Windows Mail and Contacts

Back when Microsoft shipped Windows 95, e-mail was a corporate curiosity, but today, e-mail is a pervasive presence in many people’s lives, both personal and professional. For years, Windows has been saddled with an almost universally loathed e-mail client called Outlook Express. Unfortunately, that e-mail client carries through to Windows Vista, albeit with a new name: Windows Mail. On the flipside, Windows Vista does introduce a dramatically improved contacts management system, based on XML technology, called Windows Contacts. We’ll examine the facets of both Windows Vista features in this article.

Windows Mail Basics In previous versions of Windows, Microsoft offered a bare bones e-mail and newsgroup client called Outlook Express. The name suggested that Outlook Express was somehow related to Microsoft’s premier e-mail and personal information management client, Outlook, although nothing could be further from the truth. Oddly, Outlook Express includes certain functionality that was never included in Outlook - primarily support for USENET Newsgroups - whereas Outlook, of course, includes numerous features not found in Outlook Express, including Exchange Server support, calendaring and tasks, and more. In Windows Vista, Outlook Express has been replaced by a new mail client called Windows Mail, shown in article 18-1. So you might be forgiven if you think that Microsoft has finally replaced the lackluster Outlook Express with something better. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s happened. Instead, Windows Mail is nothing more than a minor upgrade to Outlook Express, presented in a warmed-over user interface that’s only barely updated to look a bit like other Windows Vista applications. In fact, Windows Mail is actually missing a few features from Outlook Express.

Configuring Windows Mail To use Windows Mail with your e-mail account, you need to get the names of the SMTP and POP3 servers at your Internet service provider (ISP), as well as your e-mail address and e-mail password, your account name (user ID), and your logon password. In the Windows Mail window, choose Tools -> Accounts, and then Add -> E-Mail Account to start configuring your Internet mail account. By default, Internet Explorer uses Windows Mail as the mail tool when you click an e-mail address while viewing a web page. If you want to use another e-mail client (such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird) you can change this default behavior. To do so, right-click the Start button, choose Properties, and then click Customize. In the bottom of the Customize Start menu dialog box, click the E-mail link button to pick the default client. To read the articles (also called messages or postings) in newsgroups, you need to connect to a news server. Your ISP probably maintains a news server, but Windows Mail is already preconfigured with a newsgroup account called Microsoft Communities that provides access to Microsoft’s public product support newsgroup server. You can also connect to other news servers. To connect to a news server, choose Newsgroup Account in the New Account wizard.

Changing Windows Mail Options Right Away We don’t like the default configurations for Windows Mail - especially for the first-time user. We suggest that you make the following changes along with us: Choose Tools and then Options. Click the Read tab, and mark the Automatically Expand Grouped Messages check box. Now you won’t have to click the plus symbol repeatedly to follow a conversation thread, at the slight cost of seeing multiple entries in a thread that you might not be particularly interested in. On the Signatures tab, enter at least a rudimentary signature - your name at least - or other information that will appear in the bottom of every e-mail message or newsgroup message you send. You can make additional signatures and get more elaborate as discussed later in this article, but we suggest that you don’t get carried away. Mark the Add Signatures to All Outgoing Messages check box. You can choose Insert -> Signature in a New Message window to insert your default signature when you write a message, but if you usually use the same signature it’s easier and more consistent to let the computer do it for you. To automatically associate a particular signature with a mail or news account, highlight it in the Signatures list and click the Advanced button. In the Advanced Signature Settings dialog box, check all the accounts for which this signature is to be the default. For these accounts only, doing so will override the general default signature setting. Make sure that the Send Messages Immediately check box in the Send tab (Tools -> Options) is marked if you work online or want to have messages sent as soon as you finish writing them. If you work offline, clear this check box, and choose Tools -> Send And Receive when you’re ready to send your mail. You can also just click the Send And Receive button in the Windows Mail toolbar to send mail from your Outbox to the mail server. If you are browsing the Internet online and click an e-mail address on a web page to send a message, that message will not go out right away unless the Send Messages Immediately check box is marked. Instead it will wait in your outbox until you click the Send And Receive button in Windows Mail.

More Windows Mail Features The Windows Mail window is divided into three panes. The message header pane (the one on the top right) lists the message headers, and the preview pane (the one on the bottom right) displays the contents of whatever message you have selected in the message header pane. You can arrange these two panes either horizontally or vertically. To do this, choose View -> Layout -> Below Messages or Beside Messages (actually below or beside message headers). By default, Windows Mail displays its folders in a large pane on the left, called the Folder List. Unlike its predecessor, Outlook Express, however, Windows Mail does not display the contents of your address article in a pane on the lower left. Unfortunately, there’s no way to enable this old feature. When you single-click a message header, you can view its contents in the preview pane. This works just fine most of the time. If you want to view a message in a new (and bigger) window, double-click the message header. If you want to get rid of the preview pane and only view messages in separate message windows, choose View -> Layout and clear the Show Preview Pane check box. Typically, you’ll want to leave the preview pane open, however. If you want news messages to appear in the preview pane as soon as you select them, choose Tools -> Options, click the Read tab, and make sure the Automatically Download Message When Viewing in the Preview Pane option is selected. When this option is turned off, you have to press the spacebar after selecting a message to display its contents in the preview pane. If you don’t like the column order in the message header pane, drag the gray column header buttons to the desired position. You can also change the width of the columns by resting your mouse on the spacer line between column header buttons and dragging to the right or the left. To sort your messages by a particular column (such as the Subject column), click the column header button. To sort by the same column in reverse order, click the button again. To add or remove columns, right-click the column header and choose Columns, then check or clear the boxes for the columns you want to display. If you’re using the preview pane to view your messages, you can get a little extra room by hiding the header bar at the top of the preview pane. To do this, choose View -> Layout -> Show Preview Pane Header. The tradeoff is that you lose the ability to quickly open or save attachments by clicking the paper clip button in the header bar. For this reason, you should leave the header on. If you right-click the Windows Mail toolbar and choose Customize, you’ll notice that you can change its content and appearance. The toolbar gets a lot bigger and more readable if you make the icons bigger (choose Large Icons from the Icon Options list) and take out the text under the buttons (choose No Text Labels from the Text Options list). You can also get rid of the toolbar altogether by choosing View -> Layout, and then clearing the check mark next to Toolbar. Sadly, Microsoft removed the popular Outlook bar in this version, so that’s no longer an option.

Using the Views Bar Right-click your toolbar and you’ll see a menu item named Views Bar. Click it to display a handy drop-down list of view types. Now you can easily see whether you’ve chosen Show All Messages, Hide Read Or Ignored Messages, or Hide Read Messsages. You can drag the Views bar below or above the regular toolbar if you’d like.

The Folder Bar and Folder List The folder bar is a thick gray stripe under the toolbar that lists your current message folder and identity. When the Folder List pane is not displayed, you can use the folder bar to verify which folder you’re in and navigate to another. Click the name of the current folder in the folder bar to display a drop-down folder list. The folders list works similarly to the Folder List pane, in that you can right-click folders in it, and use it to drag and drop. You may decide not to display the Folder List pane, and to use the folder list instead. This gives you a wider Preview pane and makes it easier to read messages without opening them. To turn off the Folder List pane, click the Close Window button in the upper-right corner of the pane - or choose View -> Layout, Clear Folder List, and then click OK. If you prefer to display the Folder List pane, you might find that the folder bar takes up too much real estate in your Windows Mail window. To turn the folder bar off, choose View -> Layout, and clear the Folder Bar check box. If you do this, you may want to put the Folder List button on your toolbar so you can toggle the Folder List pane on and off without using the folder bar.

Working Online or Offline If you have a constant Internet connection, you can work online all the time without worrying about it. But if you want to compose e-mail offline, such as when you’re on a plane, you sometimes need a way to use communications applications such as Windows Mail and Internet Explorer without trying to communicate with the server. For example, when you move from your inbox to a news folder, Windows Mail attempts to connect to that news server if you are working online. This might also happen when you highlight the header of an e-mail message that links to a web site. If you just want to look at the messages without connecting, first switch to working offline. This setting is global for all of your applications that use it, so if you are offline in Internet Explorer, you are also offline in Windows Mail. The standard way to change your work online/work offline setting is by choosing File -> Work. But Windows Mail offers two other ways to both see and change your current state. One is an Offline button that you can add to your mail or news toolbar. When you are working offline, it appears to be depressed. The button’s icon and text show you what will happen if you click it, not your current state. Some of us find this confusing. More convenient than the toolbar button is the status bar at the bottom of your Windows Mail window. Not only does the status bar clearly indicate your current online/offline state, but in Windows Mail it toggles on and off with a simple double-click. Best of all, it’s visible all the time by default.

Using a Nondefault Mail or News Account If you have set up more than one mail account, when you start a new mail message you will see a From field at the top of the New Message window displaying your default mail account. Likewise, when you reply to a mail message, the From field in your reply will display the account to which the original message was sent, but give you the option to change the account from which your reply is sent. News messages prompt you with a dialog box to choose the account to use. It’s really easy to choose a different mail account or news server for your message. Click the down arrow to the right of the From (or News Server) field in the message header and select from the list of active accounts. When a message is in your outbox, you can look in the Account column to see which account it will use. (If you don’t see that column, rightclick a column header, click Columns, mark the Account check box in the Columns list, and then click OK.)

What’s That Pushpin For? You may have noticed a pushpin icon in the lower-right corner of the Send And Receive dialog box in Windows Mail. Or you may never have noticed it. The purpose of the pushpin is to tell you how the dialog box will behave. Normally, the point of the pushpin points to the left. This indicates that the dialog box will close automatically after your e-mail messages are downloaded. But if you click the pushpin, it will appear as though it’s sticking into the screen, indicating that now the dialog box will stay visible after the download is complete. That can be useful if you want to review the tasks Windows Mail went through in sending and receiving messages. If Windows Mail encounters any errors, the dialog box stays visible with the Errors tab in front, even if the pushpin is out. In either case, you can just click the Hide button to send the dialog box away.