD number are not included, even if you're linked to yourself.
• To protect the privacy of past messages, we only show messages sent from the date the dashboard went live on 4 May 2022. However, replies to older messages will bring the whole message chain into the dashboard.
• If a client changes intermediaries, the client messages between us and the old intermediary are not available to the new one.

Exporting messages to PDF

You can create a PDF of message content by clicking the ‘Export’ button. This will allow you to select the message rows 1 at a time or you can ‘select all’. If you have filtered by account, message direction, or both, this will reduce the messages shown onscreen and the ‘select all’ will then work across what you have filtered.

After selecting the messages you wish to export click the ‘Export to zip’ button to convert the messages into a zip folder. The PDFs will then be available to save into your own client management system.

Message attachments

Inbound and outbound messages that contain an attachment will have a tick showing in the 'Attachment column' on the dashboard. Message attachments are not able to be exported in bulk using the ‘Export to zip’ function. If you need to save a copy of an attachment offline you can open the message from the dashboard and then open the attachment. Once the file is open you save it in the usual way you would save a file.

File name formatting

The files follow a prescribed format with an underscore as the separator between each group of data.

yyyymmdd_hhmmss_123456789aaa000_name40_subject50.pdf

• Year then month then day.
• Hours then minutes then seconds.
• Client ID number or account ID.
• Client name (truncated to 40 characters with any invalid characters removed).
• Subject line (truncated to 50 characters and any invalid characters removed).

The file name format for messages differs from client letters as there is no unique letter ID - the date time stamp is included to ensure uniqueness of the file name. As there is no 5-digit letter ID the subject line has been included but can be very long. We have excluded the period and hyphens in the account ID to shorten the files overall length.