Sending Email Messages with Outlook

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Sending Email Messages with Outlook
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Author:	Sue Mosher
Published:	January 1998
Copyright:	1998
Publisher:	29th Street Press

Abstract
Sending a message with Outlook requires four separate steps: addressing the message, composing the message and attaching files, sending the message, and delivering the message to the mail server that will forward it to the recipient. This chapter covers each of these steps in detail.

In this chapter and in Chapter 11, we finally reach the heart of Microsoft Outlook — sending and receiving messages. Sending a message requires four separate steps:

addressing the message
composing the message and attaching files
sending the message (which places it in the Outbox folder)
delivering the message to the mail server that will forward it to the recipient

Each of these steps is essential (though, in many cases, delivery is automatic) and a section of this chapter is devoted to each step. We also discuss WordMail as an alternative e-mail editor and look at the techniques for sending mail from within Windows applications. Throughout the chapter, we review various settings that affect how Outlook sends a message.

USING THE NEW MESSAGE WINDOW

Let’s begin with a look at the New Message window, where you create messages. To start a new message, click the New Mail Message button, or press Ctrl+Shift+M.

If you’re currently in the Inbox or another mail folder, you can also choose Compose, New Mail Message. An Untitled - Message window appears (Figure 10.1).

Here are several more ways to start a new message:

Select one or more names from the Contacts folder, then drag them to the Inbox icon on the Outlook Bar. This feature, called AutoCreate, creates a message that’s already addressed to those contacts.
In the Contacts folder, select one or more names, then choose Contacts, New Message to Contact or click the New Message to Contact button.
Use a special template or form. Choose Compose, Choose Template to pick from the Outlook template .oft files on your system, or choose Compose, Choose Form to use any of the available forms. (See Chapter 18 for more information about forms.)

Working with the Toolbars
Most of the commands you commonly use in creating a new message have corresponding buttons on the toolbars. Choose View, Toolbars to show or hide the Standard or Formatting toolbar.

The Formatting toolbar is active only when you are working on the text of a message. We look at it under “Composing Messages” later in this chapter.

Table 10.1 lists the buttons on the Standard toolbar. Two are available only if you connect to an Exchange server.

Allowing Blind Carbon Copies
By default, only the To and Cc boxes are visible for new outgoing messages. However, blind carbon copies — copies where the recipient name is not shown to other recipients — can also be sent by entering addresses in the Bcc box. To enable the Bcc box, choose View, “Bcc field” in any new message window. The Bcc box appears below the Cc box and will be on every message until you turn it off from the View menu.

One important use for the Bcc box is to send to personal distribution lists (see Chapter 16). If you put the address for the list in the Bcc box, then recipients will not see the names and addresses of the other people that you sent the message to.

Special Note: If you are using the Internet Mail service rather than the Microsoft Exchange Server service, you may want to see “Reply To Address” later in this chapter for another way to change the address people use to respond to your messages.

You can also use the View menu to show the From box. However, this is meaningful only if you connect to an Exchange server and are sending on behalf of another person, as we discuss in Chapter 19.

ADDRESSING MESSAGES

There are three main ways to enter an address for a message, if you didn’t create a message from the Contacts folder:

pick from the Address Book
enter a name and let Outlook match it with an Address Book entry, either automatically or manually
enter the recipient’s full address

Using Addresses from the Address Book
To pick recipients from the Address Book, click the Address Book button or choose Tools, Address Book. (You can also click the To, Cc, or Bcc button.) In the Select Names dialog box (Figure 10.2), select a name in the left pane, then click the To, Cc, or Bcc button to add it to the message. To pick several recipients at once, hold down the Ctrl key as you click each name in the left pane, then click the appropriate button to add it to the message.

The address list you see when you open the Address Book is governed by your profile. (See “Adjusting Addressing Settings” in Chapter 3.) You can switch between Contacts lists in the Outlook Address Book, names in the Personal Address Book, and any other address lists (such as the Global Address List from Exchange Server). Just pick a different list from the “Show Names from the” list at the top of the dialog box. To see details about an address, select the address, then click the Properties button.

If the name you want isn’t already in the Address Book, you can create a new address entry by clicking the New button. You have the option of using that address just for this message or also adding it to the Personal Address Book (see “Adding PAB Addresses” in Chapter 15). You cannot create a new entry in the Contacts folder from this dialog box. However, once you have an underlined address in the To box of the message, you can right-click the address and choose Add to Contacts to add it to your Contacts folder. See the next two sections for details about when Outlook underlines a name to indicate that it has been “resolved” and is ready to send to.

If you have a large address list and want to search for an individual, click the Find button shown in Figure 10.2. For most address lists, you can search for names only. But for Exchange Server address lists, including the Global Address List, you can search for both names and other details, such as company, department, office, or city.

Special Note: Outlook lets you separate addresses with a comma as well as a semicolon, but this can get confusing with address lists that use a “last name, first name” format. To turn off the comma separator, choose Tools, Options, then switch to the Sending tab and clear the check box for “Allow comma as address separator.”

Checking Names Automatically
You don’t have to use the Address Book to get names of message recipients. In fact, you can enter just part of a person’s name in the To, Cc, or Bcc box, then have Outlook look through the available address entries for you and select the appropriate full address for your message. If you’re sending to more than one person, separate addresses (or partial addresses) with a semicolon.

As you move from the To box to other fields in the message, Outlook begins to validate the names you’ve entered against the address lists in your profile. If it finds an exact, unique match, it underlines the name. If there is more than one match, Outlook underlines the name with a red squiggle, just like Microsoft Word uses for AutoSpell. Right-click on any name underlined with a red squiggle to select the address you want to use.

The real magic occurs the next time you enter that name. Outlook remembers which address you preferred earlier and uses that one. The name is underlined with a green dashed line to indicate that this was an educated guess from a nickname list that Outlook maintains. As before, you can right-click on the name and select a different address if you need to. See “Managing Nicknames” in Chapter 15 for more information about this feature.

The background AutoNameCheck feature is turned on by default. To disable it, choose Tools, Options, then switch to the Sending tab and clear the check box for “Automatic name checking.”

Using the Check Names Function
If you prefer to validate addresses manually, click the Check Names button or choose Tools, Check Names. If Outlook finds one matching address, it automatically uses that address and underlines the name. If Outlook finds more than one name, you are given a chance to choose from a list of matches, as you can see in Figure 10.3. If Outlook finds no names that match, you are asked whether you want to create a new address either just for this message or in the Personal Address Book. You can also choose Show More Names to browse the Address Book.

You can even skip the Check Names step. If you don’t resolve the addresses when you enter the recipients, Outlook goes through the Check Names process automatically when you send the message. For more about how Check Names works, see “How Outlook Looks Up an Address” in Chapter 15.

Entering Other Addresses
The addressing techniques we’ve covered so far deal with names in the Address Book — people in the Outlook Contacts folder, your Personal Address Book, or in the Microsoft Exchange Server or postoffice list. But you’re not limited to sending only to people in the Address Book. You can enter one-time addresses, used for the current message only. Each information service (both internal and external) has its own format. The formats you’re most likely to encounter are listed in Table 10.2. The brackets are required for those services for which they are listed.

Remember that you must have an appropriate information service to use any of the address types in brackets. For example, if you send a message using a one-time COMPUSERVE address but you don’t have the CompuServe Mail service installed in your current profile, the message will fail.

Special Note: If you see a different Formatting toolbar, you’re using WordMail, a method of composing and reading messages with Microsoft Word as the editor. We cover WordMail later in the chapter.

Notice the two types of Microsoft Fax addresses. As you’ll see in Chapter 13, you can use the second type of address, using an explicit number with any dialing prefixes or suffixes, to bypass the dialing properties currently set on your computer.

If you are sending to an Internet mail recipient who uses the same server as you, enter the name as [SMTP:name] without the domain.

COMPOSING MESSAGES

The two elements of your message other than the address are the subject and the body of the message. Enter the subject in the Subject box shown in Figure 10.1, then press Tab to move to the large area at the bottom of the window where you write your message. As you move, the title of the window changes to the subject of your message.

In the text box for the body of the message, you can type text, attach files, drag text from another Windows application, paste pictures, and customize your message in many different ways.

Formatting Your Message
The Formatting toolbar in the message window contains the formatting tools listed in Table 10.3. If you’ve ever used WordPad, the word processor applet that comes with Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0, you already know how to format messages in Outlook because the editor is the same one.

Figure 10.4 shows a message using the different RTF elements available to you from the formatting toolbar and the Format menu:

fonts in different sizes
color
bold, underline, italics, and strikeout
indenting
bullets
left, center, or right justification

The default font for text in new messages is 10-point Arial. To change the default, choose Tools, Options from the main Outlook menu, then switch to the Sending tab and click the Font button to display the Font dialog box. Select the font and characteristics you want to use as the default, then click OK. Note that this setting also controls the font used to display incoming messages that were not sent with RTF.

Don’t go crazy with formatting. Not all recipients can handle RTF, so all they see is a plain-text equivalent. Even for other Outlook recipients, too much formatting can clutter the message or make displaying the message take longer.

If a message cries out for complex formatting, consider creating it in your word processor and sending it as an attached file (see “Inserting Files, Items, and Objects” later in this chapter).

Choosing a Message Format
Message formats are a key concern when sending on the Internet. Right now, they’re in a state of flux. While the majority of messages are still sent in plain text, RTF is available for Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. The fastest growing format is probably HTML, which is what you find on Web pages.

When you send anything other than plain text to an Internet address, it must be converted to a format that can be sent over the Internet. This process is called encoding and is one of the main functions of any Internet e-mail utility. The two principle encoding methods for PCs are MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) and UUencode (Unix-to-Unix Encode). BinHex is another, used mostly by Macintosh mail programs.

MIME vs. UUencode
Either MIME or UUencode is set as the default encoding format in the settings for the Internet E-mail service. For the Microsoft Exchange Server service, the default method is set on the server.

If you use the Internet E-mail service, you can override the default setting for any particular message. Choose File, Properties, then switch to the Internet tab shown in Figure 10.5, and choose a format.

MIME provides the best handling for both rich text and file attachments, so it’s the usual default choice. If you send to people who can’t handle MIME, you need to switch to UUencode. Also use UUencode if your recipients complain about what looks like garble at the bottom of messages, preceded by a line that reads:

 Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

A default character set is also part of the message format set on the Internet tab (Figure 10.5). If recipients complain about stray odd characters appearing in otherwise clean text, that means their mail program can’t handle certain extended characters. Try switching to the US ASCII character set.

Special Note: If you send to the Internet via Microsoft Exchange Server, be aware that settings on the server can also affect encoding and RTF. If your messages don’t seem to look the way you expect, check with the system administrator.

For messages send to the Internet via Microsoft Exchange Server, choose File, Properties, then click Send Options to display the “Send Options for this Message” dialog box shown in Figure 10.6, The default is Don’t Know, which means to use Exchange Server’s default. You can also choose one of the other encoding methods.

You should also choose Don’t Know if you useExchange Server 5.0 and want to use the encoding method set for an individual recipient on an entry in your Personal Address Book (see “For Exchange Server 5.0 Users Only”).

The Microsoft Exchange Server tab includes the same delayed delivery and expiration options found on the Options tab of Outlook’s new message window. See “Setting Messaging Options” later in the chapter.

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