Chapter 5: Exchanging E-mail, IMs, and Newsgroups In This Chapter Getting onboard for e-mail Using Outlook Express and Microsoft Mail Using enhanced Microsoft Live Mail features Keep
Trang 1Taking Internet Explorer 7 Shortcuts 584
Table 4-8 ((c conttiin nued d))
Task Microsoft Internet Explorer Mozilla Firefox
Complete org Address 2 N/A Ctrl + Shift + Enter
Decrease Text Size Ctrl + - Ctrl +
F3
Shift + F3
Forward Shift + Backspace Shift + Backspace
Increase Text Size Ctrl + + Ctrl + +
Open Link in New Tab Ctrl + Enter Ctrl + Enter
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Taking Internet Explorer 7 Shortcuts 585
Task Microsoft Internet Explorer Mozilla Firefox
Open Link in New Window Shift + Enter Shift + Enter Open Address in New Tab 2 Alt + Enter Alt + Enter
Previous Tab Ctrl + Shift + Tab Ctrl + Shift + Tab
Ctrl + PageUp
Ctrl + Y
Reload (override cache) Ctrl + F5 Ctrl + F5
Ctrl + Shift + R
Select Location Bar Alt + D Ctrl + L
Ctrl + Tab
entry in text field
Complete entry in text field
in Search Bar
Engine in Search Bar Select Tab [1 to 9] Ctrl + [1 to 9] Ctrl + [1 to 9]
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Table 4-9 Mouse Shortcuts in Internet Explorer and Firefox
Task Microsoft Internet Explorer Mozilla Firefox
Back Shift + Scroll down Shift + Scroll down
Decrease Text Size Ctrl + Scroll up Ctrl + Scroll up Forward Shift + Scroll up Shift + Scroll up Increase Text Size Ctrl + Scroll down Ctrl + Scroll down
Open in Background Tab N/A Ctrl + click 2
Middle-click Open in Foreground Tab N/A Ctrl + Shift + click 2
Shift + middle-click 2 Open in New Window Shift + click Shift + click
Trang 4Chapter 5: Exchanging E-mail, IMs, and Newsgroups
In This Chapter
Getting onboard for e-mail
Using Outlook Express and Microsoft Mail
Using enhanced Microsoft Live Mail features
Keeping e-mail safer
Using instant messaging — right now
For many people, most important communication now arrives in elec-tronic form: letters, notices, invoices, greeting cards, bank statements, and even junk mail The Postal Service and competitors like FedEx, UPS, and DHL are mostly relegated to delivering packages ordered over the Internet and some of the remaining forms of media still holding on to print and paper: magazines, books, and a diminishing number of catalogs
In more recent times, we have seen the rise of an even-more-urgent form of
communication: instant messaging (IM) This system opens a virtual channel
between two (or more) computers, and once you establish a link it allows you to send quick notes IM services have expanded to allow file attachment and many permit streaming video or audio connections The principal differ-ence between IM communication and e-mail is that IM parties have to be online at the same time, just as they would be in a telephone call
Yet another form of electronic communication is the newsgroup, which
actually draws its roots from before the rise of the Internet Today, privately operated bulletin boards are mostly obsolete, but they’re very common
on commercial sites If you visit Microsoft in search of help with Windows, you’re likely to be directed to their “knowledge base” of information; some
of the material may be provided by the manufacturer and some may come from users
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Fielding Microsoft’s Triple Play
With the arrival of Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced a new e-mail and newsgroup client with the wonderfully clever name of Windows Mail It suc-ceeds a program with a confusing and vague name, Outlook Express And within a few months after Windows Vista was released, Microsoft came out with yet another program, Windows Live Mail
Allow me to attempt to untangle these threads:
✦ Outlook Express is a basic e-mail client that has been a part of Internet
Explorer since Version 4 was released in 1997 (The current version of Internet Explorer is Version 7, with a newer edition expected in 2008 or 2009.) Just to make things confusing, Microsoft offered a more fully fea-tured e-mail and calendar program called Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Office Outlook as part of certain of its Office suites Outlook and Outlook Express are distantly related; despite its name, Outlook Express isn’t a stripped-down version
✦ Windows Mail was launched as a part of Windows Vista in early 2007.
The program was an upgrade and replacement for Outlook Express but only for Vista users And in a move that probably made sense to the mar-keting department (or the legal department), Windows Mail is consid-ered part of the Vista operating system and not part of Internet Explorer
✦ Windows Live Mail arrived in late 2007 as a replacement for both
Windows Mail and Outlook Express You can install it on any system running Windows Vista or Windows XP with Service Pack 2 This version of an e-mail client includes the features of Windows Mail as well as some visual enhancements that make it fit into Microsoft’s plans for its Windows Live Web-based product line, as well as some technical improvements Windows Live Mail is a free download for registered users
That’s BBS
Soon after the arrival of computers in acade-mia, homes, and offices came bulletin board services (BBS) which were, as the name sug-gests, forms of one-way-at-a-time communica-tion You could dial up a BBS anywhere in the
world and post a question or read an answer or even download a file or program BBS opera-tors monitored the boards from time to time, mostly to enforce whatever rules of propriety
or security the owner chose to put into effect
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Should you upgrade your e-mail client from Windows Mail to Windows Live Mail, or from Outlook Express to Windows Live Mail? In my opinion, the answer is yes but there’s no reason to rush to action
If e-mail is critical to your personal or business life, I suggest waiting a while before taking the plunge Let others be the guinea pigs, testing out the new software Check the message boards at the support departments
of Microsoft and read the web sites of computer reviews and wait for the electrons (and the inevitable glitches of a new program) to settle
Of course, if your machine is running Windows Vista, you have no choice in the matter The operating system automatically includes Windows Mail, and Microsoft has declared its intention to persuade users to download Windows Live Mail, although it isn’t yet required
Bypassing Microsoft Though Microsoft might want you to think otherwise, other companies sell e-mail clients and some organizations even give them away
✦ Eudora Distributed by Qualcomm (and named, in a nice touch, after the
short-story author Eudora Welty) In 2007, Qualcomm ended active development on the software
✦ Mozilla Thunderbird What Qualcomm endorsed after ending Eudora
development You can get this free application (as well as the free Mozilla Firefox Internet browser) at www.mozilla.com
Getting ready for e-mail
To use e-mail on a laptop, you need the following:
Why I don’t live at the PO
Although it’s electronic in nature, e-mail’s basic structure is a system more like the old Post Office than the new Internet You can send someone an e-mail any time and the recipient can read and receive it whenever she chooses
to (providing her laptop or desktop is turned on)
When the first e-mail services were launched, they were called “store and forward” systems;
your message was received by an intermediary computer and held there until the recipient picked up messages Today, that structure still is
in place Although most of us now have
always-on Internet calways-onnectialways-ons (broadband modems, WiFi, or cellular signals) and mail pops up in our inbox whenever we’re on our computers
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✦ Internet access For a direct connection to an e-mail server you need an
account with an Internet service provider (ISP) If you’ll use your laptop
on the road through an Internet café (or as an add-on to an existing shared network), you can access most e-mail services through whatever service they provide
✦ An e-mail program or Web-based service As noted, these include
Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail, Outlook Express, Microsoft Office Outlook, Eudora, and Thunderbird You can also connect to e-mail servers through Web-based portals that reach into the proprietary sys-tems of ISPs, or are free standalone services open to any Internet user; these include Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail
✦ An e-mail address Provided by an ISP or Web-based e-mail service,
or created when you register for your own domain An e-mail address consists of
• A user name
• An @ sign (pronounced at)
• Domain name The user name can be your real name, your nickname, or anything else you want as an identifier The domain name consists of a label registered for a company or individual, followed by a domain name type such as
• com (for commercial)
• org (for organization)
• edu (for an educational institution)
• gov (for a government agency) For example, a proper e-mail address might be someguy@someplace.com
To use the e-mail client, in addition to your e-mail address at an ISP, you need to know a few technical details such as names of the incoming and out-going e-mail servers, and the type of system When you sign up for an e-mail account, your ISP should present this information to you; many services offer to automatically configure your e-mail client, filling in the details Here
is a guide to the essential elements:
✦ Server information The two most common types of mail servers use
either the Post Office Protocol (POP) or Internet Message Access Protocol
(IMAP) Some providers offer a choice of either Once you instruct your
e-mail client which protocol to use, you must enter the appropriate information for an incoming and outgoing server
An example of a set of POP servers might be as follows:
Incoming mail (POP): pop.mymailserver.com
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Outgoing mail (SMTP): smtp.mymailserver.com
An IMAP setup is very similar, except for the incoming details:
Incoming mail (IMAP): imap.adifferentserver.com Outgoing mail (SMTP): smtp.adifferentserver.com
✦ Incoming mail server information Enter your full account name
(usu-ally your e-mail address) and the password for that address If you’re going to be the only user, or if you protect the machine with a password
at bootup — a good practice for laptop users — you can tell Windows to remember your password so you don’t need to enter it each time you check your mail
✦ Other details Some e-mail providers may ask you to specify a
non-standard port for your computer to use for incoming or outgoing
messages or other changes
E-mail acronyms and you
POP servers are the most common design for e-mail Also referred as POP3 (the most current specification for the protocol), these systems transfer incoming messages to files that are stored on your computer Once they have been downloaded, they are usually deleted from the server
IMAP servers, most of which now use the IMAP4 specification, don’t automatically down-load messages to your computer Instead, you see the header, which includes the sender’s name, the subject, and the date and time the message was sent Some systems also display just the first few lines of the message on your screen again, without downloading it to your computer You can delete messages without reading them or you can open the mail from the server — again, without downloading it to your machine Copies are stored on the server until you delete them or make local copies on your computer
If you use an IMAP server, you can check your mail on several different machines over the course of time; POP messages live on the
machine that first downloaded them Another advantage is that IMAP systems keep your system at a considerable distance from poten-tially harmful e-mails; you can delete them with-out them ever residing on your computer
HTML e-mail is a form of message based on a version of the same markup language used to create Web pages It can be flashy, animated, and colorful, which is why advertisers (junk and otherwise) often use this style The fact that it can include active links and mini-applications also makes it attractive to some virus or spyware authors Most e-mail clients, including Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and Windows Live Mail can accept HTML mail Security settings permit users to block images and other external con-tent in HTML-based messages; the two versions
of Windows Mail permit an exception to that block for messages from people or organizations added to a user’s Safe Senders list
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) servers
do just what their name suggests Working with either a POP or IMAP incoming e-mail server, SMTP sends e-mail messages to the Internet
Trang 9Using Windows Mail or Outlook Express 592
Using Windows Mail or Outlook Express
In this section I discuss some of the basics and important customization fea-tures of Outlook Express and its Windows Vista replacement Windows Mail Later in this chapter I expand coverage to include Windows Live Mail, Microsoft’s announced replacement for both products
If you’re an Outlook Express veteran, the newer Windows Mail will appear and perform quite similarly
✦ Some of the toolbar icons have been changed to make them fit better with the spiffed-up Windows Vista interface
✦ Some new features allow more customization of how you see your mail (including the location of the Reading pane) See Figure 5-1
But the most important changes are on the safety and security side
✦ Messages are stored in smaller individual files or groups of files A sepa-rate index database speeds searching through mail messages and, because the index is separate from mail files, a corrupted or accidentally erased index can be rebuilt
Figure 5-1:
The main screen of Windows Mail, with the Reading pane to the right of the messages
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One of the long-time landmines within Outlook Express was its single database file for all stored mail messages; the file could get quite large, which could slow down operations, and more importantly, if the file became corrupted, you could lose years’ worth of messages
In recent years Microsoft and some third parties have offered utilities that can repair certain problems with Outlook Express database files
Some types of corruption are easier to repair than others, though
✦ Account setup information is stored in the folder that holds Windows Mail This makes it much easier and safer for users to copy or move a Windows Mail configuration and all the stored messages to another machine
✦ Windows Mail includes a basic junk mail filter (a so-called Bayesian filter that examines mail and looks for words commonly found in unwanted messages; the filter also can automatically add or subtract from its list based on your handling of messages) Other features include the ability
to block certain e-mail senders based on your experience with them
✦ Now you can stop attempts to phish your private information including
passwords, account names, and banking or credit card details A phish-ing filter alerts you to e-mail of this sort, or that shares some of the characteristics of this sort
✦ One element of e-mail clients that’s often overlooked by current users is the ability to read or subscribe to newsgroups In addition to allowing access to the unmonitored (and sometimes dangerous) world of public newsgroups, Windows Mail automatically offers you access to a full set
of Microsoft Help Groups that may bail you out of difficult computer- or software-related problems
Windows Mail is part of any standard installation of Windows Vista
Adding an account in Windows Mail or Outlook Express
To manually add an e-mail account, follow these steps:
1.Gather the necessary information
2.Open the program
3.Click Start ➪ All Programs ➪ Windows Mail or Outlook Express
If you have a mail shortcut on your desktop or toolbar, you can click that as a quick way into the program
4.Choose Tools ➪ Accounts ➪ Add ➪ E-mail Account
5.Follow the screen-by-screen instructions and enter the details