Receiving and Responding to Email Messages

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Receiving and Responding to Email Messages
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Author:	Sue Mosher
Published:	January 1998
Copyright:	1998
Publisher:	29th Street Press

Abstract
This chapter explores the Outlook Inbox and how you can retrieve your messages and how you can respond to them.

In the previous chapter, we explored Outlook’s techniques for sending messages. Now let’s look at your Inbox and see how to retrieve your messages and how you can respond to them.

GETTING YOUR MESSAGES

Just as with sending messages, getting messages can take place automatically or manually. The methods available depend on the information services in your profile and the type of connection to the mail server. There are both automatic and manual procedures, discussed in the next few sections. For details about the retrieval options available for different services, see the related chapters in Part I.

Automatic Retrieval — Unscheduled and Scheduled
If you connect to Microsoft Exchange Server on a LAN, you don’t have to take any action to get your mail. The Exchange server “pushes” new message headers — containing the subject, sender, and other message properties — to your computer. The message itself remains on the server until you open it. Only at that moment is the full text of the message sent to your computer for you to view.

Scheduled retrieval is most commonly used for any service where you connect remotely and want to receive all incoming messages, instead of selecting messages. Scheduling choices for an individual service may include

when Outlook starts
at specified intervals, such as every hour
at a particular time of day (e.g., at 12:30 p.m., while you’re at lunch)

Special Note: The Internet E-mail service does not put its scheduling option on the properties for each account. Instead, set the retrieval interval by choosing Tools, Options, then switching to the Internet E-mail tab. Select “Check for new messages every xx minute(s)” and set the desired interval. Also, Internet E-mail supports scheduled connections only when you configure it for a LAN connection, not for a dial-up connection. See “Scheduled Connections” in Chapter 6 for details.

Not all services support all these scheduling options.

Manual Retrieval — Check for New Mail or Remote Mail
There are two ways to retrieve your messages manually. From within Outlook, press F5 or use Tools, Check for New Mail to retrieve all pending messages from the services you’ve selected (see “Using Check for New Mail” in Chapter 10). At the same time, this action sends any messages waiting in your Outbox. You can also use Tools, Check for New Mail On if you have more than one service in your profile and want to choose which one(s) to check.

The other manual method is using Tools, Remote Mail. Remote Mail gives you more control over which messages you download and whether a copy is left on the server. See Chapter 12 for more details.

Synchronization
Microsoft Exchange Server users also can use Tools, Synchronize to get and send messages. See “Synchronizing Mailbox and Public Folders” in Chapter 12 for more information.

New Message Notification Options
How do you know when you have new mail? First, Outlook must be running; you won’t receive any notice of new messages until you start Outlook. One indicator that a new message has arrived is an envelope icon that appears in the system tray on the Windows taskbar. (See Figure 11.1.)

You can also check the Inbox. When you switch to the Inbox, the status bar at the bottom of the Outlook window shows the total items and the number unread. The number of unread messages also is shown in parentheses next to the folder name in the Outlook Bar and in the Folder List. Note that these numbers are totals and are not affected by any filter active in the Inbox.

Outlook lets you decide how to be notified of new mail. Choose Tools, Options to display the dialog box shown in Figure 11.2. Under “When new items arrive” on the E-mail tab, you have these choices:

Play a sound
Briefly change the mouse cursor
Display a notification message

If you choose “Play a sound,” you can change the New Mail Notification sound in the Sounds applet in the Control Panel. (See “Changing the New Mail Notification Sound” at the end of this chapter.) You can also use the Rules Wizard (see Chapter 17) to set up custom notifications for different types of messages.

READING NEW MESSAGES

New messages appear in the Inbox folder in bold with a closed envelope icon. Messages you have read are in the normal font with an open envelope icon.

To read a message, double-click it, or select it and press Enter. The message opens in a message window (Figure 11.3) similar to that used to compose new messages, but with the formatting toolbar turned off. To open several messages at once, select the messages in the Information Viewer by holding down the Ctrl key, then press Enter, or choose File, Open.

Instead of a Send button, the message window’s toolbar includes buttons for Reply, Reply to All, and Forward. Two other new buttons let you browse through other messages in the same message window without returning to the Viewer. The large up arrow opens the previous item, while the large down arrow opens the next item. Click the small arrow next to each of the large arrows for additional browsing choices, as shown in Figure 11.4.

To switch the To, Cc, and Subject fields on and off, choose View, Message Header.

If you add a preview pane to Outlook (described under “For More Information” at the end of Chapter 9), you don’t need to open most messages. You can read the text in the preview pane.

You can do a number of things with the messages in your Inbox (and other message folders). We covered these basic actions under “Working with Items” in Chapter 9:

print
delete
copy or move to another folder
save
mark with categories

Under “Categories and Message Flags” in Chapter 10, we looked at how to add a follow-up message flag to a message.

In this section, we add to your message handling skills by learning how to

view the Internet headers
work with file attachments
link to Internet resources
add addresses to the Contacts folder or the Personal Address Book
reply to or forward a message

Viewing the Internet Headers
Messages received from the Internet carry header information to indicate where a message originated and how it was routed to you. To see the header for a message, open the message, then switch to the Options tab (Figure 11.5) and look under Headers. If you are using the Internet E-mail service, you can also select a message in the Information Viewer, choose File, Properties, then switch to the Internet tab. We don’t have the space in this book to go into the details of reading Internet headers; you can find references under “For More Information” at the end of the chapter.

Working with File Attachments
If a message includes an attached file, the Information Viewer shows a paper clip icon in the Attachment column. The fastest way to open the attachment is to right-click it in the Information Viewer, then choose View Attachments. The attached file opens using the application associated with the file type. (See “File Type Associations” in Chapter 13.) A program file (for example, a .com or .exe file) runs immediately.

You can also open an attachment by opening the message, then double-clicking the attachment icon. If it’s a program file, you may get a warning (Figure 11.6) that the file could contain a computer virus. You may want to save the file to disk and run an antivirus program on it before running it.

The warning is provided by a security add-on that is included with Outlook beginning with version 8.02. It can be downloaded and added to earlier versions. (Choose Help, Microsoft on the Web, Free Stuff.) To configure this add-on, choose Tools, Options, then switch to the Attachments tab (Figure 11.7).

Caution: Even if you have Attachment Security set for High, you do not receive a warning if you right-click a message in the Information Viewer, then choose View Attachments to open the file.

To save an attachment as a separate file to your system, follow these steps from the open message:

Choose File, Save Attachments.
If there is more than one attachment, the Save All Attachments dialog box (Figure 11.8) appears, with all attachments highlighted. Click on any file that you don’t want to save; that will deselect it. Click OK to continue.
After you select attachments (or if there is only one attachment), a second Save All Attachments dialog box opens, where you can browse your system for the folder where you want to save the file(s). Click OK to finish saving the attachments.

Other things you can do with file attachments in an open message:

To view the file in Quick View, right-click the file icon, then choose Quick View from the pop-up menu. (You must have installed Quick View as part of Windows for this to work.)
Another way to save an attached file is to right-click the file icon, then choose Save As from the pop-up menu.
To print an attachment, right-click the file icon, then choose Print from the pop-up menu.

To save an attachment from the Information Viewer, select a file, then choose File, Save Attachments. You’ll see a menu of all included attachments plus a choice for All Attachments, if there is more than one. Make your choice, then proceed as in steps 2 and 3 above.

Activating Internet Links
In an open message, links to Internet resources appear in underlined blue text, just as they would in the default colors for a typical Internet browser. See Figure 11.9 for an example. If you move the pointer over this text, it changes to an arrow. Click on an underlined http: link to start your Internet browser and go to the Web site.

If the link is a mailto link, rather than an http link, a new message window opens with the address of the recipient filled in (see “Sending from Applications and the Internet” in Chapter 10).

Adding Addresses
Outlook does not automatically save addresses from all incoming or outgoing messages to either the Contacts folder or the Personal Address Book. (Frankly, I get so much e-mail that I wouldn’t want it to!) Instead, it offers several methods for copying addresses from messages to an address list.

To copy an address to the PAB,

Open the message.
Right-click on the address in the From, To, or Cc field.
Choose Add to Personal Address Book from the pop-up menu.

To copy an address to the Contacts folder,
Open the message.
Right-click the address in the From, To, or Cc field.
Choose Add to Contacts from the pop-up menu.
Fill in other details on the Contact form for the new recipient, then choose Save and Close.

Here’s another way to copy an address to the Contacts folder along with information from the incoming message:

In the Information Viewer, drag the message to the Contacts icon in the Outlook Bar.
Fill in the details on the Contact form that appears for the new recipient, then choose Save and Close.

This method creates a contact from the From address and inserts the text of the incoming message into the text box at the bottom of the Contact window. I like this technique, because it lets me keep information that reminds me why I added that person to Contacts. If the message includes company name, phone number, and other details, I can come back to the record later and copy the information into the Contacts fields when I feel the need.

If you drag an e-mail message to the Contacts icon with the right mouse button, then release the button, you have several choices for how you create the new contact from the message:

Copy Here as Contact with Text
Copy Here as Contact with Shortcut
Copy Here as Contact with Attachment
Move Here as Contact with Attachment

Still another method of creating a new contact is with a custom action for the Rules Wizard. See “Understanding Custom Actions” in Chapter 17.

Marking as Read or Unread
When you open a message, Outlook automatically marks it as read and changes the way it’s displayed in the Information Viewer. Even though you have read a message, you may want to leave it marked unread to call attention to it. To mark a message as unread, select it in the Information Viewer, then choose Edit, Mark as Unread. The Edit menu also contains options for Mark as Read and Mark All as Read.

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