Using Outlook Express and Windows Mail Using Outlook Express and Windows Mail: Microsoft Outlook Express and Windows Mail are e-mail applications which are supplied free with your operating system. Outlook Express comes with Windows 2000, XP, and 2003. Microsoft renamed this application to Windows Mail starting with Windows Vista, but the applications look and act very much the same. This tutorial will not discuss all of the possibilities with Outlook Express and Windows Mail, but it will show the basics on how to read your mail, send e-mail, and reply to e-mail. So again, I am sitting at the desktop of Windows Vista, with Window Eyes running. I am going to use the start menu to actually start up, in this case, Windows Mail. If you are not using Vista, it will be Outlook Express. Press control-escape to bring up the start menu. WE: Start menu, start search, edit box I could go to “all programs” and try to find it that way, but I’m just going to go ahead and type in “mail.” WE: Windows Mail, programs group, 1 of 17 So it found it right away as Windows Mail and I’m going to go ahead and press enter. WE: Windows Mail, read, date, subject: Simply computers, real computers want attention, received 3-23-2007 8:34 pm, list view, 1 of 132. So it told me that I am on number 1 of 132 items. I have come in by default to the Inbox of my e-mail. This did tell me that I had read this particular message, even though this message looks like a spam message. This is a test account that I am actually using. I can arrow up and down through my Inbox. I’m going to press the down arrow to go to the next item in the Inbox. WE: Read, Tina Johnson, subject Simply Computers….(silenced) This told me who it was from, if I have read it or not, the subject, received date, and things like that. I’ll go down one more. WE: Unread, John K, subject, read Simply Computers re: for ag utility, received 3-23-2007 Down again. WE: Unread, Subject read Simply Computers…(silenced) Again, this is spam, but it shows you how you can up and down through the Inbox. One of the things that you want to be a little bit careful of with Outlook Express or Windows Mail is, sometimes they default to turning on the preview pane. The preview pane is actually a sighted type of thing, which means, as I’m arrowing up and down the messages in my Inbox, visually you will see approximately the first 25 lines of the e-mail message, at the bottom part of the window. You could actually browse your e-mail without having to actually open that. That can get in the way with speech because sometimes they will take focus down there and will confuse things. It is usually a good idea to go ahead and turn that off. Whether you are using Outlook Express or Windows Mail, the procedure to turn that off is the same. Mine is already off, but I am still going to walk you through this because I think it is good that you do turn that off. Again, I see no advantage if you are unable to see the screen of having that on. To turn the preview pane off, we need to go into the view menu of your application. Hold down the alt key and press “v.” That will immediately take me to the view menu. WE: V, current view v pull down Then I’m going to down arrow, or press L because I know that is the shortcut, to layout. WE: Layout, l dialog That took three down arrows to get to layout, which is a dialog. Press enter on this. WE: Menu closed, folder bar, f checkbox, unchecked What you want to do here is tab down to the checkbox that says, “show preview pane.” I’m going to tab quickly until I hear it say that. WE: Folder list; status bar; toolbar; views bar; search bar; customize toolbar; show preview pane, p checkbox, unchecked There it is, and it said that the checkbox was unchecked. That is what I expected since I do not have the preview pane on. If you have this checked, you should press the space bar to uncheck this. This will make your reading experience better. Regardless, once you are on this checkbox, I know that “ok” is the default button, so I can just press enter here. If you pressed space to turn it off, that is fine. Press enter now. WE: Inbox Windows Mail, unread…(silenced) This takes me back into my Inbox and it started to read the selected message. As you are arrowing up and down in your Inbox, you may find a message that you do not want to keep. Once you have the message selected, you can press the “delete” key to get rid of it. The next message under it will now be highlighted. If you want to read an item, press enter on the e-mail message. WE: 23 links, I’m almost finished creating another web page for my class. It has two radio buttons and needs to project…(silenced) This will read the entire contents of the e-mail message, or at least the first part of it. Then I can arrow down through the message to read the rest of it. You are actually in a browse mode at this point, so everything that you learned in the Internet section, it is the same here as well. You are in browse mode, so you can up and down arrow using the arrow keys. Outlook Express and Windows Mail, when you are reading e-mail, do not give you a cursor like you would expect inside of a word processor. As you are creating the e-mail, you will have a cursor and I’ll show you that in a bit. But when you are reading the e-mail, they decided to not give you a cursor, and you are just reading through the content of the e-mail message. That is if this is an html message. Depending on the message type that you get, you may or may not be able to navigate it with the built-in cursor or not. You will find that just up and down arrowing will automatically take you through the text within your e-mail message. Once you find the message you want and want to do anything to it, I can show you a few more things to do. If I wanted to reply to this message, I could just press control-r. I’ll do that now. WE: R, RE: Simply computers web buttons, blank Now it has actually taken me into another window and it is now giving me a cursor and I can type in my text. By default, I am at the top of my text. I believe that this is a verbosity option within Outlook Express or Windows Mail, where you can say to start at either the top or bottom when you reply. It has automatically filled in the “to” address of whoever sent the message to me, and the subject is filled in, so I can go ahead and type whatever I want. Whenever I am done, I can press alt-s and it will go ahead and send that e-mail message out. Now I am not going to send this message because it is junk and I don’t really want this person to know that I am really here. So I’m just going to press escape to get out of this message. WE: Inbox Windows Mail Since I did not type anything, it did not ask me to save it. Had I actually typed something, it would have asked me if I wanted to save the changes or not. Let me go back into that message again by pressing enter. WE: 23 links, I’m almost…(silenced) When I pressed escape, it took me back to the Inbox, so I had to press enter to get back to the message. I want to show you some keystrokes that are unique to Window Eyes. So far, everything that I have shown you is Outlook Express or Windows Mail keystrokes. If I want to read the “from” field, I can hold down the alt key and tap the 1 key that is across the top of the keyboard. Press alt-1 now. WE: From, Tina Johnson, tjohnson04463@verizon.net This told me the “from” field. That is exactly what we can see up on the screen. It shows me the “from” with that address. Let me press alt-2 and see what that says. WE: Date, Friday March 23, 2007 8:34 pm That tells me when this particular e-mail was sent. You can see that this is very old e-mail here. Press alt-3 now. WE: To: Simplycomputers@yahoogroups.com So that reads me the “to” field of the e-mail. So alt-3 is a good way to find out who the e-mail was sent to. Press alt-4. WE: CC not found. This is the “cc” field. This is who it was carbon copied to. In this particular e-mail message, there were no recipients who were carbon copied. Press alt-5 now. WE: BCC not found. This one, if you were reading any e-mail message, would never be found because that is the point of it. It is a blind carbon copy. You will never know who it was blind carbon copied to. Now if you are creating the e-mail message, then you can press alt-5 and you can see who you are blind carbon copying. Press alt-6. WE: Subject: Simply computers web buttons Alt-6 reads the subject of the e-mail that I have. Press alt-7 WE: Attachments not found. It said, “Attachments not found.” Had there been attachments to this e-mail message then it would have told me that those were there. Press alt-8 now. WE: Status line not found. If there was a status line in the message, then it would have been displayed, but there isn’t one for this message. If any of these fields aren’t there, then they would be announced as not found. But you can remember that alt-1 through alt-8 are very simple ways of being able to read this information. Now let’s say that not only did you want to know the “from” field, but you also wanted to put focus on that field. It is possible to shift-tab back up into these fields. Outlook Express and Windows Mail allow you to tab your way into these edit boxes. In order to do that, you would need to turn off browse mode by pressing control-shift-a, and then you could press shift-tab to get back up there. That is a lot of keystrokes, depending on where you are in your document because there may be links that you would have to tab over first, so the “alt” keystrokes that we just went through can actually be used as a shortcut to put focus on those particular fields, not just read them. For instance, when I pressed alt-1, remember what that read… WE: From, Tina Johnston, tinaj04463@verizon.net That read me the “from” field of who it was that actually sent me the e-mail. But let’s say that I want to put my cursor up there, or set focus on that field, I can press alt-1 again, and the second time in a row….press alt-1 now. WE: From, Tina Johnston, tinaj04463@verizon.net, read only, rich edit This time it added “read only, rich edit.” That is because focus actually went into the “from” field. Now I can arrow through this. Let me hit the left arrow since we are typically at the end of the field. WE: space; semi-colon; Semi-colon is used to separate the e-mail address if there is more than one address. Left arrow one more time. WE: Johnston, tinaj04463@verizon.net Now that might be a little bit confusing because all I did was press the left arrow and you typically expect to move by character. Well, inside Outlook Express, when you are in the e-mail address field, when you are moving between e-mail addresses, they actually lock in that e-mail address and you can’t actually arrow through that letter by letter. So it actually took me all the way to the beginning of the e-mail address. I wasn’t allowed to go through it character by character. That is just the way that the left and right arrow keys work inside the edit field of the “from” box. If you want to go letter by letter, then you would have to navigate using the mouse pointer. So I have moved my cursor to the left edge of my e-mail address. So I cannot go letter by letter with the cursor. We will have to use the mouse pointer. So if you remember from our tutorial section, I can press insert-numpad +. I am holding down the insert key and tapping the “+” key. WE: Pointer route to cursor. Now my mouse pointer is right on top of my cursor. They are both at the exact same place. Now if I press on the numeric keypad the 6 key, which is the right key, that will take me letter by letter. WE: I, n, a, space, J, o, h, n, s, t, o, n, space, < t, I, n, a, j, 0 , 4, 4, 6, 3, @, v, e, r, I, z, o, n, ., n, e, t For each letter, I just pressed the right arrow key and the mouse pointer moved across to the right. My cursor is still sitting at the left of Tina at the beginning of the e-mail address. So that is a good way that you can individually go letter by letter through an e-mail address, if that is what you would like to do. Let’s go ahead and escape out of this particular e-mail. WE: Inbox, Windows Mail, read Tina Johnston, subject: Simply computers….(silenced) I am back at my Inbox now. Let’s say that you wanted to create a new e-mail now. Press control-n, which is the shortcut for a new e-mail. Press control-n now. WE: N, To, rich edit So it said, “To, rich edit,” with “to” meaning the person that I am going to send the e-mail to. Let’s just say that I am going to send it to myself, doug@gwmicro.com. WE: d, o. doug@gwmicro.com, 1 suggestion Now in this case it had auto complete enabled. This is another feature that you can disable if you choose. All I typed was “do” and it auto-completed it and filled in the rest of the e-mail. When I slowed down my typing, I could actually hear it say that. Now we can press enter or tab to go to the next field. Press tab. WE: CC, rich edit This is the carbon copy field. In my case, I am not going to enter any addresses here. Press tab again. WE: Subject, rich edit Type in the subject of the e-mail here. Go ahead and type in, “This is a test.” WE: This is a test. Tab again. WE: blank Now I am sitting in the body of my e-mail. I can type in, “Hello, this is Doug.” If I would press alt-s, it would send this e-mail. It is that simple to create an e-mail. All that you have to do is type an address into the “to” field, the subject, and the body of your e-mail. Then press alt-s and the e-mail will be sent. Let me escape out of here because I’m not going to send myself an e-mail now. WE: Yes, y button, dialog. Windows Mail, blank. Do you want to save changes to this message? Yes, no…(silenced) This is asking me if I want to save these changes, because it realized that I didn’t send it. I’m going to press “n” for no. WE: N, Inbox Windows Mail. Read…(silenced) This takes me back to the highlighted item in my Inbox. I just want to show you one more thing, and then we will be done with this particular section. When you start up Outlook Express or Windows Mail, typically you are already in the Inbox. You can set it so that you are not on the Inbox by setting up some parameters, but I am not going to go into that. To go to the different things, for instance, if I wanted to go to the e-mails that I have sent, or to other folders where I have copied e-mails, I can do all of that. To do that, tab off of the Inbox and I’ll go to the… WE: Inbox, 119, 1 of 6, tree view, depth 2 This is a tree view type of an option that allows me to go through all of my local folders and in my case, I happen to have an Inbox, Outbox, Sent Items, Deleted Items, Drafts, and Junk E-mail. I could have other folders in there. This isn’t typically my e-mail client that I use. This is how you could set up where all of the different mailboxes that you wanted. Once I am in this tree view, I could down arrow one time. WE: Outbox, 2 of 6 If I were to go off of the Outbox, it would show me all of the items that are waiting to be sent. Down arrow one more time. WE: Sent Items, 3 of 6, Read, doug@gwmicro.com...(silenced) This folder is the e-mail items that I have already sent. One of the frustrating things, at least that Windows Mail does, is that as I am arrowing down through this list of mailboxes, if you go to a mailbox that has entries in it, it immediately took me back over into the list view of the items in that particular folder. This will cause you to have to tab over to the tree view each time it does this. If you are moving quick enough, it will not do that to you. Hopefully this has given you a little clue as to how to read your e-mail messages, how to create new e-mail messages, how to deal with your Inbox and other e-mail boxes that you might have. Let’s move on to the next section.