Managing Multiple E-mail Accounts

How many e-mail addresses do you use? Between work, home, and Web-based accounts, it's not unusual for even a casual e-mail user to have 3 or more accounts to check. If you're an e-mail addict, you could easily have more than 10 e-mail addresses to keep track of.

Outlook includes a variety of tools and features that you can use to manage multiple e-mail accounts effectively:

• Unlike previous Outlook versions, Outlook 2002 offers full support for Microsoft's Web-based mail accounts, Hotmail and MSN.com.

• You can define multiple Send/Receive Groups with separate connection settings for each mail account. This allows you to check your favorite mail accounts regularly while downloading from infrequently used mail accounts only when you want to do so.

• You can define rules to process incoming and outgoing mail automatically—moving it to folders, color-coding it, or assigning a message priority, for example.

In this chapter, we'll explain how to use each of these options most effectively.