Switching among the Mail app’s views, menus, and accounts

To load the Windows Mail app, open the Start menu (by clicking the Start button in the screen’s bottom-left corner) and then click the Mail app tile (shown in the margin).

The Mail app appears, shown in Figure 10-2, displaying e-mails received from your primary e-mail account — the first account you entered when setting up the app.

Figure 10-3, for example, shows the currently viewed Outlook account at the pane’s top.

To see your mail from a different account, click the right-pointing arrow next to the account’s name. Your other e-mail accounts appear in a pop-out menu, letting you choose the account you wish to see.

Beneath the name of your currently viewed email account, the Mail app lists its folders:

• Inbox: Shown when you first load the Mail app, the Inbox folder lists your waiting email, with your newest email at the top. The Mail app automatically checks for new email every few minutes, but if you tire of waiting, click the Sync button (shown in the margin) next to the account’s name. That action immediately grabs any waiting mail.
• Sent Items: Click here to see the messages you’ve sent rather than received from others.
• Drafts: If you write a message but don’t send it for some reason, it waits here, ready for your further attention.
• More: If you’ve created a lot of folders for sorting mail, click More to find them. Click any folder, and its contents spill out to the right.

The icons along the bottom of the left pane let you switch among the Calendar app, the Mail app, the Feedback app, and the Mail app’s settings.

Click the Settings icon, for example, and a pane appears along the right, offering all the things you can tweak inside the Mail app. The Feedback app, found in several apps, lets you play armchair critic, advising Microsoft on how to improve its apps.

The Mail app, like most apps, changes its width depending on the size of your display. On a tiny tablet, the left pane shrinks to a small strip showing icons instead of words, as shown in Figure 10-3. Click any icon, and the small strip expands, showing you the same left pane shown in Figure 10-2, earlier.

Composing and sending an email

When you’re ready to send an email, follow these steps to compose your letter and drop it in the electronic mailbox, sending it through virtual space to the recipient’s computer:

1. From the Start menu, open the Mail app’s tile (shown in the margin) and click the New Mail icon (it’s a plus sign icon) in the app’s top-right corner.

   A blank space fills the app’s right side, awaiting your words.

   If you’ve added more than one email account to the Mail app, first choose your return address by clicking your desired account name from the Mail app’s bottom-right corner. Then click the New Mail icon in the program’s top-right corner.

2. Type your friend’s email address into the To box.

   As you begin typing, the Mail app scans your contacts for both names and email addresses, listing potential matches below the To box. Spot a match on the list? Click it, and the Mail app automatically fills in the rest of the email address.

3. Click in the Subject line and type a subject.

   Click in the line labelled Subject and type your subject. In Figure 10-3, for example, I’ve added the subject “Potential Privacy Breach.” Although technically optional, the Subject line helps your friends sort their mail.

4. Type your message into the large box beneath the Subject line.

   Type as many words as you want. As you type, the Mail app automatically corrects any noticed misspellings.

5. If you want, add any formatting, tables, files, or photos to your email.

   The menu directly above your composed email offers three tabs, each with different options:

   • Format: This option lets you change your email’s formatting by selecting portions of your email and then clicking the bold, italics, underline, or font color icons along the window’s top edge, as shown earlier in Figure 10-3. To change the font size, click the tiny downward-pointing arrow next to the underlined A icon. A menu drops down, letting you change fonts, font size, as well as clear the formatting from any selected item.
   • Insert: Click here to attach files, as I describe in this chapter’s later section, “Sending and receiving files through email.” This tab also lets you insert tables, pictures, and add hyperlinks.
   • Options: Click here after composing your email to give it a final spellcheck.

   Most ISPs don’t send attached files totaling more than 25MB. That lets you send a song or two, a few digital photos, and most documents. It’s not enough room to send any but the smallest videos.

6. Check your spelling, if desired.

   The Mail app does a pretty good job of correcting your spelling as you type. But to proofread more closely before sending your mail, click the Options button along the Mail app’s top edge. Then choose Spelling from the drop-down menu.

   The Mail app jumps to each error it finds. When it finds a problem, it highlights the word and places a drop-down menu where you can choose from potential replacements.

   If the spellchecker constantly flags a correctly spelled word as being misspelled, choose Add to Dictionary from the drop-down menu. That trick adds the word to the spellchecker’s dictionary, preventing it from bugging you about it.

7. Click the Send button along the top-right corner.

   Whoosh! The Mail app whisks your message through the Internet to your friend’s mailbox. Depending on the speed of your Internet connection, mail can arrive anywhere from 5 seconds later to a few hours later, with a few minutes being the average.

   Don’t want to send the message? Then delete it with a click of the Discard button in the top-right corner.

Reading a received email

When your computer is connected to the Internet, the Windows Start menu tells you as soon as a new email arrives. The Mail app’s tile automatically updates itself to show the sender and subject of your latest unread emails.

To see more information than that — or to respond to the message — follow these steps:

1. Click the Start menu’s Mail tile.

   Mail opens to show the messages in your Inbox, as shown earlier in Figure 10-3. Each subject is listed, one by one, with the newest one at the top.

   To find a particular email quickly, click the Magnifying Glass icon at the top of your email column. A search box appears alongside the icon where you can type the sender’s name or a keyword into the search box. Press the Enter key to see all the matching emails.

2. Click the subject of any message you want to read.

   The Mail app spills that message’s contents into the pane along the window’s right side.

3. From here, the Mail app leaves you with several options, each accessed from the buttons along the email’s top edge:

   • Nothing: Undecided? Don’t do anything, and the message simply sets up camp in your Inbox folder.

   • Reply: Click the Reply button, and a new window appears, ready for you to type in your response. The window is just like the one that appears when you first compose a message but with a handy difference: This window is already addressed with the recipient’s name and the subject. Also, the original message usually appears at the bottom of your reply for reference.

   • Reply All: Some people address emails to several people simultaneously. If you see several other people listed on an email’s To line, you can reply to all of them by clicking Reply All.

   • Forward: Received something that a friend simply must see? Click Forward to kick a copy of the email to your friend’s Inbox.

   • Delete: Click the Delete button to toss the message into your Trash or Deleted Items folder. (Different email accounts use different words for that folder.)

   • Set Flag: Clicking the Set Flag icon places a little flag icon next to an email, reminding you to deal with it at a later date.

   • More: Clicking this fetches a drop-down menu that lists any menu items above didn’t fit on your particular screen. At the least, you spot the Move option, which lets you move the item out of your Inbox and into a different folder for safekeeping.

The Mail app works well for basic email needs. If you need more, including a way to print an email, you can find a more full-featured email program to run on the Windows desktop. Or you can open the web browser and manage your email from your mail’s online site, such as Outlook (www.outlook.com), Google (www.google.com/gmail), or your ISP’s own website.

If you ever receive an unexpected email from a bank or any other money related website, don’t click any of the email’s web links. A criminal industry called phishing sends emails that try to trick you into entering your name and password on a phony website. That gives your coveted information to the evil folk, who promptly steal your money. I write more about phishing in Chapter 11.

Don’t want your Mail app’s Start menu tile to display your emails’ sender and subject? Then right-click its Start menu tile and choose Turn Live Tile Off from the pop-up menu.

Sending and receiving files through email

Like a pair of movie tickets slipped into the envelope of a thank-you note, an attachment is a file that piggybacks onto an email message. You can send or receive any type of file as an attachment.

The following sections describe how to both send and receive a file through the Mail app.

Saving a received attachment

When an attachment arrives in an email, you’ll recognize it: A paperclip icon rests next to the email’s subject. And when you open the email, you see a generic photo thumbnail or a message saying, “Download Message and Pictures.”

Saving the attached file or files takes just a few steps:

1. Download the attached file.

   The Mail app doesn’t download the files until you specifically give it the command. Instead, the Mail app places shows generic thumbnails — placeholders for attached folders — along the email’s top edge.

   You can save the file either of two ways:

   • Click the attached file’s generic thumbnail icon. When the thumbnail shows a miniature of the attached file, right-click it and choose Save.
   • Right-click the attached file and choose Download form the pop-up menu. When the download completes, the generic thumbnails fill in with images or icons representing the newly downloaded files.

2. Choose a storage area to receive the saved file.

   File Explorer’s Save As window appears, shown in Figure 10-4, ready for you to save the file in your Documents folder. To save it someplace else, choose any folder listed along the Save As window’s left edge. Or, click the words This PC, also on the window’s left edge, and begin browsing to the folder that should receive the file.

   Saving the file inside one of your four main folders — Documents, Pictures, Videos, or Music — is the easiest way to ensure you’ll be able to find it later. (I describe files and folders in Chapter 5.) When you choose a folder, you see a list of existing folders where you can stash your new file.

   To create a new folder inside your currently viewed folder, click the New Folder button from the menu along the folder’s top and, when the new folder appears, type in a name for the folder.

3. Click the Save button in the Save As window’s bottom-right corner.

   The Mail app saves the file in the folder of your choosing.

After you’ve saved the file, the attachment still remains inside the email. That’s because saving attachments always saves a copy of the sent file. If you accidentally delete or botch an edit on your saved file, you can always return to the original email and save the attached file yet again.

Windows Defender, the built-in virus checker in Windows, automatically scans your incoming email for evil file attachments. I explain more about Windows Defender in Chapter 11.

Adding contacts

Although the People app loves to add contacts automatically, you can easily add people the old-fashioned way, typing them in by hand.

To add somebody to the People app, which makes that person available in your Mail and Calendar apps, follow these steps:

1. Click the People tile on the Start menu.

   The People app appears onscreen.

2. Click the Add Contact icon (shown in the margin).

3. If asked, choose which account to use for saving new contacts.

   If you’ve entered more than one email account into Mail, the People app asks you to decide which account should receive the new contact.

   The answer hinges mainly on which cellphone you own. Choose your Google account if you use an Android phone, so your newly added contact appears in your Gmail contacts. From there, it also appears in your Android phone’s contacts list.

   Choose the Microsoft account if you own a Windows phone or you want your contacts to travel with you whenever you sign into a PC using a Microsoft account.

   The People app remembers your choice, and doesn’t ask you again.

4. Fill out the New Contact form.

   Shown in Figure 10-6, most of the choices are self-explanatory fields such as Name, Phone, Email, Address, and Other. (The Other field lets you add details such as a job title, website, significant other, or notes.)

5. Click the Save icon, that little disk in the upper-right corner.

The People app dutifully saves your new contact. If you spot a mistake, however, you may need to go back and edit the information, described in the next section.

Deleting or editing contacts

Has somebody fallen from your social graces? Or perhaps someone just changed a phone number? Either way, it’s easy to delete or edit a contact manually by following these steps:

1. Click the People tile on the Start menu.

   The People app appears, as shown earlier in Figure 10-5.

2. To delete a contact, right-click his name and choose Delete from the pop-up menu.

   The person disappears from both the People app, and the email account that currently held that contact.

3. To edit a contact, click the Edit icon (shown in the margin).

   The person’s contact information appears, shown earlier in Figure 10-7, for you to edit.

4. Click the Save icon.

   The People app updates your contacts list, both in the app itself and the online account where that contact is stored. Edit a Gmail contact in the People app, for example, and Gmail also reflects the changes.