Back to basics: Email and browsers

For most home PC users, a good deal of the time spent on a computer will be devoted to emailing and surfing the internet. Any PC running Windows will feature Microsoft's Outlook Express and Internet Explorer as standard and there are other free, alternative programs that some home users may have opted for that essentially do the same job.

But while you may be well acquainted with your email software and internet browser, are you really making the most of the range of features on offer in these programs? Join us as we take a back-to-basics look at all the tools and features on offer in some of the most popular internet browsers and email programs and show you how to use them.

EMAIL

The personal touch
Email is a hugely popular form of communication that most of us use on a daily basis. If you're bored of sending and receiving dull-looking email messages on a plain white background, it's possible to personalise your messages using email stationery.

This is a simple but effective way of livening up your correspondence and can be great fun for kids to use too. In Outlook Express, an email program that most home PC users will have, click on Tools, select Options and click on the Compose tab. This allows you to choose from a number of different types of stationery for both email and newsgroup messages.

You can download more stationery for Outlook Express from the Microsoft website here, including themed Christmas, Halloween and birthday designs.

As well as creating one set of stationery for every email you send, it's also possible to use stationery on a message-by-message basis. When you have written an email go to Format and select Apply Stationery to personalise your message. Just choose the stationery you wish to apply to your message from the menu of options that appears.

Using stationery in emails is only one of the ways of personalising messages available in Outlook Express. Perhaps the simplest way is by adding your own signature. A signature can contain just about any text you want, from your telephone number and postal address to a favourite quote.

To create a signature, select Options from the Tools menu and then select the Signature tab in the window that appears. Click on the button marked New to the right of the Signatures text box and enter the text you want to include in the Edit Signatures text box. Tick the box labelled 'Add signatures to all outgoing messages'. If you don't want the signature applied to reply and forwarded emails, make sure the box below this is ticked.

An alternative email program to Outlook Express is Mozilla Thunderbird, which is designed to be used with the Mozilla Firefox internet browser. Both can be downloaded free of charge by clicking on the links.

While you can't make your emails appear quite as aesthetically pleasing as you can using the Outlook Express stationery, Thunderbird offers many of the same features and looks pretty similar.

To add a signature to your emails in Thunderbird, you'll first need to create the text you want included in a separate text file. Once you've done this, select Account settings from the Tools menu, check the Attach signature box and locate the file on your PC's hard disk. Just remember that while you may like a pink background with blue text, others may find it difficult to read, so choose something simple.

Fancy folders
Stationery and email signatures offer a good way to spice up and personalise your email messages, but both Outlook Express and Thunderbird offer other features to make your electronic life easier. One of these is folder organisation, which allows you to sort incoming mail into separate folders. You might want to keep all your emails from certain people together in one folder labelled with their name, for example.

To create a folder, right-click on the Inbox in the Folders pane to the left of the main Outlook Express or Thunderbird screens, then select New folder from the menu that appears. Type in a name for the folder and click on OK. You can drag and drop any emails you want to store in this folder straight from the main Inbox onto the folder name.

Alternatively, go to Tools and select Message Rules to instruct Outlook Express to move emails with a certain word in the subject line or from a certain person straight to the relevant folder. It's a straightforward process of ticking the right boxes.

If you want to flag up an email as being important to the recipient, you can set the priority level of the email you're sending to High. When you've finished composing the message, click on the arrow to the left of the Priority button in the message toolbar and select Low, Normal or High from the menu that appears.

A high-priority message will be marked with an exclamation mark next to it in the recipient's inbox, while a low priority message will be displayed with an arrow pointing downwards. In Thunderbird, select Priority from the Options menu and choose one of the priority settings. We'd advise using high-priority settings sparingly; use it too much and the recipients of your emails may just ignore it in the future.

You can also set both Outlook Express and Thunderbird to alert you when an email has been read by the recipient. In Outlook, click on Tools and then on Request Read Receipt; in Thunderbird click on Options and select Return Receipt.

Stay organised
With the sheer volume of email that we send and receive these days, it's important to get into good habits when it comes to inbox housekeeping. To ensure that Outlook Express does not get clogged up with old, unwanted email, it's a good idea to do a monthly spring clean.

Delete any emails that are no longer important. Bear in mind that you have to delete any email you want to get rid of twice: once from your inbox, and then from the Deleted Items folder. While this may seem like a pain, it acts as a safety guard against accidentally deleting important email.

You can also access newsgroups directly through Outlook Express. To do this, select Accounts from the Tools menu and in the Internet Accounts dialogue box, click on Add. Select News and a wizard will take you through the rest of the process to connect to a news server.

Thunderbird offers a similar feature, which you can activate through the Tools menu. Select Account settings, then Add account and follow the instructions in the on-screen wizard. You can also set up RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news feeds in Thunderbird, which means you will receive news stories from chosen news websites as emails as soon as they are updated with a brief story summary and a link to the article online.

If you use a dial-up internet connection to access the web and retrieve email, you may want to take advantage of the fact that Outlook Express lets you read emails offline. Click on the Send and receive button and then check the box that says 'Hang up when finished'. This means that all your email will be downloaded in one go for you to read offline and you can save some money in internet connection call charges and free up the phone line.

One area in which Thunderbird excels is junk mail filtering, as it has a spam-blocking tool built in. In the Tools menu select Junk mail controls, which gives access to a range of junk mail filtering settings. To ensure that emails from known contacts are never marked as junk mail, check the box marked 'Do not mark messages as junk mail if the sender is in my address book', then select an address book from the drop-down menu.

Preparing attachments
We all know that you can send more than just text via email. Email attachments are a great way to share photos, for example, with family and friends. However, you're likely to lose friends and be disowned by your relatives pretty fast if you clog up their inboxes with huge email attachments that can take an age to download.

The good news is that you can compress your attachments to ensure that your email gets to its destination as quickly and painlessly as possible. The recipient can then reverse the compression process on receipt. In Windows, you can normally just right-click on the file you wish to compress to carry out the command.

Having compressed the file, you can then attach it to an email as normal. Windows XP also has a built-in utility that will automatically compress a photo before you send it via email. When you right-click on a photograph a separate window pops up asking whether you want to make the picture smaller. Simply clicking on 'make all my pictures smaller' will do exactly that. Alternatively, you can download the WinRAR compression program here which does exactly the same job.

Preview pains
We all know the dangers of opening email attachments from unknown senders or dubious sources. As many computer viruses are spread via email, it can be the quickest way to infect your PC. To allow you to view the contents of an attachment without opening it, Outlook Express has a tool that previews the content of a .jpg image file without having to open it.

However, not all viruses require you to open the file itself to infect your PC and just previewing the contents of a file containing a virus in the preview pane can be enough. The preview pane is the split screen below the main inbox in Outlook Express and if you want to play it safe and disable this feature altogether, select Layout from the View menu and uncheck the preview pane option.

BROWSERS

A firm favourite
Anyone with an internet connection will be reasonably well acquainted with the workings of their internet browser, but there may be features on offer that you have yet to take advantage of. One of these is the Favourites tool, which enables you to bookmark frequently visited websites so you don't have to type in the same website addresses time and time again.

The vast majority of us use Internet Explorer to surf the web, as it comes with Windows as standard. If you click on the Favorites button in the main toolbar, the Favorites pane will open up on the left-hand side of the browser window. Click on Organise to create, rename or delete folders or Add to add the web page currently displayed to the Favorites menu.

You can also transfer favourites from other browsers or old computers. Select Import and Export from the File menu and follow the instructions on screen. If you're using an alternative browser to Internet Explorer, such as Mozilla Firefox or Opera, which is also free to download, the browser will do this for you automatically.

If you use Opera to surf the web, you can take advantage of the mouse control shortcuts to simplify your surfing session. Hold down the right mouse button and click the left button to access the previous page you viewed and do the opposite to move forward a page, for example. Click here for a full list of these shortcuts.

The right tools
Some of the most important settings in Internet Explorer that all users should get to grips with are to be found in the Tools menu under Internet Options. Here you will find privacy and security settings, settings that allow you to block access to certain sites, control the placement of cookies on your computer and manage the storage of temporary internet files.

In the Security tab, click on the Restricted sites icon and then on the Sites button to add website addresses that you want to make out of bounds, for example. The settings under the General tab will allow you to manage your internet history and delete temporary internet files and cookies.

In Opera, you can protect your online privacy by selecting Tools and choosing Delete private data. This will rid your PC of any trace of cookies, internet history, passwords or the cache of stored website information your computer saves as you surf the web. See our feature on Windows Control Panel for more on this.

To set a certain website as your home page in Internet Explorer (the web page your browser displays first every time you connect to the internet) type the address into the Address bar under the Home page heading in the General tab and click on OK. Knowing how to do this is particularly important in case you pick up software online that redirects your browser to a different home page.

In Opera you'll need to go to Tools and then Preferences to do this. Place a dot next to the option marked Start with homepage, then type in your desired address in the text box below. There is also an option here labelled Continue from last time, which means the browser will revert to the last web page you visited next time you connect to the internet.

Opera has several intuitive tools including the Hotclick feature, where double-clicking on a word allows you to search the web for that word or look it up in a dictionary, among other options. There is also a tool in Opera called the Wand password manager, which stores your user names and passwords for all the websites you have registered with. The Wand tool can be password-protected itself for extra security.

There's also an email program bundled with Opera as an alternative to Outlook Express and Thunderbird, although it doesn't offer the same breadth of features.

One advantage of Mozilla Firefox is that it has a built-in pop-up blocker to stop those annoying ads from appearing in separate windows as you surf the web. This is a handy inclusion as it should also help prevent spyware and diallers from installing themselves on your computer.

LEARN MORE

We have covered just a few of the options here that you can use to make your online life simpler. The programs we have featured provide more information on their tools at their respective websites:

Internet Explorer
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Thunderbird
Opera
Outlook Express