Vicki,
You probably already realize this --but on each individual patient if you go to the address tab locate their name and click on message tab you can look at any and all messages ever sent, opened or not by patient which makes the job of searching quite a bit easier.
Also, it seems to me, from a medical legal perspective, the portal is much easier to document and record messaging by my nurse (as she handles 95% of the "chatter") compared to voice mail or phone conversation. Her desk is about 15-20 feet from mine so I observe this every day. At noon or whenever she has a break, she will listen to the 5-10 messages on voice mail, take notes, type me a message on AC, or if not tied up, converse on phone take notes and type message to AC and send to me. Now that we have about 2/3 of my patients actively using the portal, the voice mail and phone calls have considerably lessened, and it is much easier and more accurate for my nurse to copy and paste from the Updox portal and send to AC. I noticed this improved way of documenting "chatter" early on and my nurse finds it much easier and my patients are less frustrated and feel empowered "electronically conversing" and prefer this method for the most part. In general the secure messages get handled more quickly, since I have an OCD nurse, when the message is in the Updox portal it gets done more quickly than the voice mail.
Now I have about 1/3 of my patients that will never do the portal, so we will continue doing things as always.
I realize this is getting lengthy, and your original question about correspondence was not addressed--sorry.
I will take a short break and address that in a bit.
If this sounds like I am being too simplistic or condescending, it is not my intention, but just trying to convey some of the subtleties I have noticed over the old way of doing things.
