Use Outlook Express More Efficiently with Shortcuts
Knowing the right keyboard shortcuts you can make email handling with Outlook Express fly. Find out the right combinations.
An Email Session Cut Short
Outlook Express comes with pretty (or, at least: simple, elegant) button bars and menus. These make it relatively simple to handle your email with the mouse.
As soon as you are about to write a message, however, using the mouse turns into a frustrating (for you) and funny (for your coworkers) endeavor. So why not keep your fingers at the keyboard while dealing with your daily dose of email and save both some time and some calories (you will find funnier ways to burn this energy in the time you just saved -- promised!)?
Checking Mail
Let us begin by starting Outlook Express. Having done that, you can give your mouse some cheese so it doesn't get bored.
First, we want to see if we have new mail. In OE's main window we type CTRL-M; this means to hold down the key labeled "Ctrl" while pressing "m". Outlook Express checks our email accounts for new mail and -- provided we have some -- sends us to the latest message.
Browsing and Deleting
This message is not particularly interesting. Let's switch to the previous one by pressing CTRL-<. Since this one is even less interesting (this is email!) let us have another look at the one we looked at before, the next one in the list. We can do that with the shortcut -- surprise! -- CTRL->.
Another very handy combination takes us to the next unread email: CTRL-U.
Since there is little point in keeping uninteresting message, let's delete them. Yes, you can drag them to the dustbin and drop them there; or select select "Delete" from the context menu; or click on that red cross in the button bar. The fastest way to get rid of unwanted mail is to press either DEL or CTRL-D (you may find the latter more comfortable although it requires you to press two keys instead of one).
Creating Messages
To create a brand new email message we type CTRL-N.
There are two ways to reply to a message: to reply only to the person who sent the message we use CTRL-R. If we want our reply to reach both the sender and all recipients of the original message we can type CTRL-SHIFT-R.
In the message window we can navigate between the various header fields (recipients, the subject,...) and the message body with TAB and SHIFT-TAB (going "backwards").
Having written our text, we can check its spelling with the most Wordish key of Outlook express: F7. Finally we will want to send our message. This can be done with either ALT-S (no, the keyboard shortcuts are not very systematically laid out -- but they work) or CTRL-RETURN; I prefer the latter.
Shortcut Key Tables
These were just some of the shortcuts available in Outlook Express. Below you find some more complete lists. Some of the described shortcuts are not in the help file, BTW.
|
Thou cutt'st my head off with a golden axe.
William Shakespeare |
