Running Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional

Chapter 19

In today's "wired world," electronic mail (e-mail) has become an essential communications medium. One of the most widely used features of the Internet is the ability it provides you to exchange messages and files with friends, business associates, and strangers.

Another popular method that many people use to exchange information is Internet news. Thousands of separate newsgroups on the Internet offer discussions about almost every imaginable topic, from particle physics to ragtime music.

Microsoft Windows 2000 includes a program called Microsoft Outlook Express that handles e-mail and Internet news in a single "information store." Outlook Express includes a rich-text message editor and viewer and a set of folders you can use to organize incoming and outgoing mail and news messages. Its integration with Address Book allows you to work with the same contacts you use for other applications that support Address Book. Outlook Express also gives you access to several Internet-hosted Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directories that you can use to find e-mail addresses, postal addresses, and telephone numbers.

Outlook Express can work with almost any mail or news service, including the protocols used by The Microsoft Network online service and most other Internet service providers (ISPs). It doesn't work with America Online (AOL), however; at the time of this writing, in winter 1999, AOL doesn't support third-party mail clients. If you have accounts with more than one ISP, you can use Outlook Express to manage all your mail from a single window, and you can switch between news servers to participate in more newsgroups than you might be able to access from a single ISP.

Like Address Book, Outlook Express now supports multiple identities. This means that two or more users can easily keep their mail segregated while sharing a Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional user account. Note that if you have already used Address Book to set up more than one identity, you will automatically have the same identities in Outlook Express—and vice versa.

Outlook Express vs. Outlook

As the names suggest, Outlook Express provides some of the same functions that are provided in Microsoft Outlook, the communications component of the Microsoft Office suite, which is also available as a separate stand-alone application. Outlook offers many additional e-mail, scheduling, and contact management features that aren't included in Outlook Express. If you install Outlook on your computer after you have been using Outlook Express, you can import the contents of your Outlook Express mailbox folders into Outlook.

Outlook Express is designed to provide a basic, fast, and reliable Internet mail and news client program, whereas Outlook is a more complex product with many additional features and functions. If you use your computer in a home, school, or small-business environment, Outlook Express might be adequate to do everything you need in order to send and receive mail and news messages. (Because of its simpler user interface and ability to handle newsgroups as well as e-mail, you might even find it preferable to Outlook.) On the other hand, if you want to integrate mail with other Microsoft Office applications, if you need the calendar and contact management functions in the larger program, or if you need to connect to a network mail server, you might want to consider using Outlook.