Basic tips for e-mail management with Outlook Express

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Those of you who have already embraced the Internet, can you imagine life without E-mail?

With E-mail, we can now easily and economically keep in touch with family, relatives and business relations anywhere around the world. For those who always hunger for the latest news, several Web sites, including CNN, PC World and Air Security International, offer free services that will update you about almost any affair or subject you could think of -- on a daily basis. Suddenly, opening our E-mail becomes a required routine, because if we ever let a day pass without checking our messages we may be swamped by hundreds of them the next day. The Inbox will become a heap of unread newspaper. We know that an important piece of information is buried somewhere in there, but finding it has now become quite a challenge for our willpower.

I guess Microsoft's Outlook Express is one of the most popular E-mail programs in use today. I like it very much and so do most of the people that I know. It is also free. The three-panel interface really makes E-mail management, well, manageable. You can see the folders for the incoming and outgoing messages, the list of messages in each folder and the content of the selected message. Of course, like most Windows programs, you can customize the panels to your liking.

One of the most powerful tools in Outlook Express is its Inbox Assistance and not many people I know of have been using this tool. Today I will share with you how the aptly named assistant has been assisting me in managing my daily dose of E-mail messages.

Folders

When we first install it, Outlook Express has standard folders called Inbox, Outbox, Sent Items, Deleted Items and Drafts. The The Inbox folder is where we normally find all incoming E-mail. When we click the Send and Receive button, the program will fetch the new E-mail messages from our Internet mail server, drop them into Inbox and add their headings to the list of contents. We can distinguish new messages from the old because the new ones have their headings displayed in bold type.

If you routinely receive E-mail messages from different sources, you can create additional folders for each of them so that they will not crowd the Inbox folder. For example, I subscribe to CNN's Headline News Brief Mail, and I receive a news E-mail from them every day. So I have created a dedicated CNN folder.

To do this, I just placed the mouse cursor on the word Outlook Express in the folder list panel, clicked the right mouse button and clicked on Create new folder. I did the same for all the tips that I receive daily from PC World's TipWorld.

Once I had created these new folders, I had to specify the "rules" in the Inbox Assistant so that arriving E-mail messages would go directly to their appropriate folders. I clicked on the Tools menu item, and then on Inbox Assistant. The dialog box would appear, and I then clicked on the Add button. This would bring up the Properties dialog box.

Inbox Assistant allows us to create rules that virtually read as follows: "If the sender is HeadlineNewsMail then place the message in the CNN folder". So, what we need to do now is set up the rules. The first step is to tell Inbox Assistant what to look out for. Obviously, we would like it to first check the sender.

To specify the sender, I did not even have to type in the entire address line. In fact, if the sender's address was already Address Book, I would not even have to retype it. I could just click on the Address Book icon next to the "From" box, find the address and select it.

Anyway, once I had specified the source of the messages that I wanted Inbox Assistant to watch out for, I had to tell it what to do with them. Under Perform the following action, I chose Move to, and I clicked on the Folder button to specify where the messages should be stored. I had to do this for each of the different sources; I would need one rule for CNN, another for TipWorld, etc.

When I had completed all the rules, I clicked on OK and that was it. The next time I got a message from TipWorld, for example, it would go directly into its own folder. Deleting all these messages in one sweep will be very easy now.

Ring the bell

Now, to add a little fun to all this, you can also tell the computer to notify you every time you receive a new E-mail message. I asked my daughter Irene to record the sentence "Hi Dad, you've got an E-mail" using the computer's microphone and Sound Recorder utility (click on Start, Programs, Accessories, Entertainment, Sound Recorder). I saved the sound file in the C:WindowsMedia folder, and I gave it the name You got mail--like Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan's movie title. Then I clicked on Start, Settings, Control Panel, Sounds. I scrolled down to New Mail Notification and replaced the audio file with the one that contains Irene's voice. Now, each time I get an E-mail I will be notified by Irene.

Back to Inbox Assistant, you can also instruct it to simply delete spams -- unsolicited promotional E-mail messages -- if you regularly receive them. All you have to do is specify the source and then choose Delete off server as the action it should take.

If you're going to be away and don't expect to be able to check your E-mail for some time, you can also have Inbox Assistant to automatically send a response to inform specific senders or even all senders about your upcoming absence. You have to prepare the reply note in Notepad, then select the file when you choose Reply with in Inbox Assistant's Properties dialog box.

E-mail is a Godsend. But when you receive too many of them every day, then it will be time for you to learn to manage it. Otherwise, you'll be crushed by E-mail overload in no time. Luckily, there are more tips and hints on managing E-mail available on the Internet. If you wish, you can visit http://www.windows-help.net/windows95/oetips-idx-nf.shtml for thousands of more tips.

Finally, here's a URL if you want a list of keyboard shortcuts for Outlook Express: http://www.i-america.net/OExpTips.htm.