Getting  Along With Your Computer Column Archive

Keeping Email Under Control
By Cate Eales

Appeared December 15, 2005 on castanet.net

Overflowing Inbox?
If your email program takes a long time to start up, maybe it’s those 1,827 messages in your Inbox.  And are you tired of scrolling through all those messages to get to the new ones?

The folders that come with Outlook Express are a good start, but they’re not the only ones we can have.  Maybe you do some volunteer work.  Maybe you share recipes with your friends and family.  Maybe you are planning a trip to Italy for the Olympics.  You can create any number of folders that will allow you to get all that mail out of your Inbox and into a place where you can easily find it when you need it. 

When you open Outlook Express, do you see a list of folders on the left-hand side?  They should cascade: 

Local Folders
     Inbox
     Outbox
     Sent Items
     Deleted Items
     Drafts

 If you don’t see that list, click on View, then Layout, then Folder List.

To create a folder for recipes, put your mouse cursor on “Local Folders” and right-click.  You’ll see a menu with several choices.  Select “New Folder” and click on it.  Now type the name you want to give the folder, in this case, “Recipes”.  Click OK.  Now your Folder View looks like this: 

 Local Folders
     Inbox
     Outbox
     Sent Items
     Deleted Items
     Drafts
    Recipies

Next time you get an email pertaining to recipes, you can file it in the Recipes folder.  Click on the folder that contains the message you want to move.  (If you’re already looking at the message you want to move, then of course you can skip that step.)  Click on the message you want to move, and while holding down the left mouse button, drag the message to the destination folder and release the mouse button.  To make sure that worked, you can double-click on the Recipes folder and you should see the message there.  To move more than one message at a time to the same folder, hold down the Ctrl key as you click and highlight the ones you want to move.  When you click and drag, everything you highlighted will go. 

You can have “nested folders” in Outlook Express.  That means you can have folders within a folder.  Just start by holding your cursor over “Recipes” this time, instead of “Local Folders”. So you might see something like this:

Local Folders
     Inbox
     Outbox
     Sent Items
     Deleted Items
     Drafts
    +Italy
   +Recipies

A folder with nested folders in it shows up with a plus sign in front.  If you click on the plus sign, the nested folders will be displayed. 

Local Folders
     Inbox
     Outbox
     Sent Items
     Deleted Items
     Drafts
    -Italy
       Hotels
       Restaurants
       Tickets
   -Recipies
       Cakes
       Soup
       Vegetarian

Click on the minus sign to stop displaying the nested folders. 

Try this yourself and see if you don’t feel better once things are a little tidier! 

Update Update
There were several softwareupdates worth mentioning this week.  First of all --- yay! --- Mozilla Firefox 1.5 was released!  You can download it here: http://www.mozilla.com/.  Firefox is an alternative to Internet Explorer for web browsing.  The new version looks very much like the previous ones; the improvements are mostly under the hood.  It’s a bit faster than before and it updates automatically.  The ability to work with tabs instead of many windows is great, and it still kills more popups than Internet Explorer. 

Also, Microsoft released several new updates for Windows XP.  Make sure you are downloading AND installing those updates!  Go to Start | Control Panel | Security Center and check the status of your Automatic Updates.  If you’re not getting them automatically, make sure you’re manually going out and getting them.  

Real Networks has released RealPlayer 10.5, which promises greater clarity (and don’t we all want that?) and the ability to sync with mp3 players.  I haven’t tried this new version yet, but it would be a welcome surprise to find something that sync’s “effortlessly” with an mp3 player that is not an iPod!  You can download it here: http://www.real.com/

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Cate Eales has been helping people make online computing safe, accessible and fun for over 20 years. She lives in Kelowna with her husband, Eric, and her dog, Sandy. Cate is a partner in Real Life Internet Solutions, helping individuals and small businesses with virus, spyware and malware eradication; personal computer training and management; digital image management; music transfer; and website design, hosting and management. Email Cate at cate@rlis.com  with your comments, suggestions, or questions. To browse the column archives, visit the Real Life Internet Solutions website at www.rlis.com.

© Cate Eales 2005 – All Rights Reserved