Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 handles many daily tasks for you, such as keeping your calendar, collecting notes, and saving your contacts. But the main feature of Outlook is its electronic mail (e-mail) features. Outlook is often referred to as a universal inbox—it can send, receive, and store messages from a number of different e-mail sources. These sources can include internal networks, Internet e-mail accounts, and other sources.
Outlook’s e-mail features enable you to create e-mail messages and send them to other users. With the help of the Outlook Address Book, you can quickly access a recipient’s e-mail address when you are ready to address your new e-mail message. Outlook also provides ways to send one message to multiple users using distribution lists, format e-mail message text to contain rich content (such as hypertext format), use signatures at the bottom of all your outgoing messages, and create HTML stationery.
In this section, you learn how to write and modify e-mail messages, send messages, and review messages you’ve already sent. In addition, you learn how to use the Address Book to select recipient names, create and use distribution lists, format your messages, use signatures, send attached files, and work with HTML stationery.
When you write new messages in Outlook, you use the Message window. This window has a line for recipients (called the To line), a line for "carbon copied" recipients (the Cc line), a Subject line, and an area for the text of the message. Every new message must have at least one recipient. If you want, you can leave the Cc and Subject lines blank, but it’s a good idea to give your messages a subject.
In Outlook, click New on the Standard toolbar to display a new Message window.
Click the name of the address book you want to use, such as Contacts. The addresses in the selected address book appear in the box.
Click the name of the person to whom you want to send the new message.
Click To, Cc, or Bcc; Outlook copies the name to the specified message recipients list.
Repeat steps 5 and 6 until the message recipients list includes all the recipients you want to send the message to.Tip
You can set up several different address books to store your e-mail recipients’ contact information. For example, you might have a company-wide address book that stores addresses and contact information for all internal employees. A second address book can be set up for external contacts, such as vendors, suppliers, and customers. A third address book could store personal contact information.
- In the New Message window, type a subject for the new message in the Subject field.
Tip
As you write your message, you do not have to press Enter at the end of each line. Keep typing and Outlook wraps the text to the next line. To create a new paragraph, press Enter. If you want each paragraph to be separated by two blank lines, press Enter twice at the end of each paragraph. This makes your messages easier to read than single-spaced messages.
See Also
After you type your message, you can send it. Sending messages is discussed later in "Sending Messages".
Caution
You can apply special formatting to your message (see "Formatting Message Text"), but you might not want to. If you send mail to people who use a different e-mail program, they might not see the formatting that you intended. When in doubt, it’s usually a good policy to keep your messages simple so nothing gets lost in the translation.
