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Using Email

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Software : Microsoft Outlook Express

Introducing the Address Book

The Address Book provides a convenient place to store contact information for easy retrieval by programs such as Microsoft Outlook Express. It also features access to Internet directory services, which you can use to look up people and businesses on the Internet. You'll find that the following features help you organize all your contact information into the most usable form for you.

Store important information about the people and groups who are important to you

With your Address Book, you have a place to store e-mail addresses, home and work addresses, phone and fax numbers, digital IDs, conferencing information, instant messaging addresses, and personal information such as birthdays or anniversaries. You can also store individual and business Internet addresses, and link directly to them from your Address Book. For extra information that doesn't fit in these categories, there's a generous section for notes.

Find people and businesses by using Internet directory services

Directory services are powerful search tools that enable you to look up names and addresses on the Internet. The Address Book supports Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for using Internet directory services.

Create groups of contacts for mailing lists

You can create groups of contacts to make it easy to send e-mail to a set of people, such as business associates, relatives, or friends. Any time you want to send e-mail to everyone in the group, just use the group name instead of entering each contact individually. Creating groups is also a good way to organize a large Address Book.

Share your Address Book with other users

By creating an identity for every person who uses the Address Book, each user can organize contacts into his own folder. In addition, each user can put contacts into a Shared Contacts folder so that other identities can use them.

Import names from your other address books

Moving forward with Outlook Express doesn't mean leaving your old address book information behind. You can import your personal address books from numerous popular e-mail programs including Microsoft Exchange, Eudora Light and Eudora Pro, Netscape Communicator, Microsoft Internet Mail for Windows 3.1, and any program that exports text files with comma-separated values (CSV).

You can also use your address book files with either Microsoft Exchange or any other program that imports files in CSV format.

Send and receive business cards

Business cards are the new way to send contact information electronically. When you create a business card in the Address Book, your contact information is stored in vCard format, so it can be exchanged between different programs (such as e-mail, address books, and personal planners), and between different digital devices (such as desktop computers, laptops or portable computers, personal digital assistants, and telephony equipment).

Print all or part of your Address Book and take it with you

Now you can print your Address Book to add to your personal planner. With three page styles to choose from, you can print all contact information, only business information, or only phone numbers, for any or all contacts.

To change contact information

• In the Address Book list, locate and double-click the name you want, and then change the information as needed. Click the tabs to access different information sections.

Note

• To delete a contact, select the contact name in the Address Book list, and then click Delete on the toolbar. If the contact is a member of a group, the name will also be removed from the group.

Deleting contacts from your Address Book

You can easily remove contacts and groups from your Address Book. When you delete a contact from a group, the name is removed from the group but the entries for both the group and the individual remain in your Address Book. Likewise, deleting an entire group does not remove the entries for the individual members who made up the group.

The following topics provide more information:

To open the Address Book

• To open the Address Book from Outlook Express, click Addresses on the toolbar, or on the Tools menu, select Address Book.
• To open the Address Book from within a message window, click the To, Cc, or Bcc icon.

Note

• To use the Address Book directory services from the Windows Start menu, click Start, click Search, and then click the option for finding people.

Sending an Email Message

To send an e-mail message

1. On the toolbar, click the Create Mail button.
2. In the To or Cc boxes, type the e-mail name of each recipient, separating names with a comma or a semicolon ( ; ).

To add e-mail names from the Address Book, click the book icon in the New Message window next to To, Cc, and Bcc, and then select names.

To use the Bcc box, on the View menu, select All Headers.

3. In the Subject box, type a message title.
4. Type your message, and then click Send on the toolbar.

Notes

• If you have multiple e-mail accounts set up and you want to use one other than your default account, click in the From box, and then click the e-mail account you want to use.
• If you are composing a message offline, your message will be saved in the Outbox. It will be sent automatically when you go back online.
• To save a draft of your message to work on later, on the File menu, click Save. You can also click Save as to save an e-mail message in your file system in e-mail (.eml), text (.txt), or HTML (.htm) format.

Deleting an Email Message

To delete an e-mail message

1. In the message list, select the message.
2. On the toolbar, click Delete.

Notes

• To restore a deleted message, open the Deleted Items folder, and then drag the message back to the Inbox or other folder.
• If you don't want messages to be saved in the Deleted Items folder when you quit Outlook Express, on the Tools menu, click Options. On the Maintenance tab, select the Empty messages from the 'Deleted Items' folder on exit check box.
• To manually empty all deleted items, select the Deleted Items folder. On the Edit menu, click Empty 'Deleted Items' Folder.

Attachments

To insert a file into a message

1. Click anywhere in the message window.
2. On the Insert menu, click File Attachment, and then find the file you want to attach.
3. Select the file, and then click Attach.

The file is listed in the Attach box in the message header.

Note

• You can also add a text (*.txt) file into the body of your e-mail message by clicking the Insert menu and then clicking Text from File.

To create a business card

The easiest way to exchange contact information with people over the Internet is by attaching a business card to e-mail messages. A business card is your contact information from the Address Book in vCard format. The vCard format can be used with a wide variety of digital devices and operating systems.

You must have your contact information in your Address Book before you can create a business card.

1. In the Address Book, create an entry for yourself, and then select your name from the Address Book list.
2. On the File menu, point to Export, and then click Business Card (vCard).
3. Select a location in which to store the file, and then click Save.

Note

• To add your business card to an e-mail message, on the Insert menu, click My Business Card.

 

Spell Checking

To check the spelling in messages

Outlook Express uses the spelling checker provided with the following Microsoft Office programs: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. If you do not have one of these programs installed, the Spelling command is not available.

• In the New Message window, click Spelling on the toolbar, or on the Tools menu, click Spelling.

Note

• To customize the way your spelling checker works, on the Tools menu, click Options, and then select the Spelling tab.

Increasing Disk Space

To increase disk space by deleting stored newsgroup messages

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. On the Maintenance tab, select the options you want for maintaining the size of all message files on your computer.

To compact, delete, or remove messages from all or specific message files now, click Clean Up Now, and then follow the instructions on the screen.

Note

• Most news servers periodically remove old messages. The next time you connect to a newsgroup you've cleaned up, your message file contains just the current messages from your news server.