Outlook Tips

A CONTACT BY ANY OTHER NAME

Just as saying "Spanky," "Ninky" or "Dig Dug" is easier than saying "J. Michael Godofsky," "Gregory J. Courtright," or "Zachary I. Miller," addressing an e-mail with a nickname is easier than writing out the name in full. In order to use a nickname when addressing a message to a particular contact, however, you have to first assign a nickname to that contact. (Fair enough.) To assign a nickname, do the following:

• Press Ctrl-Shift-B to bring up your Address Book.
• Locate the contact you want to give a nickname and then double-click on his or her name. The Personal tab of the contact's Properties box appears.
• In the Names section, click in the space beside Nickname and type whatever nickname you'd like to bestow upon your friend. (You can make the name silly or whatever you want; but the best nicknames are simple, unique, and easy to remember.)
• Click on OK.

After you assign a nickname to a contact, the next time you want to send an e-mail message to that person, you only have to type the nickname. For example, if you gave your friend the nickname Spanky, you'd just type
Spanky
in the To, Cc, or Bcc field, right beside any other "normal" addresses you include.

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!

You love e-mail, right? Sure you do. Nothing compares to the thrill of seeing brand new e-mails from friends, family, and popular online services all over the world--pop into your Inbox. So why delay the excitement of opening up the tender little morsels by having to sift through all the other messages that you've already seen? You just want to see the new messages, the ones you haven't read yet. To display only unread messages, follow these steps:

• Click on the Send and Receive icon in the main toolbar to download your most recent new e-mails.
• If you're not already in your Inbox, press Ctrl-I to get there.
• Choose View + Current View + Unread Messages.

Only the newest, hottest, most exhilarating, and interesting e-mails--that is, unread e-mails--enter your system. Of course, how hot, exhilarating, or interesting these messages are depends on what kinds of friends, loved ones, and popular online services you have going for you.

RSVP FUNNEL

How can you sum up The American Dream in three words? Easy: Two of everything. Two cars, two kids, two homes, two e-mail addresses. Sure, living up to those standards isn't always easy, but we do know a trick that can save you some time and peace of mind when it comes to having two e-mail addresses.

Normally, the address from which you send e-mail is the address that receives the replies. In other words, when your address is joe_blow@coolguy.com, you send a message from that account; and when someone replies to it, the reply automatically gets sent to joe_blow@coolguy.com. That's just the nature of replies--but it doesn't have to be. You can actually set things up so that the reply goes to a different address! For example, you may want to send things from an account called joe_blow@coolguy.com and set up your mail so that replies to those messages go to jblow@realcooldude.com--or whatever other account you want.

As you can imagine, having replies come to an address other than the address from which they originated is especially handy when you have to handle multiple e-mail accounts; you can consolidate all the replies coming back to you from various places into a single place. And that means you don't have to spend so much time constantly checking your different accounts. To take advantage of this feature, all you have to do is know each of your various e-mail addresses and follow these five steps:

• Choose Tools + Accounts to bring up the Internet Accounts dialog box. If the Mail folder tab isn't the active tab, click on it to bring it forward.
• In the account list, click on the account for which you want to change the reply address.
• Click on the Properties button.
• Under the General tab, click in the space next to Reply Address.
• Type in the e-mail address where you want all the replies to your messages to go and then click on OK.
• Click the Close button.

If you have more than two e-mail accounts that you'd like to do this with, simply repeat the preceding process. Just a word of warning: Make sure that you have already established the e-mail account where you want replies to be sent and that you've typed in the address correctly. After all that work, you wouldn't want all your replies to be funneled to nowhere!

KEEP 'EM SEPARATED

When you enter a list of e-mail addresses in a message, you can separate the names with either a comma or a semicolon. In fact, you can use a comma to separate in some places and a semicolon to separate in others. It doesn't matter too much, as long as you don't use both right next to each other. So use whatever works for you. This works whether you're using the To, Cc, or Bcc field to address the message.

SIZING UP YOUR SPACE

In a previous tip, we showed you how to save valuable vertical screen space by double-clicking on (and therefore eliminating) the preview pane header, a somewhat useless half-inch tall box that sits right under the divider between the message list and preview pane. Well here's another tip that involves the preview pane and saving space: Change the size of the font displayed in the preview pane. Although you do have five size options, you probably want to start by trying the two tiniest ones if you're looking to save space. Follow these steps:

• Select (that is click on) any message in any of your message folders. The message's contents appear in the preview pane.
• Choose View +Fonts + Smallest. The size changes immediately.
• If that font seems too small, choose View + Fonts + Smaller.
• Still too tough to read? You can always choose View + Fonts + Medium.

One last thing to keep in mind: Changing the font size like this changes the font size for the preview pane in all of your folders, but it DOESN'T change the font size that appears when you actually open the message.

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