What is Email?
Email is by far the most
important means of communication in the world today. Not only
is it the preferred means of communication for business purposes, it
is more often than not one of the primary means of staying in touch
with friends and family. On any given day, you may be sending quite
a few emails at work using a corporate email system like Microsoft
Outlook and at the same time using many of the free web email
applications like Yahoo Mail,
Gmail or Hotmail for
your personal use. Email is also known as e-mail.
electronic mail, webmail, web mail, internet mail, and net
mail just to name a few.
Yahoo Mail:
For today's lesson we are going to concentrate on Yahoo Mail (for personal use) and
Microsoft Outlook (for work related).
Yahoo Mail is one of
the most popular webmail applications out there and it is
also FREE to use. There are other popular web mail choices
like Hotmail, Gmail etc. Many of them are pretty much the
same in functionality, so we will just cover one of them
today.
Sign up for Yahoo Mail:
If you do not have a
Yahoo mail account, you can sign up for a free email account.
Here’s the link to that site:
https://edit.yahoo.com/registration?.intl=us
You will need to enter some personal
information in addition to username/password that will be used to
login (sign in) to the Yahoo Email
system. We have included a screen
shot of what it looks like right below.
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Yahoo Mail Screen:After you set up
your Free email account with Yahoo, you will need to login or signin
to Yahoo Mail. If you forget the website, an easy one to
remember is this location, simply Mail . Yahoo . com.
http://mail.yahoo.com
You
will need to enter the same username and password used during Yahoo registration
process for initial setup. In my case I have already logged
into my Yahoo email account. After I pass through the login screen, I get into the
email application. As you can see right below I have
more than 20,000 emails!! I am either really popular or I get a few
junk emails in my Yahoo mail account. I think the latter is true in this case.
Here is a screen capture of what I am talking about.
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We
are using the new email version of Yahoo Mail, so it may look
different depending on the version you are using. The screen is split
into two main areas. On the left side you will see Yahoo
email related section, personal contacts and a section titled applications
towards bottom. This is a new feature in Yahoo Mail
where you can do things like add an appointment to a calendar,
manage your photos and use other apps like Paypal, Evite, etc
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Default email folders:The default email folders for Yahoo Mail are:
-Inbox [Emails that
need to be read]
-Drafts [Emails in progress]
-Sent
[Emails that you have sent already]
-Spam
[All those 20,000 junk e-mails]
-Trash [Emails that have been deleted]
Right below the default mail folders, you will see a section for contacts. As
you work with emails, you can add the email sender's info
to your contact list. This gives you the ability to have quick
access to your personal contacts. You can also add additional info about your contacts
here.
Finally you will see some of my personal folders in Yahoo mail that
I have customized in order to better organize my email.
Doing this will also help you especially when you are trying to find an existing
email that you wanna hold onto for future reference.
I have
shown a close up of these folders in the screen capture
below.
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Right above the folders, you will notice the navigation tabs including commonly used features
of using an email system like Yahoo. These include
checking existing emails or sending a new email message. Let
us look at these options one by one.
Creating a New Yahoo Email message:
When you are
ready to create an email message, go ahead and click on
the drop down arrow labeled New. From
the drop down,
go ahead and choose Email message. This should open up the
new message window in Yahoo Mail, shown as follows.
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New E-mail Message options in Yahoo:Let
us clarify and explain some of the important
items regarding a new email message here:
To: This is email of the person you're
trying to send the message to. If the person that you are
trying to send a Yahoo
e-mail to already exists under your
contacts folder, then you can simply type the first few letters
of their name. This will let Yahoo mail
auto populate this field. In case you do not have
the e-mail address already, you will need to type the whole
e-mail address in this box. I am going to go ahead and
use one of my other emails aliases here:
kashi@learningcomputer.com
CC: cc stands for carbon copy and essentially it means that you will
be sending you're email message to another person
as well. For our demo purposes, I'm going to skip over this part.
Subject: You can enter the subject matter of the Yahoo email here. In this
field I will go ahead and enter Test mail for now.
Body: The big white rectangle is the actual body of your email in Yahoo Mail. Lets go ahead
and enter some text here.
Rich text: This is a new feature in
Yahoo E-Mail that I really like. This option will
enable a basic formatting toolbar for your outgoing
e-mail. You can modify things like font type, font size, bold,
italicize, underline and a few more formatting options. f you look right above the fields that we discussed, you will
see additional command buttons so let us go over them real quickly.
Send:
You
will need to click on this on when you are ready to send the
Yahoo e-mail message.
Attach: When you click
on this button, Yahoo Mail will launch another dialog box
where you can attach additional files (like Word document
or Excel spreadsheet) to your email message. For now
we are going to skip this part.
Save Draft: This option will let you
save an email message so you can review send it later in
Yahoo.
Spelling: When you
are done creating an email message, it is always a good idea
to check the spelling. When you click on this option,
it will go through all your email and highlight any
of the misspelled words.
Sending a New email message:I think
we are ready to send our Yahoo email now. Here is what the email looks
like before I send it.
After reviewing it, you can simply click on Send.
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Web Mail Example:Before we move onto
the next topic on Yahoo Mail, I would like to show you how the email that we
just sent looks like at its destination site. This is
not Yahoo Mail system but a seperate email system. I have
logged into yet another web mail client on my website
(learningcomputer.com) and then clicked on the Inbox
folder.
Right below you will notice the last email I received is from Kash, my
Gemini twin!
Notice you will see similar items like To, From, Subject
etc. I am going to click on Reply and send a
quick note back to the sender, mum that would be Me!
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Check New Email messages in Yahoo Mail:Now that we are done with creating and sending
a new message, let us move onto the next topic,
checking your email in Yahoo. Back in Yahoo Mail
system, you will notice the first button on the left most
part in Check Mail . Let's go ahead and click on this
one.
When you do that,
you will notice that the main window has changed and now you
have a new tab (Inbox) with different options on the top. This
is where you will receive new emails in Yahoo.com.
Right off the bat you will also notice
that the emails in the Inbox are sorted by
date in a descending order. What this means is that
the newest emails are on top and the oldest ones are on the
bottom. The column headings are also clickable, so you
could simply click on the headings like From to sort the
emails by the sender.
For
this step, on
our computer monitor this is what you see in Yahoo Mail.
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If you look at the first email, you will see that I did get a reply
back from
kashi@learningcomputer.com
so let's go ahead and check that out first.
When you click
anywhere on the item, it will go ahead and open up the
new email message in the bottom pane. Here’s a screen shot of
what I'm talking about in our Yahoo Mail account.
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Incoming Email message options in Yahoo:Some of the items in the above figure
should be familiar to you by now. You will notice that we have the subject
of the mail highlighted on the top, followed by from, to and
then the actually body of the email. In
addition observe that this email attached
the original e-mail message towards the bottom. This
is useful when you are trying to work on something that
came from another email source. Essentially it keeps a running
log of the items that were being discussed in the incoming message.
Once you have read the e-mail, you can take many different actions
on it including the following options in Yahoo
Mail:
Delete: This option
will go ahead and remove the message and move it to your
Trash folder
Reply: Using this you
can reply to
the email message in Yahoo Mail
Forward: This one
is a handy little option which will allow you
to forward the message onto somebody else
Spam: This is my
favorite as it marks the Email as a solicitation and
moves it to the SPASM folder.
Move: This Button is
useful when you would like to organize your email
into personalized mail folders. For example if I
received something on real estate, I could easily move it to
the real estate folder.
Actions: This is a
new feature that gives you additional features to work with
your electronic mail. You can do things like
these: Marking an e-mail as already read,
selecting all emails etc.
We have included a
screen shot
of the available Actions in Yahoo Mail here.
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Managing and organizing your emails in Yahoo Mail:
The last
thing we want to discuss regarding Yahoo Mail is the
ability to manage and organize your emails effectively. We
already looked at one option of having personalized
folders where you can organize your email messages.
The other important item is search capabilities in Yahoo
emails. Let us assume that you are looking for e-mails
from Travelocity. How would you do that
in Yahoo Mail?
One obvious way is to filter by
sender, then browse through all the emails to see
what you are looking for. A much easier way to do this is
to use the built-in search mail functionality within Yahoo!
Let’s try this out next. Go ahead and
type Travelocityin the Search Mailbox (highlighted in Red)
and then click Go.
This will search
through your e-mails in Yahoo
Mail and look for the expression "Travelocity" either
from the sender or in the body of the email, very cool indeed!
This is a much more efficient way to work with your yahoomail
rather than using the sorted list feature.
Here is
the
output screen capture after we did the email search in Yahoo Mail.
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Microsoft Outlook 2007:Next we are
going to look at some features in Microsoft Outlook which is
the most popular corporate email system in use. In order to launch Outlook
2007, you need to do the following:
All Programs - Microsoft Office 2007
- Microsoft Office 2007 Outlook 2007
This will go ahead and launch
Microsoft Outlook as shown below:
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Microsoft Outlook Layout:Let's go over the
layout in Outlook 2007 quickly. You will notice that
MS Outlook by default creates three sections or panes that you
can work with. In the left pane also known as
the Navigation Pane, you will see all the mail related folders including
the following:
Inbox:
This is where the new emails come in
Drafts:
The emails that are in progress and have not been sent out yet are
in this folder
Sent: Here are all the e
mails that have been sent already
In addition there are other folders like
Junk, Oubox and RSS Feeds. Besides the mail folders you will
also see other options like Calendar, Contacts and
Tasks.
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List and Detail Mail Views:Let us move
onto the middle pane, this is where you can see your e-mails in a
list format. Typically you will see headings like:
From [sender of the email]
Subject [subject of
the email]
Received [date of the email]
Just like the web email we saw in Yahoo Mail, you
can click on these headings to sort the e-mails in a certain
order.
Moving onto the third
pane which is the one to the right side. This is where you will find
detailed information on your email. Most
of these fields should be familiar to you by
now, things like sender, to, subject, time of message
delivery and the most important, the actual body of the
email.
Here we have included a screen capture of
the list and detail pane views.
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Send a reply to an Outlook E-Mail
Message:Let us go ahead and reply to the above email
message now. You can first select the e-mail that you're
working on from the pane in the middle. In order to reply, you
can either choose a Reply from the tool bar
above or use the right click menu. We have decided to use the second
option which will give several choices in addition to
Reply.
You can see the right click menu in action
below.
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Reply Window:After
you select Reply
from the previous step, this will open up a new window
as shown below. Notice this window uses the new Ribbon layout that
is a new feature for Office 2007 Mail system. The different actions
are organized by function which makes it much more intuitive and
easy to use.
We are going to add some text to this email message and then click on Send button. Here is
what is looks like.
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ContactThe last item we would like to
discuss is Address book in MS Outlook 2007
.
This lets you add all your personal contacts in different formats.
If you want to send a message to one of these contacts, you can
simply right click on the contact and choose
Create - New
Message to Contact.
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