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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, AOL 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 web mail
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.
If you do not have a yahoo account, you can sign up for a free email account.
Here’s the link to that side
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 to the mail 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 to the mail system. You will need to enter the same username
and password used during registration process for initial setup.
In my case I have already logged into my 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. 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 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
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 [E-mails that
need to be read],
-Drafts [E-mails in progress],
-Sent
[E-mails that you have sent already],
-Spam [All those junk e-mails],
-Trash [E-mails 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 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. These include
checking existing emails or sending a new email message. Let
us look at these options one by one.
Creating a New 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, shown as follows.
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New E-mail Message options: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 an 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 email here.
In this field I will go ahead and enter Test mail
Body: The big white rectangle is the actual body of your email. 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.
If 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 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 e-mail so you can review send
it later
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 email. 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. 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:Now that we are done
with creating and sending a new message, let us move onto
the next topic, checking your email. Back in yahoo
email, 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.
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 sortable, 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.
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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.
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Incoming Email message options:Some of the items in figure above
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:
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
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 Actions here.
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Managing and organizing your emails:
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?
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 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.
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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 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], and 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 on 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. 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.
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Contact
The
last item we would like to discuss is Address book in 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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