Our Favorite Tips: Outlook Express
Store old mail (Simon)
Click File/New/Folder... to create an extra folder for storing mail from or to a specific customer, about a project, or for a certain year. You can create a folder underneath any other folder, or directly under Local Folders.
Keep your folders empty (Steve)
Clients often ask ITS about problems sending or receiving mail in Outlook Express. As we covered in last issue's Q&A, cleaning out the Inbox, Sent Items and Deleted Items folders are crucial to keeping mail flowing.
Color code messages (Amy)
Click Tools/Message Rules/Mail. Create a new message rule (if you don't have any rules yet, it will start a new rule for you). Select Where the From line contains people and the action Highlight it with color. Click "people" and add the e-mail address you wish to color code. Click "color" and choose a color from the list. Rename the rule and click OK to save.
Sort mail automatically (Steve)
We all keep too much mail. Why not let your mail program do some of your work for you? Use Message Rules to automatically sort incoming mail to specific folders. For example, create an "ITS" folder and then create a Message Rule to sort all mail with "@teamITS.com" in the "from" line into that folder.
Back up important mail (Steve)
Normally e-mail is downloaded to each user's computer. Should you be backing up certain users' e-mail every night when you back up the data on your file server? Are you?
Sign your e-mail (Simon)
Click Tools/Options... and then select the Signatures tab to automatically add a signature block to outgoing messages. Typical usage includes a user's name, company, and contact information. If you check mail from multiple mailboxes you can even set up more than one signature for your replies.
September 2005
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