Sam Barker

A basic introduction to Microsoft Outlook e-mail

Brief introduction to the program

Microsoft Outlook is a web-based e-mail courier. It’s produced by software giants Microsoft, it was released in September 2015. It requires you to create an account so you can send and receive e-mails. These e-mail addresses typically look like “someone@outlook.com”, although other domains can still be used, such as, Hotmail. Personalised domains strictly used for company or work can be used as well.

Receiving and sending e-mails

The primary functions of having an e-mail account is to send and receive e-mails to other addresses. E-mails are used for everything today, keeping in contact with people to receipts for online shopping.

There’s no work to do on receiving e-mails, your e-mail is the only thing needed to receive e-mails, and most online shopping sites now require you to give them an e-mail so you can purchase your goods so it’s not hard to get e-mails sent to you if you’d like to practise this.

When you receive e-mails they can go into two “inbox’s”. One is your main inbox, the site filters your e-mails and puts the ones it thinks you’ll want to read into this one. The other “inbox” is the “Junk Email”, this is where the e-mails which the site doesn’t think you’ll want to read go. It’s fairly common for e-mails which you do want to accidentally go into the “Junk Emails”, so it’s an idea to check it every now and then.

In both inbox’s the setup is the same, the sender’s name is displayed on the left. The subject or the email is down the middle, an e-mail can be selected to be read by clicking on this. The time the e-mail was sent is on the far right.

Filtering e-mails

On each inbox’s there’s a drop-down menu which gives you options of how you want to filter your inbox.

These filters are fairly self-explanatory, for example, the unread will remove all the e-mails out of your inbox (they’ll still be saved though). This is a simple but useful tool.

Sending e-mails

The other main function on Outlook, sending e-mails to other addresses. This can be done in numerous ways.

1. Acquire an e-mail address which you want to send the e-mail to.

Figure 1

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2. Then you click the button at the top left of your inbox, it’s the button with “New” on it shown in Figure 2.

Clicking the “New” button will take you to a new empty e-mail format. As you can see from Figure 2 this button is accompanied by a drop-down menu. This is because this “New” button can also mean new calendar event which is something I’ll come onto later.

To actually write an e-mail and get to sending it you just need to click the “New” button once. This will take you to the next page which will look something like this:

3.

The final step of sending an e-mail is to write one, write the e-mail and then hit send and your e-mail will send to the address.

At any point you can discard the e-mail you’re preparing by hitting the “Discard” button on the right of the “Send” button.

Attaching files to your e-mails

In between those two buttons you’ll notice a button which is labelled, “Attach”, this button means you can send e-mails which are accompanied by files. This is a very useful feature but is common.

Here is the attach button, when this is pressed it’ll open a page which looks like this:

Figure 2

This is where you need to enter the e-mail address you want to receive this e-mail.

This is where you can set the subject for your e-mail.

Finally, this is where your message goes.

Sam Barker

This gives you the options of where you want to get the files from to attach to the e-mail. Selecting the computer button will open your documents and from there you can pick which documents you want.