Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Checking Your Mail and Reading New Messages

Some experts recommend that you check e-mail only twice a day—any more often, they say, and you won't be able to concentrate on what's really important. At companies that live and die by e-mail (including many in the computer and Internet industries), following that advice would be a classic career-limiting move.

Still, the general point is valid: Figure out how often you need to check e-mail, and use Outlook to do as much of the work as possible. You have a variety of manual and automatic choices that control how you check messages.

Setting Up Send/Receive Groups

By default, Outlook assigns the same mail-checking options to all your e-mail accounts. To adjust these settings, choose Tools, Options; ...