Welcome to the third and last segment of this Outlook Express
(OE) tutorial. We went through the most important features of OE in
the last couple of weeks. To put the icing on the cake, let's
examine a bunch of convenient features available at your
fingertips. They are mostly useful to personalize OE or simply to
make your email handling easier.
Rewrap
The rewrap button is located in the toolbar in every message you
open with Outlook Express. If you feel that a message's text
wrapping is messed up or just not right, click on this button, and
it will take care of wrapping the text in a standard way. It will
handle quotes just fine, by the way.
Message Editing
When you receive a message and decide to keep it, you may judge
that only a part of it is relevant and that you want to change the
subject line to make it easier to remember. Open the message and
hit the Edit button in the message window's toolbar. If the message
came in HTML format, OE will alert you that it will remove the
formatting. Just click on OK. Then, the subject line will turn into
a text field and the body text will be easy to edit. Once done,
reach for the File menu and hit the Save item.
Attribution
In OE, you can modify the attribution like to whatever you want
it to be. The standard "Joe Public wrote" could be a little boring,
and it is one standard that you can avoid without doing much harm.
You have to remember, however, to keep it short without impolite
words. Pull down the Edit menu and select Preferences. Click on the
Compose tab. Look for the text fields at the bottom of the window.
Take a look at the screen shot below.
The first thing you have to notice is how the attribution line
is structured for OE to display it right. The elements you can add
in are in capital letters between [] signs. When you add [NAME] to
the line, OE will put the name of the sender in the attribution
line. The same applies to [DATE] and [ADDRESS]. The default in the
preferences is on [DATE], [NAME] wrote. The most simple
thing is to use [NAME] wrote: or [NAME] said: to make
it short. People don't need you to remind them their email address
and the moment when they sent you a message. They have all of this
stored in their email database. Just build your attribution line
with this information.
HTML
HTML email is rather controversial, mostly because HTML is
not popular in email and you need to respect people's wish
to get plain text email unless you want them to categorize you a
rude and stupid. All you need to do is to select plain text as your
default. Pull down the Edit menu and select Preferences. Click on
the Compose tab. The second category of composing preferences is
Messages, and just under it, you see Mail format. You can
see it in the screen shot above. Make sure that it is set to Plain
Text. Then, go down to Reply and Forward in the window. Make sure
to uncheck the checkbox for "Reply to messages in the format in
which they were sent". This will ensure that all the mail you send
is in plain text. Plain text is an email standard that people
really want to be respected, and it is a great idea to do just
that.
Notification
Each time you receive or send email, you will hear a sound to
indicate what happened. Don't like the default sounds? It is time
to download something more appropriate. Visit the Sound Set Central and have
fun. Once you downloaded a bunch of sound sets, you need to try
them out. Take the files and open the Outlook Express folder. It
contains a folder named Sound Sets. Drop the sound set files in
that folder. Close OE and launch it again. Go to the edit menu, hit
Preferences and click on the Notification tab.
Select your sound set from the pop up menu. Click on the speaker
icons to test the sounds attached to a notification. If you want my
sound set, email
. If you want to make your own sound set, you need to get
Expression
from the Sound Set Central and follow the instructions that
come with it to build your own.
Search your database
OK. You have this hot date tonight and you can't find the recipe
that mom emailed you. You little devil. You know that it's there
but you can't find it. You have two choices. You report the date or
search through your database. Pull down the Edit menu, and select
Advanced Find. Don't bother with the other Find.
It works like the mail rules, which we studied
last week. You add and remove criteria at will and make sure to
check "All Folders" since the message could be anywhere in your
mail database. Make sure to use criteria that can be found in the
message. Make sure that they are accurate or relevant. Then, click
on Find. You will get a results window and you can retrieve your
message from there. I recommend that you print that recipe, by the
way :-)
Address Book
Adding entries to the address book is not complicated. Click on
the Address Book icon in your folders list and
click on New in the main window's toolbar. Once there, you enter
the information in the text fields and click on Save in the entry
window's toolbar.
What I want to show you is how simple it is to add a contact to
the address book... from a message you received! Control-click on
the message and select Add Sender To Address Book. You're done! The
name and email address are now together in a contact. If you wish
to edit it and add more information, then just go back to the
address book and double click the contact to make changes, and then
save everything.
AppleScript
Outlook Express is scriptable. That means you can use custom
AppleScripts to perform light and complex operations on your
messages and database. As this is complicated to write, I highly
recommend that you visit AppleScript
Central and see how you can make OE work with custom scripts.
Meanwhile, look at the menu with an AppleScript icon and test the
already present scripts with an open message to see what they can
do.
Final Advice
After reading these three tutorials, you now know everything you
need to know to take full advantage of the features in Outlook
Express. All I can tell you is that you should experiment with
these tips, and then come back here to read the tutorials again if
you are unsure. You can, of course, email
if you need further
help. But again, experiment! Don't be afraid of screwing up. It's
part of learning, and it will help you to become a power user and
control your email like never before.
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list and
click on New in the main window's toolbar. Once there, you enter
the information in the text fields and click on Save in the entry
window's toolbar.
