2007 MicrosoftВ® Office System Inside Out (Bpg-Inside Out)

Many people spend a majority of their time working in the mail folders in Outlook 2007. So Microsoft has improved mail features in Outlook 2007 in a number of ways, both visual and functional.

For example, Outlook 2007 now can automatically set up e-mail accounts for you based on a small amount of information you provide, such as your e-mail address and name. Outlook 2007 will attempt to determine the appropriate mail server and other settings based on that information, simplifying account setup. If Outlook 2007 is unable to set up the account, you can specify settings manually.

Here’s a list of the most notable mail-related feature improvements in Outlook 2007:

• Attachment Previewing  You can preview certain types of documents right in the Reading Pane without having to open the attachment or the message containing it. You simply click the item to preview it in the Reading Pane. Outlook 2007 supports previewing of Outlook 2007 items, images and text files, and documents created by Microsoft Office Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Visio. This feature is extensible, enabling third-party developers to build preview capability for other attachment types.

• Out Of Office Assistant  In earlier versions, Microsoft Outlook displayed a notification dialog box when you started Outlook with the Out Of Office Assistant turned on. In Outlook 2007, the notice appears on the status bar. A more important change to the Out Of Office Assistant is that you can now schedule the Out Of Office Assistant ahead of time, turning it on at the specified time. So a week or so before you will be out of the office, you can set it and forget it. The Out Of Office Assistant will turn on at the specified time all by itself and turn off at the set time, as well. In addition, you can specify different Out Of Office messages for recipients in your organization and those outside it. These last two features require Exchange Server 2007.

• Unified Messaging  When Outlook 2007 is used with Exchange Server 2007, you can have your voice messages and faxes delivered to your Inbox along with your e-mail.

• International Domain Names  Outlook 2007 supports internationalized domain names in e-mail messages, enabling people to specify addresses in their own languages in addition to English.

• E-Mail Postmarks  Outlook 2007 stamps each message with a uniquely generated electronic postmark. This postmark serves two purposes. First, it helps reduce spamming by imposing a small processing load on the computer. This load is negligible when sending an average number of e-mail messages, but it imposes an unacceptable load on spammers trying to send messages to a large number of recipients. In addition, Outlook 2007 recognizes the postmark on messages that it receives, helping it to determine whether a message is not junk mail.

• Junk Filter And Phishing Protection  Another improvement in Outlook 2007 is its enhanced junk filtering. Outlook 2007 also adds a phishing filter to help guard against phishing attacks in which official-looking but false messages attempt to direct you to malicious sites or obtain personal information such as credit card or banking information.

• Managed Folders  This feature works in conjunction with Exchange Server 2007 to provide a means for archiving messages to meet legal requirements, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, and corporate policy requirements. Managed folders look and function like other message folders (such as the Inbox folder). However, the policies assigned to managed folders determine retention and other policybased behavior. In addition, the user cannot move, rename, or delete managed folders. These restrictions ensure that the users cannot bypass retention policies.