If you keep Outlook Express running while you’re connected to the Internet, you’ll know when a new letter arrives. Your computer makes a breezy little sound to herald its arrival. You’ll also spot a tiny Outlook Express icon in
your desktop’s bottom-right corner, right next to the clock. Plus, if more than one person uses your PC, the Welcome screen where you log on displays how many e-mails each person has received.
To check for any new mail when Outlook Express isn’t running, load the pro-gram from the Start menu. When it loads, click the Send/Recv button (or click the Tools menu, choose Send and Receive, and then choose Send and Receive All). Outlook Express logs onto the Internet, sends any outgoing mail you have sitting around, and grabs any incoming mail to place in your Inbox.
Follow these steps to read the letters in your Inbox and either respond or file them away into one of Outlook Express’ many folders:
1. Open Outlook Express and look at your Inbox.
Depending on how Outlook Express is set up, you can do this several different ways. If you see an opening screen announcing that you have unread mail in your Inbox, click the words Unread Mail to start reading.
Or, if you see folders along the left side of Outlook Express, click the word Inbox.
Either way, Outlook Express shows you the messages in your Inbox, and they look something like Figure 9-4. Each subject is listed, one by one, with the newest one at the bottom.
Figure 9-4:
Click the Inbox in Outlook Express to see your newly received messages.
Want your newest e-mails to appear at the list’s top? Then click the word Received at the top of the Received column. Outlook Express resorts everything but now places your newest message at the top. (You can sort mail by name or subject by clicking those column headers, too.) 2. Click any message’s subject to read it.
The message’s contents then shows in the bottom portion of the screen, as shown in Figure 9-5, ready for you to read. Or, to see the entire mes-sage in its own window, double-click it.
3. From here, Outlook Express leaves you with several options, each described in the following list:
•You can do nothing.The message simply sets up camp in your Inbox folder until you delete it.
•You can respond to the message.Click the Reply icon along the top of Outlook Express (or choose Reply to Sender from the Message menu), and a new window appears, ready for you to type your response. The window is just like the one that appears when you first compose a message but with a handy difference: This window is preaddressed with the recipient’s name and the subject.
•You can file the message.Right-click on the message and choose either Copy to Folder or Move to Folder and then select the desired folder from the pop-up menu. Or drag and drop the message to the desired folder along the left side of your screen. (Don’t see the fold-ers there? Click the word Inbox and, when the foldfold-ers drop down, click the little push pin to keep the folders in place.)
•You can print the message.Click the Print icon along the menu’s top, and Outlook Express shoots your message to the printer to make a paper copy.
•You can delete the message.Click the Delete button along the top to send the message to your Deleted items folder.
Outlook Express can be confusing when you drag and drop a message:
As you drag the message over to the folders, the little envelope icon turns into a circle with a diagonal line through it. Don’t fret. That menac-ing circle disappears when the mouse rests over a folder that’s able to accept a message.
To organize your incoming messages, right-click on your Inbox and choose New Folder to create another folder inside. Create as many fold-ers as you need to categorize your spam offfold-ers.
When you see a little red Xin place of a picture or photo on your e-mail, that means Outlook Express is blocking it. It’ll appear if you edit, forward, or reply to the message. Or, to make Outlook Express stop blocking it, choose Options from the Tools menu, click the Security Tab, and remove the check mark from the Block Images and Other External Content in HTML E-Mail box.
If you ever receive a message with an attached file from a friend, don’t open it. E-mail your friend and ask whether he or she really sent it. Evil people have written programs that can mimic other people’s e-mail addresses to spread virus and worm programs into other computers.
If the worm infects your computer, it sneakily sends copies of itself to everybody in your Address Book.
To prevent you from opening a virus, Outlook Express refuses to let you open almost any attached file. If Outlook Express won’t let you open a file you’re expecting from a friend, turn off that protection: Choose Options from the Tools menu, click the Security tab, and click to remove the check mark from the Do Not Allow Attachments to Be Saved or Opened That Could Potentially Be a Virus box.
Figure 9-5:
Click a message’s subject line to see the message’s contents.