Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007 For Dummies®

Chapter 4. The Essential Secrets of E‐Mail

In This Chapter

• Sending, saving, opening, and replying to messages

• Previewing, forwarding, and deleting messages

• Saving messages as files

When I wrote the first edition of Outlook For Dummies some ten years ago, many readers had yet to celebrate the sending of their very first e‐mail. After this much time, e‐mail isn't something to celebrate anymore — not unless you celebrate washing the dishes or changing the cat box. (Woohoo!) E‐mail has become every working person's biggest chore. I find that many of the people I train put a lot more effort into e‐mail than is really necessary, especially if they have a tool as powerful as Outlook to speed things up.

Front Ends and Back Ends

You need two things to send and receive e‐mail:

• A program that helps you create, save, and manage your messages

• A program that actually transports the messages to and from the other people with whom you exchange messages

Some technical people call these two parts the front end and the back end, respectively. Outlook is a front end for e‐mail; it helps you create, format, store, and manage your messages, but it has little to do with actually getting your messages to your destination. That work is done by a back‐end service (such as Microsoft Exchange Server in your office), by your Internet service provider (ISP), or by an online e‐mail service (such as AOL or Hotmail).

If you feel that you're the last person on earth without Internet e‐mail capability (and if you still don't ...