5 great Outlook Express tips

From the pages of the New Riders Publishing book, Windows XP Killer Tips, we've pulled together some tips that are sure to improve your computer productivity when using Microsoft Outlook Express, the free e-mail program included with Internet Explorer.

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Send e-mail to a group

If you often send the same e-mail message to several people, such as your family, friends, or co-workers, you should create a group. Groups make it much easier to send a message to several different people.

To create a group, follow these steps:

1.	Click the Addresses button on the toolbar to open your address book.
2.	Click the New button on your Address Book toolbar, and click New Group.
3.	This opens the New Group Properties dialog box, in which you can name the group and select members from your existing contacts. Click the Select Members button to add contacts to your group. When you are finished, click OK.
4.	Your new group's name now appears in Contacts in your Address Book. To send an e-mail message to the group, simply type or select the group's name in the "To" field of the message, and you'll automatically send everyone in the group the message. Something to keep in mind when sending e-mail to groups is that everyone receiving the message will see the e-mail address for each member on the list. There's a clever way around this problem, however. On a new message window, click the To button to select the recipients, but instead of adding your group to the To list, add it to the Bcc (Blind Carbon Copy) list. Now when you send messages to the group, members will only see who sent the message, not who the recipients are.

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Add a signature to the bottom of your messages

You can use e-mail signatures to include your phone number, instant messenger addresses, and any other information about yourself at the bottom of your messages. You don't have to type this information each time you send e-mail (unless you just really like to type). You can create a signature once and add it to your messages whenever you want.

Follow these steps to add a signature to your messages:

1.	Click the Tools menu, and then click Options.
2.	In the Options dialog box, click the Signatures tab.
3.	Next, click the New button to add a signature. Then, click the Rename button and type a name for your signature.
4.	In the Edit Signature box, click Text, type your signature, and then click OK.
5.	To use your new signature, create a new message and place your cursor in the message where you want your signature to appear. Now, click the Insert menu, and then click Signature to place the signature into your message.

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Organize e-mail into folders

With all the clutter that e-mail can create, it's easy to overlook an important message that you need to respond to. One way to keep things straight is to create a "Things To Do" folder where you can store e-mail to be worked on later. To create a Things To Do folder, follow these steps:

1.	Right-click Local Folders, and then click New Folder.
2.	Next, type a name for your new folder (such as "Things To Do") and click OK. Now you'll see your new folder listed under Local Folders.

I create separate folders to store responses to invitations, e-mail with useful reference information (such as gardening tips), and e-mail that I want to save forever.

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Block a sender

Are you getting annoying e-mail from someone? If you are, you can block the sender's e-mail address so that you won't see their messages. When you block an e-mail address, any mail received from that address is automatically placed in your Deleted Items folder. You don't ever have to see it.

To block a sender, click their e-mail message, click the Message menu, and then click Block Sender. This instantly adds the sender's e-mail address to your Blocked Senders List.

To remove someone from the list, follow these steps:

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Use sorting to find a lost message

If you can't find a message, click any column header to sort your messages quickly. For example, if all you remember is that you received a message last Wednesday, click the Received column heading to list your messages by the date and time they were received. If you remember the subject of the message, click Subject to sort messages by their subject line.

If you have multiple accounts, you may want to sort by using the Accounts column. This will tell you which accounts received messages. However, the Accounts column isn't displayed by default. To add the Accounts column, or several other useful columns, follow these steps:

1.	Right-click any column header, and then click Columns.
2.	In the Columns dialog box, select the columns that you want to appear. You can also arrange columns by grabbing any column header and dragging and dropping it in any order you'd like.
3.	Click OK to return to Outlook Express with the new columns added.

These tips are from the book, Windows XP Killer Tips by Kleber Stephenson, ISBN 073571357X. Published here with the permission of Pearson Education, Inc.

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