Last week, we went through the basics of
Outlook Express (OE). Now it is time for slightly more complex
operations to take advantage of the power that begs to be used. In
this case, more complexity means more power. OE has a variety of
tools that make importing, filtering, and sorting easy. They use
your mail database's flexibility to perform surprisingly effective
actions.
Importing Mail
As Microsoft wants you to switch to Outlook Express easily - it
makes it easier to get more customers, of course - the importing
functionality is pretty nifty. In fact, its simplicity makes it
worthwhile. Before you do an import, I suggest that you increase
the amount of memory allocated to OE and to the application you are
importing from. If you have a large message database, a high amount
of memory could be necessary. All you need to do is to click once
on the application icon, go to the File menu, down to Get Info, and
in the submenu, select Memory. One megabyte equals 1024 kilobytes,
and convert the number of megs you want to allocate into kilobytes,
and type the number in the Preferred Size field. Do it for both
applications. If you have a lot of data to import, you should
not go without this preliminary step since your software may crash
during a massive import.
For this example, I chose to do an import from Eudora. To start
importing, switch to Outlook Express and to go the File menu. Hit
Import item, and you will have to choose to import from an
application. Click on the right pointing arrow, and this is what
you will see. Choose the application from there. Note that you can
export your mail into a text file if you used another client than
the four major apps below, and instead of importing from an
application, you import from a text file.
Specify, in the next screen, what you wish to import, and then
OE will take care of the rest for you. The larger your
message database and number of contacts, the more time it will
take. Once done, you just have to close the import module.
As you can see in this screenshot, you will get a folder that
reproduces your mailboxes or folders exactly as they were in your
former email application. All you need to do is to move your
messages from there. If you wish to have the same structure of
mailboxes, just take the messages of the In, Out and Trash folder
and drag them in OE's Inbox, Outbox and Deleted Items folders.
Trash those old folders. Then, recreate folders with the same names
of your custom folders, to drag and drop your messages from the old
ones to the new ones. You are set.
Mail Rules
Outlook Express 5 offers different flavors of filtering power,
and the Rules represent a large chunk of it. I can tell you what
this function can do, but it will necessitate more work on your
side. I'll throw the ball, and you get to run with it. I will show
you the generic pattern of Outlook Express rules, which you will
find in all the categories of rules in the software.
Go to the Tools menu and select Rules. You will see five panes:
POP, IMAP, HOTMAIL, News, and Outgoing. As the typical mail rule is
for POP accounts, and unless it is for a different time of account,
select POP. Click on the New button, and you will get this window.
We will see the meaning of each item and functions that can be
performed through them.
In this case, I set up a simple filter by subject. It will look
for messages with the Welcome to Outlook Express subject and mark
it with the highest priority in the mailbox.
The result: OE tagged my message with the highest priority.
Yipee!
Rule name: all you need to do there is to type the name
of the rule. Use something that will sound familiar since you want
to remember what the heck it does.
If: This portion is where you define what Outlook
Express has to detect in order to apply an action to a message. You
can add multiple criteria if a message has more the one
characteristic. The Execute actions popup menu offers to filter if
a message meets any or all the criteria, or if doesn't meet any or
all of the criteria. Then, the next popup menu displays All
Messages by default. Click on it and select what you want OE to
look for. There is a variety of items. OE can look for messages
depending on their sender, their location, their subject line,
their body text, and many more. Once done, a second popup menu can
appear to require you to specify attributes. If you selected
Subject for OE to look at subject lines for filtering, you will
have to specify if it has to start or end with something, contain
or not contain something, or to be exactly the match or opposite of
what you typed. Once that's done, you are likely to see a text
field where you need to type what text string OE has to look for in
the specified area.
Then: Once OE has detected which messages to filter, it
will apply an action. The first popup menu is there to select what
you wish to do. You can move messages in your database, change
their priority, category and perform many other actions. You can
apply multiple actions, of course. For most actions, you will also
get a text field or a second popup menu to specify attributes of
the action. In the above example, I had to choose between Highest,
High, Normal, Low and Lowest as a priority. The Stop applying rules
to this message checkbox should be checked to ensure that your
other actions won't mess up with the already filtered message, and
the Enabled box should be checked when you want the rule to be
active.
Click on OK, you are done. Reward yourself with a Pepsi if
tired. Then come back here, since we're not done.
Mailing List Manager
The Mailing List Manager will handle all the mail from your
mailing lists and filter them for you. It works independently and
does it very well. Hit the Tools menu and select Mailing List
Manager. Click on New to add a mailing list.
Give it a name in the Name text field. Then, type the List
Address. This address is the one used to send messages to the list.
You usually find that information in the welcome message after
subscribing. You can copy and paste it if you like. This is the key
to filtering the mailing list successfully. After that, a popup
menu will require that you select where you want its messages to be
filtered. If you like clean and organized environments, create a
folder for your mailing list (File menu --> New --> Folder;
then type a folder name). Select the folder in the popup menu. This
will make OE file the list's messages in the appropriate
folder.
Click on the Advanced pane. In the first section, you can store
information about the list to retrieve it later. This is totally
optional, but useful if you don't want to bother list members to
get basic information. You can specify if you wish to see actions
performed on list messages, such as adding a prefix to the subject
line. This is especially nice to tell messages apart if you don't
filter your list messages to separate folders.
The When Replying section allows you to decide whether you want
to override list behavior and always reply to senders or to the
list. This is especially useful if you want to always reply to the
list, while the list is set up for you to reply to senders! Click
on OK. Set up as many lists as you need to filter.
Junk Mail Filter
It is simple to use, but so darn powerful. It will detect spam
better than most spam filters. If you adjust its sensitivity to
Average, it should be just fine. If you wish, increase it by a
notch to tighten the grip. Make sure to use the big text field
to add the domain names of organizations that send you newsletters
and other messages that the filter tries to tag as junk. The
Junk Mail Filter is strong enough that it will consider newsletters
as spam, without knowing if they were solicited. Once you add the
domain names of people who are not spammers, you'll be set.
To know what domain name to use, look at the From field of the
sender and take the domain name after the @ sign.
Make sure to leave the "Set color" checkbox checked, so that the
gray color will minimize the visibility of messages. The Mark as
read checkbox is great to make sure that you do not need to open
the message in question to mark it as read before deleting. If you
wish, set up a Mail Rule to filter junk messages to the trash, but
I recommend that you filter them to a custom folder that you'd name
Spam. Click on OK.
Message status
Finally, sorting messages can be done by applying little
actions. You can tag messages with a flag or priority to sort by
importance once everything is in the right folder, or mostly, in
your Inbox. It can be done from OE's main window toolbar, the
Message menu or a contextual menu. Look for these items: Flag,
Clear Flag, Mark as Read, Mark as Unread and Set priority.
Flag a message if you NEED to reply to it soon.
We are done for this week. Now you know how to filter your mail
and manage your mailboxes for a maximum of order and efficiency.
Next week, we will take a look at more features.
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your
message database and number of contacts, the more time it will
take. Once done, you just have to close the import module.
