Dragging and Dropping to a Windows Mail Message If you want to send a new message containing some text from another message or document, all you have to do is drag and drop. Windows Mail must be open for this to work, but it can be minimized as follows:

1. Highlight the text that you want to send. If the text is in a Windows Mail message, you can highlight it in either the message window or the Preview pane. If it’s in another document, such as a text file or a Microsoft Word document, highlight it there.

2. Drag and drop the highlighted text onto any message folder except the outbox. If Windows Mail is minimized, hover over its Taskbar button until it opens. If the Folders pane is not displayed, hover over the folder name on the folder bar until the Folders list appears. Drop onto a mail folder for mail, or onto a news folder for news. A New Message window appears containing only the text you highlighted. No header information appears in the new message, and no quote characters are included.

Using Windows Mail with E-mail Windows Mail operates in mail mode by default, but you can switch mail modes by highlighting a mail folder in the Folder List pane.

Handling Multiple Email Accounts

If you have multiple e-mail server accounts, you can poll a single account for e-mail manually. Just choose Tools -> Send and Receive, and then choose the account from the submenu that appears. You can choose which e-mail accounts are polled when you click the Send And Receive button (which does the same thing as Tools -> Send and Receive -> Send And Receive All). Just click Tools -> Accounts, highlight a mail account, click the Properties button, and mark or clear the Include This Account When Receiving Mail or Synchronizing check box. This also works to choose which accounts Windows Mail polls automatically. Replies to your messages will still go to your stated e-mail address (the reply address you indicate in the General tab of each account’s Properties dialog box) even though you don’t necessarily send out your e-mail through the SMTP server at your e-mail address location.

Choosing Which Account to Send

Your Messages Through If you have multiple e-mail server accounts, the New Message window gives you the ability to choose which account the message will be delivered through. This is true even if you are replying to a message that may have been delivered through a different account. Each account has a specific SMTP outgoing mail server. To associate a specific account with a message, use the drop-down menu button at the right end of the From field. If you don’t specify an account, Windows Mail sends the message through your default mail server account. Because each account can have a separate Internet connection, and because you can stack mail in your outbox, it is quite possible to click the Send And Receive button and have Windows Mail call up multiple ISPs and send out mail through each of them.

Waving When the Mail Arrives You can make your computer play a tune (play a

.wav or Windows Media Video,

.wmv, file) when your mail arrives. To do this, choose Tools -> Options, click the General tab, and select the Play Sound When New Messages Arrive check box. This only makes sense if you have marked Check for New Messages Every [ ] Minute(s) in the same tab. Windows Mail must be running for the tune to play. (And if you receive your mail from the Internet and not an Intranet, you have to be connected to the Internet as well.) To pick the sound to play, right-click the Volume icon in the Windows Vista system tray and choose Sounds. Then, in the Program list, scroll down to New Mail Notification. Click Sounds to pick a default sound. Or, click Browse to find another sound file you’d like to use.

Leaving Mail on the Server If you are traveling, you might want to leave mail messages on your mail server until you get back, even though you want to read them now. That way, you can download them to your office computer when you return. To do this, choose Tools -> Accounts, highlight your mail server, click the Properties button, click the Advanced tab, and mark the Leave a Copy of Messages on Server check box.

Converting the Mail You can import Exchange, Outlook, Outlook Express 6, and Windows Mail 7 messages into Windows Mail format. In Windows Mail, just choose File -> Import and then Messages.

Reading and Managing Messages Electronic messages differ from other types of messages in several ways, but one of the most significant is the ease in composing and sending messages electronically. This ease contributes to the absolute flood of messages that many people send and receive on a regular basis. Fortunately, Windows Mail offers several ways for you to deal with all of these messages - as you’ll see in the following sections.

Did You Receive the Message? When you send an important letter the old-fashioned way, you can ask the post office to notify you when the letter is delivered. It’s possible for e-mail to work the same way. Actually it’s not quite the same, because there’s no friendly postal carrier to hand the letter to the addressee and ask him or her to sign the receipt. Still, you can ask to be notified when someone opens a message you have sent. In the New Message window, select Tools -> Request Read Receipt. You can set this globally for all messages you send by choosing Tools -> Options -> Receipts and marking Request A Read Receipt For All Sent Messages. But before you select this check box, consider: do you really want to clutter your inbox with all those receipts? If you receive a message with a receipt request, Windows Mail will ask whether you want to send a receipt. You can set it to Always Send A Read Receipt or to Never Send A Read Receipt by marking the appropriate box on the Receipts tab of the Tools -> Options dialog box. If you decide to always send a receipt, you will probably want to make an exception for mailing lists by marking the Always send a read receipt check box. If you frequently send or receive digitally signed messages, it can be very helpful to verify that the message arrived free of security errors. You set the behavior for secure receipts separately from the nonsecure kind, using the same Tools -> Options -> Receipts dialog box.

Choosing Your Columns You can choose which columns to display in the Message pane. To do this, right-click any column header button and click Columns (or choose View -> Columns). In the Columns dialog box, mark the columns you want to see and clear those you don’t. Use the Move Up button and the Move Down button to set the order in which columns will appear (or you can drag the column header buttons to position them). Each message folder can have different column settings. For example, if you find the Flag column isn’t useful and is just taking up space, you can turn it off. Although you will still be able to flag a message, you won’t see the icons in the Message pane and will be unable to sort by flag. If you have more than one incoming mail account, you might want to view the Account column. That way, you can easily see where a message came from without bothering with message rules. The Account column can also be very helpful in your Outbox.

Composing and Sending Messages You can associate a new mail message with a specific account at the time that the message is composed. This is especially helpful if you have multiple users with different accounts on the same computer.

1. Open a New Message window by clicking Message, New Message.

2. Click anywhere in the From field to display a list of your accounts.

3. Select the mail account you want to use when sending the message.

What’s the Drafts Folder For? The Drafts folder is a place to keep messages that you’re not yet ready to send. When you are composing a message and you choose File -> Save, your unfinished message is automatically stored in the Drafts folder. If you close a New Message window without sending the message and click Yes when asked if you want to save it, the message will be stored in Drafts. To finish editing a message stored in the Drafts folder, double-click the message to open it. When you click the Send button, Windows Mail moves it from the Drafts folder to the outbox.

Quoting in Replies and Forwards When you reply to an e-mail message, it’s helpful if you can distinguish the text you write from the message text you are replying to. In plain text messages, the standard is to place a > symbol in front of each quoted line of text. Fortunately, Windows Mail does this by default. But to configure related functionality, follow these steps:

1. Choose Tools -> Options in the Windows Mail window, and click the Send tab.

2. Make sure that the Include Message in Reply check box is marked. (This is the default.) If this option is deselected, your replies will be much harder to understand since they will not include a copy of the original message.

3. On this same tab, click the Plain Text Settings button under Mail Sending Format. Make sure Indent the Original Text with [ ] When Replying Or Forwarding is marked. Windows Mail no longer lets you use a character other than > at the beginning of each line of quoted text.

4. Click OK. So far, so good. But this kind of quoting only works as long as you are replying to a message sent using plain text. Messages sent using MIME/Quoted Printable (such as HTMLformatted messages) don’t insert line endings, so there are no line beginnings for Windows Mail to mark with >. Instead, the text is formatted in paragraphs. Even if you tell Windows Mail to reply in plain text, it will still not place a > at the beginning of quoted lines if they weren’t originally composed in plain text. Instead, quoted HTML text is indented with a vertical bar along its left side.

Messages Formatted in HTML Windows Mail formats your e-mail messages and newsgroup posts using HTML by default. Choose Tools -> Options, and click the Send tab to override the default setting for the current newsgroup post or e-mail message. Just choose Format in the New Message window, and click Rich Text (HTML) or Plain Text. If you’re using HTML, you get a formatting toolbar that lets you choose the font, font size, font color, and so on. Lots of newsgroup and e-mail clients aren’t able to display HTML-formatted text. If they can’t, your correspondents will see the HTML tags embedded in the plain text of your messages - something that they might not appreciate. Frankly, HTML e-mail is generally obnoxious. Our advice is to use plain text for both e-mail and newsgroup messages.

Stationery If you do use HTML e-mail, you can configure Windows Mail to automatically start a new blank message with your chosen background color, background image, font, and margins. You can choose from among the existing stationery files, create new stationery, create stationery that is just a background color, or download new stationery from Microsoft. To pick a default stationery type, choose Tools -> Options -> Compose, mark the Mail or News check box under Stationery, and click the Select button. You get to preview the stationery before you select it. After you have chosen a stationery type, clicking New Mail or New Post will open a New Message window with that stationery already included in the message. There is a downside to marking Indent Messages on Reply, however, if you like to intersperse replies with quoted text to simulate a conversation. If you insert your reply after a section of quoted text, you’ll find the new text is also indented with the vertical bar. To get rid of the indent and the bar, first place your insertion point in the quoted text where you want to insert your reply text and press Enter - this inserts a line break. Then with your insertion point in the new paragraph, click the Paragraph Style toolbar button and click Normal. Even though the drop-down list shows that the current paragraph is already Normal, this will work. Your new text will be flush left and will not have a vertical bar. Press Ctrl+F2 to see that the source code of the HTML e-mail file that Windows Mail uses to create the stationery has been inserted into your new message, including the name of the associated GIF file. In addition, at the top of this HTML view of your message, you’ll find a reference pointing to the folder that holds the stationery’s image file. If you want to create a message with something other than the default stationery, click the down arrow to the right of the New Mail or New Post button. You can pick the stationery or choose no stationery at all.

Attachments Here’s how to handle all those incoming e-mail attachments.

Saving Attachments To save an attachment to a message you have received, double-click the message header in the message header pane to display the message in a separate window. Then drag and drop the attachment icon from the Attach field into a folder or onto the desktop. You can also right-click the attachment icon and click Save As. To save an attachment without opening a separate message window, click the message header, and then click the paper clip icon in the upper-right corner of the preview pane (the Show Preview Pane Header check box must be marked in the View -> Layout dialog box). A menu listing the names of the attachments in the message appears. Click the name of the attachment you want to open. If you instead choose Save Attachments from this menu, you can browse to a folder for saving more than one at a time. You can also just highlight the message header and choose File -> Save Attachments.