Outlook Express


Outlook Express is the mail and news reader that comes with Internet Explorer 4. The mail and news reader are seamlessly combined into one program. I will discuss the mail first, as most everything that I will discuss about the mail reader is also true for the news.

When you start outlook express, you will see this screen:

You have the options here to go into the mail or go into the news, go into the address book, compose a new message, find people (using 411, and other directory services), or download all (new messages from all accounts, and news servers).

The Mailreader

If you click read mail, it will take you into the mail reader window.

This window gives you a list of all the mail folders(inbox, outbox, etc.), and news servers.

Now the reason I've labelled the toolbars and different windows is that they are fully customizeable. Any toolbar you want or don't want can be added, removed or placed by your choice. If you click on view, and layout, you will get the following screen.

you can uncheck or check as many toolbars as you like. You can also customize which side of the window you want the basic toolbar or button bar to be on, (for exapmle top, left, bottom or right side of the window). You can also customize the toolbar. You can do that by clicking the customize toolbar button here, or if you right click on the toolbar in Outlook Express you will get a window with buttons, align->, and text buttons checkbox. If you click on buttons it will take you to this customize toolbar screen.

Now that's all the different ways you can customize the look of outlook express, now more of the general use questions that most people will be asking.

Attachments

With Internet mail and news 1.0, and up, it has really simplified the receiving of attachments. When a message arrives with an attachment, Outlook Express can decode it if it was sent using mime, UUENCODE, or BASE64. Then it just gives a little paperclip icon, or an icon at the bottom of the message.

Now if windows knows the file type (its associated), then you can just double click the icon, and launch the program that's associated with it. Security has never been of much concern in the past when it comes to e-mail. Now this presents a small problem, when hackerguy@2600.com sends a message with iloveyou.exe as an attachment. The less savvy computer users among us, might just double click it to see what it is. Next thing you know, no hard drive. That's why you will see below, that you must specify a security zone for your e-mail messages to run in.

The Settings

Outlook express stores its mail settings in two places. There is tools and accounts, which has more of the actual mail server and account settings, and tools and options which has more of the personal preferences as to how you would like to read your mail, etc.

Tools-Accounts
BEFORE YOU CHECK ANYONE'S OUTLOOK EXPRESS SETTINGS, IF YOU THINK A SETTING IS WRONG, HAVE THEM DOUBLE CLICK ON THE C:\EROLS\INSTAL.INS, TO RESET ALL OF THEIR SETTINGS. THIS COULD VERY EASILY SAVE YOU 20-30 MINUTES. THAT WILL RESET ALL THE SETTINGS TO THE WAY IT WAS WHEN THEY FIRST INSTALLED THE SOFTWARE.

There is also a program on the cd-rom d:\erols\askinfo.exe, that will run and ask the user their Full name, username, password, and local access number, and it will reinput these into the instal.ins which you can then db-click, to reset their settings.
On the "all " tab You will see all accounts under outlook express. This includes Mail servers, News servers, and directory services. You can get to the properties of any account from this tab, but it may be easier to click on the mail tab or the news tab to get the customer to select the correct account.

If you click on pop.erols.com(default) and hit properties, you will get these screens.

Since pop.erols.com is the default account you will see that the Include this account while doing a full send and receive is checked. In fact when adding any new mail account, that will be checked by default. To check the mail on an account that is not checked with send and receive, go up to tools, click on send and receive, and you will have a pull-out menu that gives you all the mail accounts, just select the one whose mail you would like to check.

On the connection tab, I would like to mention how the connection preferences seem to work in IE4. There is basically a hierarchy of connection settings. The top being the most overriding, and the bottom being the last one to be checked.

Internet settings (in control panel) or view-internet options in IE

|

Tools-Accounts-connection in Outlook Express

|

Tools-options-dial-up in outlook express

So even if both tools and accounts, and tools and options are not set to dial, but control panel, internet settings are set to dial, then outlook express will dial. Also, The tools-optoins, dial-up tab will be grayed out if tools and accounts is set to use a lan.

You will see on this screen, if you have a digital ID, you can send secure mail. This also requires the recipient to have a digital ID as well. It will encode the message with the sender's Digital ID (also called certificates) and can only be decoded by the recipients, by way of their digital ID's. Digital Id's are also computer specific, you cannot move a digital ID from one machine to another. You will see the get digital id button there which will take you to a microsoft page that will point you to verisign very easily. For more info on digital Id's check out http://www.verisign.com/

The Advanced tab under tools and options is the only place to leave mail on the server. Note also that if someone screws up or plays with the server port number, you can hit the use defaults button and it will set them back to 110, and 25.

If you click on news.erols.com(default) on the news tab (or any tab) and hit properties, you will get the following screens:

Tools-Options
AGAIN - BEFORE YOU CHECK ANYONE'S OUTLOOK EXPRESS SETTINGS, IF YOU THINK A SETTING IS WRONG, HAVE THEM DOUBLE CLICK ON THE C:\EROLS\INSTAL.INS, TO RESET ALL OF THEIR SETTINGS. THIS COULD VERY EASILY SAVE YOU 20-30 MINUTES. THAT WILL RESET ALL THE SETTINGS TO THE WAY IT WAS WHEN THEY FIRST INSTALLED THE SOFTWARE.

Notice here you have the option of sending HTML formatted mail or just regular plain text e-mail. It is set by default, to send plain text only. The reason for this is that you may type a text only message, but if you have it set to send as HTML, it will throw some font tags and stuff in there, even if you just type in text.

The spelling tab is only present if microsoft office is installed. Notice that you can set it to check the spelling of an e-mail message before sending

Now with accounts set up like this you can see that you could easily create multiple e-mail accounts. And also you could createmultiple news servers as well, and use them all just as easily as you've been able to use a single mail account in the past.

That's great you might think, but it will dump all the separate accounts' mail into the inbox. How do I keep it from doing that?

Inbox Assistant
Inbox Assistant is the filter for Outlook Express. Note that you can specify that all messages sent to a certain account can be filtered to an e-mail box. You can reply with a standard form letter. Outlook Express also starts a new file extension for windows, *.eml, for e-mail files. Now notice you cannot reply with an e-mail that is actually in outlook express, you must create an e-mail message and save it as a .eml file on your hard drive. If you click the add button on the screen below, you will get a list of the rules you can apply to your incoming e-mail.

Using Newsreader
When you first add a news server, or the first time you go into Outlook Express after installing erol's software, it will give you a message asking if you would like to see a list of newsgroups. That will take you to this screen. (this is an example of secnews.netscape.com) To get to this screen again, you can always hit the NEWSGROUPS button in Outlook Express. Or click on tools (with the news server highlighted) and click newsgroups. Or you can also right click on the news server and click on newsgroups there.

The window that you get on this screen, is a small search utility that searches through the text of the newsgroups for anything you enter in the box that says: Display newsgroups which contain: In this example here, I did a search for navigator and it found all the newsgroups with navigator in the name.

To subscribe to a newsgroup, just highlight the group you want to subscribe to, and click the subscribe button. When you subscribe to a newsgroup, the newsgroup will show up as a subfolder (sort of) of the news server. Now if you click on the + sign next to the news server, below it, it will show a list of the subscribed newsgroups.

News Settings
The settings in Tools and Options are for the entire program, so we don't need to cover those again. The news accounts settings are practically the same as the ones for the mail.

On the general tab, notice that the full name, organization, and e-mail address, and reply to address are in the news settings as well. this way you could have gurnles@nospam.erols.com as your reply to address when posting to newsgroups.

The news reader has its own version of Inbox assistant called Newsgroup Filters. It basically performs limited filtering functions for the newsgroups. This is what it lloks like if you try to add a new newsgroup filter.

That's about it for outlook express. It's your basic mail program, with just some new locations for settings.