EMAIL USING OUTLOOK EXPRESS

What is email?

Opening and Closing outlook express

Creating and using Personal Accounts

Folders

Saving Email to Folders

Creating a Message

Replying to a message

Returned Mail

Email Viruses

Mail Spamming

Email Etiquette

What is Email?

An e-mail message has always been nothing more than a simple text message -- a piece of text sent to a recipient. In the beginning and even today, e-mail messages tend to be short pieces of text, although the ability to add attachments now makes many e-mail messages quite long. Even with attachments, however, e-mail messages continue to be text messages 

Email Client

When you receive email, you need to look at them using a computer program or email client. Many people use well-known stand-alone clients like Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora or Pegasus. In this lesson we will look at how to use outlook express email client People who subscribe to free e-mail services like Hotmail or Yahoo use an e-mail client that appears in a Web page. No matter which type of client you are using, it generally does four things:
 

Opening and Closing Outlook Express

To start outlook express:

1. Start              
2. All programs                                        
3. Outlook express                  

To Close outlook express

1. Click File
2. Exit or Exit and Log Off

You can also close outlook express by clicking the close button   
If you are using Identities in outlook express you can use the "Exit and Log Off" option on the File Menu.

Note: If many people are using the same computer and don't have log-in accounts they can create identities and password protect those identities so that others don't access their mail.
Since we are sharing the modem over the network, be careful not to disconnect the modem while others are using the internet.

 Creating and Using Personal Accounts

Since everyone uses a personal log-in account, there will be a user profile for each one on the hard disk. Ideally, we could let the system create a default store location for messages, but this would mean that you would need to get on that particular computer to read your new and old messages. I've created an "email" directory under each user's directory on the Datec(Celeron) system and the "email" directory will be made the default storage location for outlook express email addresses.

To Create an account:

1. Click Tools from the Menu bar
2. Accounts (You will get the picture above)
3. Click the Mail Tab
4. Add
5. Mail
6. Type in your Name and email address and click Next
7. The POP3 and SMTP servers will have the same name eg. mail.datec.net.pg
   Click Next
8. Put in your account name, this is usually the first part of the email address before the "@" sign. eg. tadiguma.
   Type in your password, this is the password given by the ISP, You can also change this password on Datec's system.
   The check box for Remember Password should be left blank, and allows you to type in your password all the time. From experience, many people forget their passwords, and have to ask the ISP to reset their passwords when they are setting up accounts on another computer. 
9. Click Finish

The account can be modified by clicking the properties button.

Folders

Existing Folders

Outlook Express has the following pre-defined folders, which can't be modified

1. Inbox - All incoming messages old/new are kept
2. Outbox - Mail ready to be sent when connection is made
3. Sent Items - All sent messages are kept in this folder
4. Deleted Items - All deleted messages are kept here
5. Drafts - Draft messages are kept here and can be modified later before sending them

Creating New Folders

New folders can be created to store particular type of messages. For instance you might want to store messages you receive from kristus. You would create a folder called "KRISTUS", and when a message from Kristus members arrive you would move them to this folder.

To create a new folder , say under the "local folders"

1. Place the cursor on "Local Folders"
2. Click File on the Menu bar
3. Folder
4. New
5. Type in the name of the New Folder

You could also right-click and select new folder to create a new folder

Creating a Message

To Create a new message                      

1. Click the Create Mail button on the toolbar  
2. A new Message window will appear                  
   
   
3. Type in the addresses of the recipients and write your message in the message box.
   "To" -  address of the recipient. If there is more than one recipient, then separate the addresses with a semi-colon (;)
   "Cc" -  Address of the person who is to receive a copy of the message
   "Bcc" - Address of a blind carbon copy recipient. 
   "Subject" - Identify a meaningful subject for the mail.
4. When you finish with the message, click the Send button. If the line is not connected, your message will be placed in the outbox, and sent the next time you connect.

Clicking the send/receive button
from the main outlook express window will send messages and receive new ones
 

Spell Checks

It is important to check your message for spelling mistakes before you click the send button.

To do a spell check:

1. Click Tools
2. Spelling                     

or use can press F7 or click the spell check button

Sending Attachments

Your email message is purely text. If you want to send other file types, say word documents, excel spread sheets or other formats, you need to attach them to your message.

When you finish typing your message from the new message window:

1. Click Insert from the menu bar
2. Click File Attachment
   

You can also click the Attach Button

Note that with slow internet connections, like Yagaum at the moment, it can take a long time send or receive attachments. Therefore consider the file sizes before sending them as attachments. Use compression software like WinZip to compress the files before sending them.

Replying to Messages

To reply to a message:

1. Highlight the message you want to reply to   
2. Press the Reply button
3. The recipient's address is automatically inserted in the "To"  box. The original message will also be in the message box, and you can see the message and reply to it.
4. Click the Send button when you're done.

If you want everyone who received this message to get your reply you click the Reply All  button

Forwarding a message 

If you receive mail and wish to forward the mail to others:

1. Click the message
2. Click Message from Menu bar
3. Forward                                       

A forward message box will appear, Notice the subject line starts with Fw: to show that the message is being forwarded. 
You can also click the   
forward button from the toolbar.
Another way is to:

1. Select the message
2. right-click the message
3. Forward

Returned Mail

If the mail you sent gets returned to you, there are several reasons, it is possible that you typed the wrong email address,  you miss-spelt the address. That is why you need to have an address book, where you can select your contacts rather than typing their address every time you want to email them.

It could also be possible that the email server that hosts the address doesn't host the email address anymore or the recipient changed their address.

Saving Email to Folders

You can save your message to the folders you create or from the existing folders.
To move a message to a folder:

1. Right-Click the message
2. Move To Folder
3. Select the destination folder for the message

You could also:

1. Highlight the message
2. Click Edit from the Menu bar
3. Move To Folder

Deleting and Copying messages to another folder follow similar steps, except that you select the Copy to Folder or Delete options.

Email Viruses

Email Viruses are spread through email communication. Someone writes a virus program and sends it through email to a recipient on the internet. This program comes as an attachment in the email, either as a program on its own or as some other file format, like a Microsoft word document. When the recipient opens the attachment, it might not be obvious in the first place. After some time of using the computer the virus will start to infect the file system or the boot system of the computer, and by that time others on the internet will have already received the virus.
Infected user's notify the anti-virus software companies who then update their anti-virus software to help destroy this computer virus.

Therefore the cycle is:

1. Release - The virus is released.
2. Recognition - Someone recognizes the virus.
3. Virus recognition database update - Antivirus programs will now recognize the virus.
4. Antivirus update and removal tools

The time between step one and step three above can be significant. During this time you are vulnerable to getting the virus because your anti-virus software will not recognize it as a virus. This is why you should be careful about the e-mail attachments that you open, even if you are actively running anti-virus software

How Viruses Work

1. When a victim of a virus double clicks on an infected attachment, the virus will run.
2. The virus will modify the victim's system so it will always be active when the system is turned on.
3. The virus will scan the victim's address book in their e-mail client program such as Outlook or Outlook Express.
4. In the past, viruses would then mail themselves to addresses found in the victim's address book. But today many viruses choose random recipients and senders from the victim's address book. This means that although the e-mail is sent from the victim's machine, the e-mail sender address is faked to appear as though someone else in the victim's address book sent the message

What to Do

• Always run anti-virus software and be sure it gets updated at least twice per week.
• If you get a virus in an e-mail attachment and you are sure it is a virus, delete the e-mail message.
• If you get an attachment from someone you know, consider whether there is enough personal information in the e-mail which a virus program would not know. If you are not sure your acquaintance sent the e-mail call them and be sure before opening the attachment. Do not count on your anti-virus software being able to stop you from getting infected if you open the e-mail attachment. Remember, viruses are not recognized right away by your anti-virus software and you could get a new unrecognised virus before your virus definition updates are released.
• If you get an e-mail saying a message you sent was undeliverable and you did not send the message, consider whether your system is behaving abnormally. You probably do not have a virus, but if you are not sure, use your anti-virus software to perform a system scan for viruses and remove any viruses found using the procedure in the section about "Removing Viruses", then delete the e-mail.
• If you get an e-mail saying a message you sent contained a virus, consider whether your system is behaving abnormally. You probably do not have a virus, but if you are not sure, use your anti-virus software to perform a system scan for viruses and remove any viruses found using the procedure in the section about "Removing Viruses", then delete the e-mail.

Mail Spamming

Spam is unsolicited junk e-mail sent to large numbers of e-mail addresses. It is used to promote some product or service and many Spam e-mails are pornographic in nature.

Spam Prevention

Unfortunately there are not very many good ways of preventing Spam other than keeping your e-mail address secret. It should be kept at a level of security somewhere between your phone number and your PIN number . You should be careful about who you give your email address to. Many companies will sell your email address to Spam lists, thus making it available to spammers.

Before you subscribe on the internet and give your email address to companies or host organizations, be careful to read the company's privacy policy. Sometimes companies will have a good privacy policy but doesn't really implement those policies. Subscriptions to pornographic sites is the worst situation someone can get to. In PNG pornographic material of any form including electronic is illegal.
If you can't prevent Spam, the obvious thing to do would be to change your email address and notify other people who communicate with you about the changes.

Effects Of Mail Spamming

When you connect to the internet, you are paying for a specific service for your use. This service costs a specific amount of money and provides a certain connection speed to the internet. This connection speed indicates your bandwidth. The greater the connection speed, the higher the bandwidth. The higher speed connections cost more money. At this point you have paid for the privilege of surfing the internet with your web browser, sending and receiving e-mail, and other activities. The speed at which you can do this is limited by your bandwidth and how fast you can click pages or send or receive e-mail. Consider the Following diagram

Each person has a connection to the internet. If the person on the right chooses to use their connection to send e-mail or junk e-mail (Spam), that is their choice. They are paying for their connection and they are willing to use it in that manner.

If the person on the left does not want to receive Spam, but wants to read personal e-mail and surf the internet, they are willing to receive only personal e-mail. If someone is sending them a lot of Spam, they will need to wait for the junk e-mail to be delivered before they can read much of their personal e-mail. They are an unwilling participant regarding the unsolicited e-mail they are receiving. Not only is their connection being used by someone else, but it will take them additional time to sort the mix of e-mail out to get to the mail they want to read. If the receiver had willingly stated that they were interested in receiving the advertisements, it would be another matter.

Of course the sender of the Spam is not using all the Spam receiver's internet connection, but the Spam receiver does not get the opportunity to use their connection in the way they fully intended even though they were the one paying for it. This is the same as stealing even though the effective amount may be small. Imagine, how rich you could be if you could only steal a fraction of a cent per day or week from everyone who uses the internet. That's why Spam should be illegal.

Someone may argue that Spam is the same as junk mail sent through the postal service so why would it be stealing. This is not true since the sender of mail through the postal service pays for the cost of both pickup and delivery. On the internet, the sender pays for the cost of pickup and the receiver pays for the cost of delivery.

Email Etiquette

Electronic mail is a relatively new form of communication, and the number of new users is increasing dramatically. As a consequence, few people are aware of appropriate conventions to use. The following are general guidelines for email users'.

Good practice

1. Check your mail regularly. Ignoring a mail message is discourteous and confusing to the sender.
2. Always reply, even if a brief acknowledgment is all you can manage. There is still sufficient unreliability about email transmissions to create doubt in the mind of the sender that you ever received it.
3. Reply promptly. Email systems often do not have the conventional "pending" trays of the desktop, nor secretaries to remind you, so it may be easier to forget an email message.
4. Develop an orderly filing system for those email messages you wish to keep; delete unwanted ones to conserve disk space.
5. Try to keep email messages fairly brief. Most people wouldn't choose a computer screen to read text on in preference to a printed document, and it can get very tiring for some users. Try to restrict yourself to one or two screen-fulls at most.
6. Make sure that the "subject" field of your email message is meaningful. Where someone receives many messages, it can be very confusing and frustrating not to be able to judge the subject matter correctly from its subject field. When you use the "reply" option, ensure that the subject field (automatically filled in for you) still accurately reflects the content of your message.
7. Try to restrict yourself to one subject per message, sending multiple messages if you have multiple subjects. This helps recipients to use the "subject" field to manage the messages they have received.
8. Don't reproduce an email message in full when responding to it, especially if you are posting to a bulletin board. This is hard on the readers and wasteful of resources. Instead, be selective in the parts that you reproduce in order to respond.
9. Be tolerant of others' mistakes. Some people are new to this medium and may not be good typists, or they may accidentally delete your message and ask you to resend it.
10. Be very careful how you express yourself, especially if you feel heated about the subject (for instance if you are shooting off a quick response to some issue). Email lacks the other cues and clues that convey the sense in which what you say is to be taken, and you can easily convey the wrong impression. If you meant something in jest, use a "smiley" [ :-) ] to convey that.
11. Remember that people other than the person to whom it's addressed may see your message; ie recognise that anyone along the chain of distribution could get to see what you have said, and it might even end up in someone else's hands.

    Email abuse

12. Don't extract and use text from someone else's message without acknowledgment. This is plagiarism. You wouldn't do this with conventional mail, so don't let the ease of being able to do it with email lead you into bad habits.
13. Don't make changes to someone else's message and pass it on without making it clear where you have made the changes. This would be misrepresentation.
14. Don't pretend you are someone else when sending mail, eg by using someone else's account to send it. Note that it is not advisable that people lend accounts in the first place.
15. Don't broadcast email messages unnecessarily. It's very easy to send "junk mail", but it can be very annoying to recipients (and wastes resources). Also, do not send or forward chain email - it offends some people and is wasteful of network resources.
16. Don't send frivolous, abusive or defamatory messages. Apart from being discourteous or offensive, they may break the law.
17. Remember that the various Laws of the land relating to written communication apply equally to email messages, including the laws relating to defamation, copyright, obscenity, fraudulent misrepresentation, freedom of information, and wrongful discrimination.

    And finally...

18. Encourage others to communicate with you by email. Ensure you give them your correct email address - include it on your business card and letterhead.
19. Also remember that sending email from your organizations domain name is similar to sending a letter using your organizations letterhead, so don't say anything that might bring discredit or embarrassment to the organization.

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