Windows Vista for Starters: The Missing Manual

Chapter 10. WINDOWS MAIL

Email is a fast, cheap, convenient communication medium; these days, it’s almost embarrassing to admit that you don’t have an email address. To spare you that humiliation, Windows Vista includes Windows Mail (which, in previous versions of Windows, was called Outlook Express).

If you do have an email address, or several, Mail can help you manage your email accounts, messages, and contacts better than ever (Figure 10-1).

Figure 10-1. Meet Windows Mail—and the very first message you’ll see here. It’s a canned message from Microsoft containing information about Mail, its features, and how to use it.

To use Mail, you need several technical pieces of information: an email address, an email server address, and an Internet address for sending email. Your Internet service provider or your network administrator is supposed to provide all of these ingredients.

Setting Up Windows Mail

The first time you use Mail (Start→All Programs→Windows Mail), you’re prompted to plug in the Internet addresses and codes that tell the program where to find your email.

Note

If you used the Vista program called Easy Transfer Wizard to bring over your files and settings from an older PC, Windows Mail is probably already set up quite nicely. If that’s the case, skip to the next section.

Click Next to step through the wizard’s interview process, during which you’ll provide the following information: ...