To compose and send a new e-mail message in Outlook Express, follow these steps:
1. Click the Launch Outlook Express button on the Quick Launch toolbar on the Windows taskbar to start Outlook Express in a full-screen window, as shown in the following figure.
The Outlook Express window contains three panes: Folders, Contacts (both on the left side), and the larger Outlook Express pane (on the right side).
2. Click the Create Mail button on the Outlook Express toolbar to open a New Message dialog box, or choose Message➪New Message (or simply press Ctrl+N) to open a New Message window.
The first thing to do in a new message is to specify the recipi-ent’s e-mail address in the To: field (which automatically con-tains the cursor). You can either type this address in the To:
text box or click the To button to display the Select Recipients dialog box, in which you can select the recipients from a list of contacts in your Windows Address Book or from one of the online directories.
To send a new message to someone who’s already listed in your Address Book, double-click the person’s name in the Contacts pane of the Outlook Express window. Outlook Express will then open a New Message window, with the recipi-ent’s e-mail address already entered in the To: field.
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Alternatively, you can type the recipient’s e-mail address in the text box of the To: field or, if the recipient is listed in your Windows Address Book, click the To button to open the Select Recipients dialog box. Click the name of the recipient in the Name list box, then click the To button, and finally click OK.
When composing a new message, you can send copies of it to as many other recipients (within reason) as you want. To send copies of the message to other recipients, type their e-mail addresses in the Cc: field.
3. (Optional) Click somewhere in the Cc: field and then type the e-mail addresses, separated by semicolons (;), in the Cc: field.
Alternatively, if the addresses appear in the Windows Address Book, click the Cc button to open the Select Recipients dialog box and then choose the e-mail addresses there (after clicking the names in the Name list box, click the Cc button to add them to the copy list).
After filling in the e-mail addresses of the recipients, you’re ready to enter the subject of the message. The descriptive text that you type in the Subject: field of the message appears in the upper pane of the recipients’ Inbox when they read the message.
4. Click somewhere in the Subject: field and then enter a brief description of the contents or purpose of the e-mail message.
In Outlook Express, you can change the priority of the e-mail message from normal to high or low. When you make a mes-sage either high or low priority, Outlook Express attaches a priority icon to the message (assuming that the recipients of the message are using Outlook Express to read their mail) that indicates its relative importance. The high-priority icon has a red flag in front of the envelope, whereas the low-priority icon has an arrow pointing downward.
5. (Optional) To boost the priority of the message, choose Message➪Set Priority and then choose High in the submenu that appears. To decrease the priority of the message, click the Priority button, and choose Low on the submenu.
6. Click the cursor in the body of the message and then type in the text of the message as you would in any text editor or word processor, ending paragraphs and short lines by pressing the Enter key.
When composing the text of the message, keep in mind that you can insert text directly into the body of the message from other documents via the Clipboard (the old Cut, Copy, and Paste commands).
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7. (Optional) If you’re not sure of some (or all) of the spelling in the text of the body of the message, you can have Outlook Express check the spelling by inserting the cursor at the begin-ning of the message text and then clicking the Spelling button on the New Message toolbar or by choosing Tools➪Spelling on the menu bar (or by pressing F7).
When spell-checking the message, Outlook Express flags each word that it cannot find in the dictionary and tries its best to suggest an alternative.
To replace the unknown word in the text with the word sug-gested in the Change To text box of the Spelling window, click the Change button or, if it’s a word that occurs frequently in the rest of the text, click Change All.
To ignore the unknown word and have the spelling checker continue to scan the rest of the text for possible misspellings, click Ignore or, if it’s a word that occurs frequently in the rest of the text, click Ignore All.
8. (Optional) To send a file along with your e-mail message, click the Attach button on the New Message toolbar or choose Insert➪File Attachment on the menu bar; then select the file in the Insert Attachment dialog box and click the Attach button.
When you include a file with a message, an icon for the file appears in a new Attach field immediately below the Subject field above the body of the e-mail message.
9. To send the e-mail message to its recipients, click the Send button on the New Message toolbar or choose File➪Send Message on the menu bar (or press Ctrl+Enter or Alt+S).
Note that when composing a new message, you can send blind copies of the message to several recipients by filling in the Bcc:
field. To display the Bcc: field between the Cc: and Subject: fields, select View➪All Headers on the Outlook Express new message menu bar. You can fill in this field with the names of the recipients as you do in the Cc: field (seeStep 3 in the preceding list). When you add names to the Bcc: field rather than to the Cc: field, no recipient sees any other names that you’ve entered. When you add names to the Cc: field, each recipient sees the names of everyone else to whom you’ve sent this same message.
If you have more than one e-mail account that you’ve set up in Outlook Express, the New Message dialog box will contain a From field at the top of the message header. You can use the drop-down button attached to this field to select from which of your e-mail accounts the new message is to be sent.
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If you compose e-mail messages when you cannot get online to send them, choose File➪Send Later from the New Message window menu bar after you finish composing each message. Outlook Express then displays an alert box indicating that the message will be stored in the Outbox and will be sent the next time you click the Send and Receive button. To send the messages stored in the Outbox when you can connect or are connected to the Internet, just click the Send and Receive button on the Outlook Express toolbar.