I have four email accounts. In Outlook Express all my email would pour into one Inbox. Very convenient. In Windows Live Mail, incoming mail for each account ends up in its own Inbox. Very inconvenient, at least for me. If you’re like me and you want all your email in one place, here’s what you do:

1. Right-click Quick Views and click Select quick views.



2. Click All inbox, All drafts, All sent items, and All junk e-mail to place a check mark in each box.



3. Click OK.
4. (Optional) Click the arrow to the left of each account name to hide everything below it.

You opened an e-mail attachment from Outlook Express, edited it, and saved it. When you go to open it, it’s gone—nowhere to be found! You’d just spent hours editing that file, and it has vanished without a trace.

To avoid this from happening to you, always save file attachments before opening them to make changes. The right way to proceed is instead of double-clicking the attachment to open it, right-click the attachment, click Save As, and then save the file to a folder on your hard drive. As long as you can remember where you saved the file, it can’t simply disappear.

Once the file is saved, use your word processor (or whatever program you use to edit or view the file) to open the file and edit it. When you are done editing, you can then attach the file to an outgoing e-mail message to send it.

Is there any hope for that file you lost? Maybe. These files are stored in hidden, temporary folders that Outlook often deletes in the course of doing its business. If you’re lucky, the edited file is in one of these temporary folders. You can try one of the following maneuvers to hunt it down:

Go back to the email message that contains the attachment and try to open the attachment. If the file contains your changes, use the program’s File, Save As command to save the file to a permanent folder on your computer, such as My Documents. If the file does not contain your changes, DO NOT save the file; you could end up writing over the file that contains your changes.

If that didn’t work, try this:

1. Run My Computer by double-clicking its icon on your desktop or on the Start menu.
2. Click Tools -> Folder Options.
3. Click the View tab.
4. Click Show hidden files and folders, and then click OK.
5. Double-click the icon for the drive on which Windows is installed, which is almost always drive C.
6. Double-click the Documents and Settings folder.
7. Double-click the folder for the user name you are logged on as.
8. Double-click the Local Settings folder.
9. Double-click the Temporary Internet Files folder.
10. Click at the end of the entry in the address bar to move the insertion point there, and type \Content.IE5. Your entry in the address bar should look something like this: C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Settings\Content.IE5
11. Press Enter.
12. Double-click each folder in the Content.IE5 folder and look for the file. The files should be listed by name in alphabetical order. It could be in any one of these folders. If you find the file, double-click it to open it, and then use the program in which the file opens to save it to a separate folder on your computer, such as the My Documents folder, so it doesn’t get lost again.

I belong to a few advocacy groups run by well-meaning folks who are committed to spreading the message. Unfortunately, some of them are unaware of one of the first rules of e-mail etiquette – don’t pass along the email addresses of people you know to others without the expressed permission to do so.

What these folks usually do is use their email program to create a group – a list of all the email addresses they have in their address book for people related to the advocacy group. Whenever they send a message, they simply insert the group name into the TO box, and the message is broadcast to everyone in the group.

This is very efficient, but it displays the email addresses of everyone in the group to each person in the group, which is a big email etiquette no-no. This practice significantly increases the risk of having that email list fall into the wrong hands – the hands of a spammer who then starts sending spamming everyone on the list.

The proper way to handle mass mailings is to BCC (blind carbon copy) everyone on the list. With a blind carbon copy, everyone in the group receives the message, but the recipients’ email addresses remain hidden.

You can BCC individuals or groups. To create a group in Outlook Express, take the following steps:

1. Open the Tools menu and click Address Book.
2. Click the New button and click New Group.
3. Type a name for the group.
4. Click the Select Members button.
5. Double-click the name or email address of everyone you want in the group.
6. Click OK to close the Select Group Members dialog box.
7. Click OK to save the group.

To BCC an individual or group in your address book take the following steps:

1. Create a new email message as you normally would.
2. Instead of clicking in the To: box and typing an email address, click To:. This opens the Select Recipients dialog box.
3. Click the name or email address of each person to whom you want to send this message. You can select multiple recipients by clicking a group name or holding down the Ctrl key while clicking additional names/addresses.
4. Click the Bcc:-> button.
5. Click OK. This returns you to the New Message window, where you can proceed to compose and send your message. The To: and CC: fields are blank, and all group and individual names and addresses appear in the BCC: field.

Now when you send the message, none of the recipients will be able to see the names or email addresses of the other recipients.

I have several years’ worth of email gunking up Outlook Express, but I’m afraid that as soon as I delete it, I’ll need one of those messages. Outlook Express contains an option to Export messages, but then I can’t figure out where the exported messages are stored or how to get them back. After thinking about this problem for some time, I developed my own solution:

1. Create a new folder in Outlook Express.
2. Move the messages you want to archive to the new folder.
3. Move that folder wherever you want to keep it – to a CD, flash drive, external hard drive, or whatever.

If you ever need those messages, simply copy the folder file back to the folder in which Outlook Express stores its folders and their contents.

The following sections explore the three steps in detail.

Step 1: Create a New Folder in Outlook Express

To create a new folder in Outlook Express…

1. Right-click Local Folders.
2. Click New Folder.
3. Type a name for the new folder, such as 2007 Inbox Backup.
4. Click OK.

If the new folder does not appear, exit Outlook Express and restart it.

Step 2: Move Messages to the New Folder

To move messages from one folder to another in Outlook Express…

1. Click the folder that contains the messages you want to move.
2. Click Received or Sent above the column that displays the dates of the messages to sort them with the oldest messages first. (Clicking a column head toggles the sort order – for example, if the messages are sorted by newest first, clicking the column head reverses the sort order, so the oldest messages appear at the top.)
3. Click the oldest message you want to include in your archive.
4. Hold down the Shift key while clicking the newest message you want to include in your archive.
5. Release the Shift key.
6. Drag one of the highlighted messages over the folder you created in Step 1 and release the mouse button. Outlook Express moves the messages to the archive folder, which can take some time depending on the number and size of the messages.

Step 3: Move the New Folder to a Separate Storage Medium

To find out where Outlook Express stores the folders and their contents…

1. In Outlook Express, click Tools, Options.
2. Click the Maintenance tab.
3. Click Store Folder. Outlook Express displays the path to the “Store Folder” – the folder in which all of its message folders and their contents are stored.
4. Drag over the path to the Store Folder so the entire path is highlighted, and press Ctrl+C to copy it.
5. Start My Computer or Windows Explorer.
6. Click in the Address bar to highlight whatever it contains.
7. Press Ctrl+V to paste the path to the Store Folder in the Address Bar.
8. Press Enter. My Computer or Windows Explorer displays all the folders that Outlook Express uses to store messages, including the new folder you created. (These “folders” are actually DBX files, so their icons will appear as file icons, not as folder icons, but you should be able to tell from their names what each file/folder contains.)
9. You can now move the folder to your backup medium using whatever technique you normally use to move files and folders.

Now that the “folder” is archived, you can always copy it back to your Outlook Express Store Folder to access any messages it contains.