Absolute Beginner's Guide to Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003

Reading E-mail

The most important thing about receiving e-mails is reading them, of course. Outlook provides two methods of reading e-mails. You can read them in the Reading Pane, or you can open individual e-mails.

Working with the Reading Pane

By default, the Reading Pane is shown at the right of mail folder views but optionally can be displayed below the folder view or can be turned off entirely. You saw how the Reading Pane looks on the right of the folder view in Figure 3.1; the Reading Pane displayed at the bottom of the folder view is shown in Figure 3.3. This arrangement displays more information for each e-mail in the folder but shows less of the message text in the e-mail selected in the Reading Pane.

Figure 3.3. Displaying the Reading ...