Windows 7 : Email and Newsgroups with Windows Live Mail - Using the Windows Live Mail Contacts, Newsgroups and the Internet

1. Using the Windows Live Mail Contacts

You don’t have to communicate via email for long before you mistype someone’s address. Suddenly, spelling has become more important than ever before. Your local mail carrier can direct your parcel to you when the label is misspelled, tattered, and torn, but email with a misspelled address just gets bounced back to you or lost in the black hole of the “catch-all,” an account designed to receive incorrectly addressed email. Email addresses can also be cryptic and long, and a very rare few are even case sensitive. The Windows Live Contacts list (previously called Address Book in Outlook Express and Windows XP) feature in Windows Live Mail is a big help with all of this.

You can open Contacts in its own window by clicking the Contacts item in the sidebar.

Adding, Editing, and Removing Entries

A foolproof way to add someone to your Contacts is by doing the following:

1.	Open a message sent to you by someone you want to add to the Contacts.
2.	Click the Add Contact link that appears to the right of the address you want to add to your contacts.
3.	An Add a Contact dialog box opens for the entry, as shown in Figure 1. Go ahead and fill out as much of the form as you can now. You will save yourself a load of time later. Figure 1. Go through all the tabs in the Add a Contact dialog box and enter any information about this contact you feel appropriate.

You also can add someone to your Contacts the old-fashioned way—that is, manually from a business card or other source. In Windows Live Mail, click the Contacts icon to open the Contacts list. Click the New button and the Add a Contact dialog box opens for you to enter information.

To edit a contact later, click again on the Contacts item in the sidebar to open the Contacts list. Select the contact that you want to edit by double-clicking that person’s name. The Properties dialog box now opens with a summary of that person’s contact information. To change or add information, you need to click one of the other tabs along the side of the dialog box—the information cannot be changed on the Summary tab.

You might find duplicate listings or unwanted contacts in your Contacts. Deleting a contact is simple: Just highlight the entry and click Delete (on the toolbar). Be certain you’ve selected the correct contact, because this action cannot be undone.

Dealing with Spam

A hot topic in email circles today is the subject of commercial advertisements that are mass delivered via email. This type of unsolicited mail is generally referred to as spam, a name attributed in Internet lore to a Monty Python musical skit pertaining to the pink meat product of the same name. This type of mail is so offensive to some people that a few states have even enacted laws against it.

Some groups are also working with the U.S. federal government to ban unsolicited email and place identification requirements on people and organizations who send advertisements via email. Countless antispam organizations exist, with one of the foremost being CAUCE, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (www.cauce.org).

The real problem with spam is that scam operations are rampant and difficult to detect. Spam also has an impact on Internet traffic, requiring a considerable amount of bandwidth that many people feel would be better used for other purposes.

If you have been online for more than an hour, you’ve almost certainly received some spam yourself. Windows Live Mail has a Junk Mail filter inherited from Outlook that uses massive amounts of data collected by Microsoft’s Hotmail service to help differentiate junk mail from real mail. As a default, it is turned on.

Before mail comes into your Inbox, it is analyzed by the Junk Mail filter using the latest information supplied by Microsoft through online updates. It then moves suspected junk mail into the Junk Mail folder for you to examine later. I do recommend that you visually scan the Junk Mail box once a day until you become convinced that it’s not eating up real emails that you would otherwise miss.

If an email has been mistaken as spam, right-click it and choose Mark As Not Junk. It will be moved to the Inbox. If you want to prevent the next email from this sender from going into Junk Mail again, right-click the email and choose Add Sender to Safe Sender’s List. This puts them in your “white list” of valid senders.

2. Newsgroups and the Internet

With the overwhelming and still growing popularity of the Web since its inception in the early 1990s, you might easily forget that the Internet was around for more than two decades before the first web page saw the light of a cathode ray tube. Before the inception of the Web, people used the Internet to access newsgroups. Newsgroups began in 1979 as a forum in which UNIX users could communicate with each other, and the concept grew steadily from there into what is now a global assemblage of people sharing information on virtually every topic imaginable.

Originally, news servers exchanged articles using UNIX-to-UNIX Copy Protocol (UUCP), which involves direct modem dial-up over long-distance phone lines. In 1986, the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) was released, allowing news to be transported via TCP/IP connection over the Internet. Most modern newsgroups use the NNTP protocol, and it is the only news protocol supported by Windows Live Mail.

Newsgroups are scattered on servers around the world, and the rough network used to carry newsgroup bandwidth is generally referred to as Usenet. We’re not implying, however, that some authority provides oversight of Usenet. “Usenet is not a democracy” is one of the first statements you will read in virtually any primer or Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list on the subject, alluding to the virtual anarchy in which this medium exists. Usenet has become so large and diverse that a simple definition cannot possibly do it justice.

What we can do, however, is roughly describe the types of newsgroups and news servers that you can access using Windows Live Mail. Basically, the administrator of your news server determines which news feeds you will have access to. Feeds are passed along to the server from adjacent servers, providing a decidedly decentralized structure to Usenet. Each server maintains a list of message IDs to ensure that new articles are received at a given server only once. An individual server can control which feeds it propagates, although the interconnectivity of Usenet servers ensures that a lone server has little or no control of the overall distribution. Thus, the authority of a news server is generally limited to what clients (that would be you) can access and what kind of material those clients can post. Likewise, the decentralization of servers means that an article you post may take hours—or even days—to circulate among all other news servers.

A free alternative to commercial news servers is a web-based news service, such as the one created by groups.google.com. An advantage of using a web-based news service is that a search brings back results from many newsgroups, not just one. It’s a terrific way to find expert postings on just about anything from open-heart surgery, to child adoption, to what people think of the new car you’re considering buying. However, messages are not brought into your news client program (such as Windows Live Mail) for reference offline.

Many folks still use newsgroups and want a decent reader and newsgroup message composer that works more like an email program. It’s also noteworthy that Microsoft has rethought newsgroups a bit and has some useful offerings in the way of help information on all its products, by way of Microsoft Communities, a set of super newsgroups with new features.

Locating News Servers

Many ISPs and companies provide news server accounts to their Internet users, but you still might find yourself looking for a server on your own. This might be the case even if you have a news account available to you; some service providers censor the news content that is available, and if you want uncensored news, you must rely on a different source.

Many news servers are available through virtually any Internet connection, but you’ll pay for that connection. Typically, monthly charges for a personal news server account range from $2 to $20 per month and get higher for corporate or higher-bandwidth accounts. If you plan to use newsgroups frequently, you might want to factor in this cost when you’re shopping for an ISP. You can find a good list of commercial news servers at http://freenews.maxbaud.net/forfee.html.

However, if you have an Internet connection and simply want a different news server, you can find a list of free news servers available online at http://freenews.maxbaud.net/newspage.html?date=today. The list of free servers can change daily.

Web-based news servers at the time of this writing could be found at http://newsguy.com/news.asp.