Email Tips & Tricks for Outlook Express

The following only apply to IE's Outlook Express email client.
If you have an MSN account or similar, they may not work as all email clients are different. Some may have different commands to achieve these effects and others may not.

How to create a group email list
Change the background colour of your emails
Add a background image to your emails
Add background music to your emails
Insert images into your emails
Scrolling text in your email
Scrolling images in your email
Some fun with the Marquee command
Even more fun with the Marquee command

How to create a group email list

If you have say 5 or 6 people that you always send the same email to (example sending jokes) you can create a group email list. Then (in just one click) you can send everyone on that list the same email.

Enter Outlook Express in the normal way.
Click the Addresses box (or click 'Tools' from the top menu, and select 'Address Book').
In the popup window that appears, click New and select New Group.
Choose an appropriate name, example: 'My Friends' and enter it in Group Name.
Enter the name and email of each person in Name & Email boxes, making sure you click Add after each entry.
The names will appear in Group Members box.
Click OK and then close the address book.

The Group should now appear in your 'Contacts' list. Now you can email everyone in that group by simply double-clicking the name. Now that you've got the hang of things, you should be able to work out how to add or remove people from the groups list.

Change the background colour of your emails

When writing your email, click Format from the top menu.
Select Background then Color and click on the actual colour required.
Your email background will immediately change to that colour.
You can keep selecting different colours until you find one that you like.

Add a background image to your emails

When writing your email, click Format from the top menu.
Select Background then Picture and click Browse.
Navigate to where your image is stored.
Click anywhere inside the Look in box to select drive and folder you want.
Click on the image you want and click Open, then click OK.

You can use a large photo that fills the screen or a small image that will repeat (tile). Remember that photos can be extremely large files, so emails will take longer to send and receive.

Add background music to your emails

When writing your email, click Format from the top menu.
Select Background then Sound and click Browse.
Navigate to where your music or sound files are stored.
Click anywhere inside the Look in box to select drive and folder you want.
Click on the sound you want and click Open.
Adjust the Play the sound X times or select Continuously and click OK.

Don't pick a sound file that is too large, as this will take longer for the email to be received.

Insert images into your emails

When writing an email, you decide it would be nice to include a photo or funny image.

If your email already has some text in it, position your cursor where you would like the image to go.
From the top menu, click Insert and select Picture.
In the popup window, click Browse to navigate to where your image is stored.
Click anywhere inside the Look in box to select drive and folder you want.
When you've found your image, click it once and it will be highlighted.
Click Open, now you're back to the Picture window (ignore other settings for now).
Click OK and the image will appear where cursor was last positioned.

The other settings:-

Alternate Text - text entered here will be displayed when cursor is hovered over the image.
Alignment - positions image in relationship to text (try them, you can't damage anything).
Border Thickness - if you want a border 2 is ok.
Horizontal & Vertical - these provide a gap around image so text is not butting up (not needed unless you have text surrounding image, then try 8).

Scrolling text in your email

It's important to master going into the raw HTML of your email, or you won't be able to do it

When writing an email, click View from the top menu, then select Source Edit.
3 new boxes will appear below the email (Edit - Source - Preview).
Clicking View and re-selecting Source Edit will remove these boxes, if you don't want them showing.
Edit - Back to normal email editing mode.
Source - Display the HTML editable code of the email.
Preview - View email as it will actually look like, when it's received.

Click Source and you'll see the HTML code (HyperText Markup Language), which is the stuff webpages are made of. Clicking Edit returns you to normal email mode. The email code looks a bit messy at first, but don't let this put you off. In a new blank email, type in a few words. Click Source and look for your words in the code. Insert Marquee tags around the phrase:

<MARQUEE>Hello Viewers</MARQUEE>

Click Preview then stand back and be amazed to see the text scroll across your screen.

Hello Viewers

Note: Marquee only used to work with Internet Explorer, but it now works in the latest Netscape, Firefox, Opera and similar browsers. Browsers that don't understand the Marquee command just see it as stationary text. You can alter the behavior, direction, speed and many other attributes. <MARQUEE behavior=alternate> will bounce back and forth endlessly (see next tip).

Scrolling images in your email

The Marquee command (see previous tip) will also work with images. Instead of putting words between the Marquee command, put an image. I've used an animated GIF image for extra effect.

Type the Marquee tags in manually as above, but put just 2 characters with a few spaces between it. Any characters will do. I've used 'x's here.

<MARQUEE behaviour=alternate>x x</MARQUEE>

Then in 'Edit' mode, click the Marquee between the characters and the Marquee should stay selected (you may have to click a couple of times to select the text in the marquee). From the top menu, click Insert > Picture > Browse etc. and insert your image into it. You can now delete the characters as they were just markers.

Commands can be written in upper or lowercase. All the attributes are put in the first Marquee command and nothing in the closing Marquee. To alter the start direction you use the Direction attribute. The default is 'Left' if you omit this option.

Behaviour=alternate makes it go back and forth, is as you would expect.

To alter the scroll speed use the ScrollAmount attribute. This is the travel in pixels of each step of the scroll. Therefore, the higher the step travel, the faster the scroll will move.

Example:
<MARQUEE direction=right behaviour=alternate scrollamount=50>Your text or image goes here</MARQUEE>

Some fun with the Marquee command

Putting two Marquees back to back produces some interesting effects. Don't forget that Marquee is a Microsoft command (but works in the latest versions of Opera and Firefox) and it's only for fun emails.

Merry Xmas and A Happy New Year

Here is the code:


<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0>

<TR>

<TD><FONT face=Arial color=#ffffff size=5><MARQUEE bgColor=#ff0000>Merry Xmas and A Happy New Year</MARQUEE></FONT></TD>

<TD><FONT face=Arial color=#ffffff size=5><MARQUEE direction=right bgColor=#0000ff>Merry Xmas and A Happy New Year</MARQUEE></FONT></TD>

</TR>

</TABLE>

Swipe your cursor over this code and save it. Create a test page "marquee.html" on your computer and paste it in. To use it in an email, enter the html of the email and paste it in there. One Marquee goes left and the other goes right. The text is the same in both. You need to put it into a table to make it work with some browsers. The whole lot is surrounded by font tags of your choice, or you can use inline styles if you know how to use them.

Even more fun with the Marquee command

The description is in the scrolling text (doesn't work in all browsers).

The Marquee command also works with the 'UP' and 'DOWN' attributes in some browsers.

Just use it in the normal way, but use UP or Down as the direction attribute.

It looks better if you put it in a box.

I've used an inline style to display this box, but this is too large a subject to cover here.

Experiment with it, and I'm sure you'll come up with some other weird effects.

Here is the code:
<MARQUEE direction=up scrollamount=1 height=100 bgColor=#ffff00>Your text goes here</MARQUEE>

The 'scrollamount' is the speed. The 'width' and 'height' can be percentages or screen pixel values. The size can be made as large as you want. The 'bgColor' is the background colour. To alter the text colour and size, you need to surround the whole lot with font tags as in the previous example. The <br> tag can also be used to split up your text.