Vista includes Windows Mail, a program that replaces Outlook Express found in previous Windows versions. As with Outlook Express, Windows Mail offers support for email and newsgroups—electronic bulletin boards where you can exchange ideas and files.
With Windows Calendar (refer to Chapter 20, “Dating with Windows Calendar”) and Windows Mail, you really don’t need a separate program such as Microsoft Outlook for your email and scheduling. The truth is, however, that Windows Mail is not an extremely sophisticated email program and Windows Calendar isn’t an extremely sophisticated scheduling program. It wasn’t Microsoft’s intent to make these programs everyone’s answer to scheduling and email; as with Outlook Express, the adequate (and free with previous versions of Windows) Windows Mail can handle day-to-day email tasks and will do the job without all the bells and whistles that a program such as Microsoft Outlook provides. (In addition, Windows Mail provides a newsreader and Outlook does not.)
In this chapter, you’ll learn how Windows Mail works to handle your email. You’ll set up your email account and send emails in no time. The next chapter shows you how to use Windows Mail to access newsgroups for information about various topics that interest you.
To start Windows Mail, open your Start menu and select the Windows Mail option. Figure 40.1 shows the screen that awaits you after Windows Mail loads. Even if you have set up no email accounts, Microsoft stuck an email message in your Inbox to tell you a little about Windows Mail. (Depending on your version and release date of your specific Windows Vista system, you might see a slightly different email message from Microsoft.)
As with most email programs Windows Mail provides you with the following folders in the navigation pane:
To view all the items in a navigation pane folder, double-click the folder and the items will appear in the email summary area. You can move items from folder to folder and create your own folders to sort and store your messages.
The first thing you have to do to use Windows Mail is set up an email account in the program. Most often, an email account falls into one of two categories:
Both kinds of email accounts are set up in slightly different ways, depending on the service, but for Windows Mail, you can only set up an email account that offers a POP3 connection. Therefore, you’ll have a problem with Hotmail and some other web email services because many email programs, such as Windows Mail, require a POP3 email account to access the email there.
Many web-based email services such as Gmail provide you with a free POP3 connection to your web-based email account so that you can use Windows Mail to send and retrieve a Google account’s email. Surprisingly, however, Microsoft’s own Windows Mail won’t read Microsoft’s own Hotmail email because the free version of Hotmail doesn’t allow a POP3 connection.
Microsoft assumes that if you get free Hotmail, you should use the Hotmail web-based interface to read ads that appear along the edges of your Hotmail screen at various times. If you pay to upgrade to Hotmail Plus, Microsoft adds a POP3 connection to your Hotmail account so that you can use Windows Mail to access your email.
A third kind of email account, IMAP, is available as well as a web-based and POP3 email account, but IMAP is generally limited to large corporate network computers like those you’d find at a large company’s headquarters or a university. The IT staff (IT stands for Information Technology, a name often used for a company’s computer support staff) for that organization can supply the details you need to configure Windows Mail for your mail account if you use an IMAP account.
Windows Mail makes it easy to work with more than one email account. You can add one or more email accounts and you can send and receive from all your accounts from within Windows Mail. In addition, you can create separate folders to hold email messages sent to each account so that you can keep your accounts separate.
Before you set up a new email account in Windows Mail, you need the following information, most of which you know, but some of which you will probably have to obtain from your email account’s customer support website:
ISPs’ POP3 and SMTP information is readily available, and if you don’t know your email account’s POP3 and SMTP values that is information your email account provider will almost always make readily available on its customer support website and phone centers. The information is so often requested that it’s usually faster to go online and locate it on your ISP’s website than to call its help staff. Companies that provide email account service understand the importance of making it easy for you to find these values so that you can set up email programs such as Windows Mail.
As long as you use a POP3-based email account, or a web-based email account that offers POP3 access, such as Gmail, it’s simple to set up Windows Mail to send and receive your email. Windows Mail is a more structured way to manage your email than the Gmail website because Windows Mail runs on your own computer, and you’re not limited to an Internet connection speed when all you want to do is read and manage and sort and delete the email messages that you went online to send and receive.
To add a new email account to Windows Mail, follow these steps:
You will see Directory Service as one of the kinds of accounts you can create in addition to an email and newsgroup account. A directory service is an address book for contacts and is often made available in a large organization.
One of the things you’ll probably want to do is move contacts and possibly old email that you’ve received in the past into Windows Mail. There are so many options, depending on what you’ve used in the past for email, that to cover them all would be impossible. So, a brief overview of what you’ll go through will be helpful.
One of the nicest things about Windows Mail is that when you upgrade a computer from Windows XP to Windows Vista, Windows Mail imports all your Outlook Express contacts and email addresses (as well as newsgroups) so that you don’t have to do anything special after you install Vista. Windows Mail will already have all your contacts and email information and you’re ready to continue where you left off with Outlook Express.
If you have not used an email system on your current computer because it’s new, one of the things you’ll certainly want to do first is to get your past emails and contacts into Windows Mail. The contacts will include your names, email addresses, and other contact information you might have kept track of elsewhere or on another computer, such as a desktop where you use Outlook or Outlook Express.
It might be nice to keep Outlook on your desktop and use Windows Mail for your laptop’s email. By doing that, you save the cost of a second copy of Microsoft Outlook but you can still use Outlook’s contacts and even import its email messages into Windows Mail. You will need to select Outlook’s File, Import and Export command and export your Outlook Contacts to a CSV (comma-separated value) file and your email data to a PST personal folder file. These files might be large if you have lots of contacts and emails, so you might have to save the files onto a CD-ROM or perhaps burn a DVD. You need a way to get the files to your laptop. If you run a network between your laptop and the desktop on which you installed Outlook, you can store Outlook’s exported files in a Public folder and copy that folder to your laptop.
If you already have Outlook on the Windows Mail machine, you might not have the need or desire to use Windows Mail. Even though its interface is simpler than Outlook’s, you will lose functionality. Getting your contacts and email from another computer that uses Outlook, however, is a need that you might have.
If you use Outlook Express on your desktop and have a new laptop that you didn’t upgrade, you’ll want to get your Outlook Express email and contacts to Windows Mail. From Outlook Express, you must select File, Export and export your OE messages to one file and your OE contacts to another file.
After you copy your exported contacts and messages to your laptop, select Windows Mail’s File, Import, Messages option. Then select the program that holds the email you want to import from using the Select Program dialog box shown in Figure 40.3.
Given that Windows Mail is Microsoft’s product, Microsoft doesn’t offer options to import from non-Microsoft email programs. Select a program such as Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Outlook Express 6 and click Next. Windows Mail leads you through a window or two where you locate the imported file (the one you exported from the other program and copied to your laptop). Select the items you want to import (such as the mail folders you want to import) and the import process begins. To import the contacts that you exported from Outlook as a CSV file, select File, Import, Windows Contacts, CSV; click Import and locate the file to import.
This example has assumed an existing desktop and a new Vista laptop, but the same procedure holds if you’re transferring mail data from one desktop to another, too.
After you import Outlook or Outlook Express email and contacts into Windows Mail, a new folder hierarchy appears in the Windows Mail navigation pane, like the one in Figure 40.4. Windows Mail stores all imported folders in a new folder named Imported Folder. You can keep whatever imported folders you want to keep and remove those you don’t want to use with Windows Mail by right-clicking the folder and selecting Delete.
If you’ve used the Vista program called Windows Contacts and manually added contacts there or perhaps imported them from Outlook Express, you can import those contacts into Windows Mail as well. Even better, when you import contacts from Outlook or Outlook Express into Windows Mail, Vista also uses those same contacts for Windows Contacts, a program that does nothing but manage your contacts, as Figure 40.5 shows. Windows Contacts serves up your contacts to various Vista programs that can access those contacts.
Obviously you’ll use Windows Mail to send emails to others. The following steps show you how to send various forms of email to recipients. Windows Mail probably works exactly the way you expect it to if you’ve used other email programs in the past. Windows Mail has several options, but you can send email messages and files to others very easily without worrying too much about what else is under Windows Mail’s hood.
If you do not see the Bcc box, select View, All Headers, and the Bcc field will appear beneath your carbon copy field.
Windows Mail supports spell-checking! Click the top toolbar’s spell-check button (the one with the letters ABC on it) to make sure that your message’s spelling is correct before sending your email.
Sending email messages and attached files to the right recipients, as you can see, requires only that you know the person’s email address or locate that person’s email address from your list of email addresses in Windows Mail.
You can send an email to multiple recipients (or multiple Cc- or multiple Bcc-filled recipients) by separating multiple email addresses with a semicolon.
You can send entire web pages to any recipient using Windows Mail. The reason you might do this is that you want someone to see something firsthand on a web page you just visited. By sending the page in an email, you act a little like your own RSS service, sending web content to specific people whose email address you know.
Before sending a web page with Windows Mail, make sure that Windows Mail is your default email program by opening the Control Panel’s Programs group and selecting Default Programs. Select the Set Your Default Programs option, choose Windows Mail, click the Set as Default option, and close the window.
The default email program you set will be the one displayed at the top of your Start menu in the slot labeled E-mail. Outlook places your default web browser (usually Internet Explorer) and email program in the top two Start menu slots because of the frequency that most users run those two programs.
Follow these steps to use Windows Mail to send an entire web page to someone:
Remember that your recipient must also use an email program, such as Windows Mail or Outlook Express, that can display formatted email as web-based HTML code; otherwise, the recipient will get garbage in the message. Your recipient will be able to read the mail’s text, but the email will be messed up because the recipient will see all the HTML formatting codes that are normally hidden.
You can receive and organize the email that people send to you by taking advantage of Windows Mail’s folder structure. Windows Mail automatically checks for new email messages every 30 minutes, but you can change this frequency. To set the email check frequency so that Windows Mail checks every 5 minutes, select Tools, Options and click the General tab to display the page shown in Figure 40.8.
Even if Windows Mail hasn’t checked for emails, you can. Click the toolbar’s Send/Receive button to refresh your email account, send any emails that might be in your Outbox folder, and receive any emails that have been sent to you since your most recent send and receive action.
As you click the headers in the Inbox, a preview appears for that message in the lower pane. (Drag the center bar up or down to make more or less room for the headers.) If you double-click an Inbox item, a window opens so that you can view the message from a larger window without the other screen elements getting in the way.
Delete mail you do not want by selecting one or more message headers and dragging them to the Deleted Items icon. The Deleted Items area acts like the Windows Recycle Bin. Mail does not really go away until you delete items from the Deleted Items area by clicking the Deleted Items icon and removing unwanted mail. You can also delete mail by clicking the mail item and pressing the Delete key.
You can easily reply to an email message’s author, or to the entire group if you are one of several who was sent mail, by clicking the Reply or Reply All toolbar button. In addition, when reading email, you can compose a new message by clicking the toolbar’s Create Mail button.
You can create new folders to store email that you want to keep for future reference. Select File, New, Folder to display the Create Folder window in Figure 40.9. Type a folder name in the Folder Name field and click the folder where you want to insert the new one. The new folder will be a subfolder of the one you click.
If an email arrives with an attachment, you’ll see a paper clip icon to the left of the email’s From recipient in your Inbox. Figure 40.10 shows a series of emails, four of which have attachments. All have been read before except the top one from DTI Partners. The envelope icon to the left of a message’s sender’s name or email indicates whether you’ve read—indicated by an open envelope—or haven’t yet read that email.
To open the attachment, click the email’s paper clip icon and click the filename. To save the attached file to your disk, click the email’s attachment paperclip, select Save Attachments, and enter a filename. Windows Mail stores the attachment to the folder you select.
Don’t open attachments from unknown sources. Nasty viruses often arrive as email attachments. Even if someone you know sends you an email with an attachment, it doesn’t mean that the email is safe. Some Trojan programs hijack a user’s contacts list and, in the background, sends email to everyone in the contacts list from the computer owner’s email address without the owner knowing it’s happening. Keep your antivirus and spyware programs up-to-date because they should catch most of or all the problems you might have.
Windows Mail maintains a list of blocked senders. If you receive junk email or other email you no longer want to receive, right-click the message, select Junk E-mail, and select Add Sender to Blocked Senders List to add the email’s sender to your blocked emails. In the future, any emails you receive from that sender automatically go to your Junk E-mail folder. You should periodically click your Junk E-mail folder to view the mail there. Windows Mail’s Junk E-mail filter, although good, isn’t perfect and it sometimes happens that a valid email gets sent to your Junk E-mail folder by mistake.
You can ask Windows Mail’s help in cleaning up your Inbox by setting Windows Mail’s Junk E-mail filter to a higher-than-default setting. To do this, select Tools, Junk E-mail Options to open your Junk E-mail Options dialog box shown in Figure 40.11.
If you select the No Automatic Filtering option, Windows Mail sends only email you’ve requested to be blocked to your Junk E-mail folder. By raising the level of junk email filtering from Low to High, you greatly increase the number of emails that Windows Mail sends to your Junk E-mail folder, but it also sends some valid emails there by mistake. That is why it’s incumbent on you to check your Junk E-mail folder every day or two to make sure that you don’t miss a valid email.
If you select Safe List Only, Windows Mail sends all email you receive to your Junk E-mail folder except those emails sent by people in your Safe Senders list. You maintain the Safe Senders list by clicking the Junk E-Mail Options dialog box’s Safe Senders tab and adding new email addresses.
All email addresses in your Windows Contacts folder are assumed safe and Windows Mail will not block any of their emails unless you click to uncheck the option labeled Also Trust E-mail from My Windows Contacts. If you click the option labeled Automatically Add People I E-mail to the Safe Senders List, Windows Mail monitors to whom you send emails. Windows Mails adds everyone you send an email to your Safe Senders list so that they won’t be blocked in the future.
If you receive an email that contains graphics and the sender is not part of your Safe Senders list, Windows Mail blocks the graphics and puts a red X inside a box to indicate that it is blocking the graphic image from view. Windows Mail does this because viruses and spyware software can arrive in an email disguised as a graphic image; by blocking the image, Windows Mail blocks that kind of danger from infecting your computer. Figure 40.12 shows such an email. The email is from Amazon.com, a trusted source that sends email with lots of graphics that are safe from such problems.
When you receive such an email, you can click the yellow information bar above the previewed email with the blocked pictures to request that Windows Mail load the pictures and display the email as the sender intended it to display. If you then add the sender to your Safe Senders list, Windows Mail never again blocks the graphic images that come inside emails from that sender.
You can add a message to the bottom of every email you send by creating an email signature. If, for example, you routinely sell on eBay, you might want to direct all readers of your email to a list of your current auctions—an email signature could do just that. A business might require that all emails sent from the company’s domain include a privacy clause or perhaps an equal-opportunity employment clause, and an email signature is great for that purpose By creating a signature to appear automatically, the sender never has to worry about forgetting to type the message.
After you create a signature, every time you create a new email message, Windows Mail automatically adds your signature to the bottom of the email. You don’t need to do anything except send the email. To really catch the reader’s eye, you can highlight your email signature in color or format the signature to look the way you want it to look.
For that rare email you might not want to send a signature with, you can delete the signature’s text before sending the email.
To add a signature, select Tools, Options and click to select the Signatures tab. Click the New button to type a new signature in the Edit Signature box. Click Rename to rename the signature something other than Windows Mail’s default name so that you can select the signature from a list of additional signatures you might add in the future. Click the Add Signatures to All Outgoing Messages to make sure that your new email signature appears at the bottom of every email you send. You can also make sure that your email signature appears at the bottom of every email you reply to or forward, assuming that you want your signature on such emails, by unchecking the Don’t Add Signatures to Replies and Forwards option. Figure 40.13 shows the creation of a signature. After you finish the signature, click OK to save it.
The Advanced button displays a list of all email accounts currently set up in Windows Mail so that you can select which account’s email you want the signature test to appear on.
If your goal for your signature is to get the email’s recipient to click a link, that’s great because if you include a hyperlink in a signature, Windows Mail turns that link’s text into an active and clickable link. Some senders find that formatting the entire signature text as a hyperlink is more likely to grab that click than an embedded hyperlink. You’ll have to test this to see which works best in your situation.
The next time you create a new email message, Windows Mail places your default signature at the bottom of the message. Figure 40.14 shows such a message.
Adding a few blank spaces above a signature or using a smaller signature font size helps to distinguish the signature from your email message.
If you want a really fancy signature, such as one with a yellow background and perhaps a small picture, use your word processor or other web page creation program, such as Microsoft Publisher, to create a nicely formatted signature. Save the signature as an HTML file. You can use that file as your email signature in Windows Mail by clicking the File option on the Signatures dialog box and browsing to that HTML file. Select the HTML file and Windows Mail loads the HTML code and formats your signature accordingly.
This chapter explained how to use Windows Mail, Windows Vista’s free email program and newsgroup manager. Email is a major part of every Internet user’s life, and you’ll appreciate Windows Mail’s advanced support and email management simplicity. You can import all your existing email and contacts so that you’ll be ready to send emails to family and friends in no time.
If you want detailed information on a subject, you can search the Web for all kinds of data, but you’ll want to keep newsgroups in mind as another source. Windows Mail doesn’t do only mail well—it is also known as a newsreader client that enables you to access thousands of messages and files on subjects that interest you. In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to set up and use Windows Mail as a newsgroup reader.
18.225.117.233