OE Mistakes

My Stationery Still Doesn't Work!

A few things in Outlook Express don't work in quite the way you have the right to expect. Disappointments regarding sent stationery are often due to one or more of these.

Play Safe

If you've spent time and care on a piece of stationery and you want to be sure that your email arrives exactly as you designed it, go about it the long way:

• Before you begin, click the down arrow beside New Mail.
• Ignore the Recent list and click Select Stationery.
• Click your way to the piece of stationery that you want to use and select it.
• If you haven't used the stationery previously, test it before you use it.

The Format Menu

Once you've started writing an email, you can click on the Format menu and change the format from Plain Text to Rich Text (HTML). That option does work, so if you've just decided that you want to use some underlining or different colours, clicking that button will have the desired result.

After you've changed to Rich Text, more options become available on the Format menu. They include Background > Color, Background > Picture and Background > Sound, and, at the bottom of the Menu, Apply Stationery.

Color works—but look at the colour selection!

Picture works. If you have a background tile you'd like to use, go ahead and add it from here.

Sound sometimes works but more often does not. If you must add sound to an email, this is not a sure-fire way to go about it.

As for Apply Stationery, I can't imagine why it's there. In my experience, it just doesn't work. You may get the background colour. You'll get precious little else!

Recent Files

If you click the drop-down arrow beside New Mail, you'll see a list of Recently Used Files.

Most of the time these do seem to work. However, if you've used some complex scripting, sometimes it gets lost along the way. If you've made some minor changes to the stationery, you're likely to get the version before the changes were made.

Things to Remember

• Keep your Mail Sending Format set to Plain Text. This will not in any way affect stationery that you choose for a particular email, and it will ensure that you don't annoy people who expect to exchange emails in plain text. Stationery is for your friends, but not for the butcher, the baker, or the software vendor.
• If you are using stationery and wish to quote from an email to which you're replying, copy/paste the other person's message onto your fresh email.
• If you have “Include message with reply” checked and intend to reply on the stationery set to you, don't write at the top of the reply email. Scroll down to the original text, make spaces by hitting the enter key, write your answers or comments in the appropriate places and then delete all those parts to which you are not replying before you send the email.
• Stationery sent to or from a web mail address will almost certainly be either removed or corrupted. Removed you can live with; corrupted can mean that the text is illegible. Stationery works from OE to OE—only!
• When you are writing on stationery or in html format there are three tabs at the bottom of the window. Only Preview shows you exactly how the email will look when it's received. You can make last-minute changes to the code in the Source window. You can only send from the Edit window—and that's where you should do your actual writing.
• Keep it small. Find out how large an email your recipient is happy to receive and stay at that size.

Sounds

Take it easy with sounds. Most people don't like them, except, perhaps, for birthday greetings.

• Don't set sounds on “loop infinite”. If the person wants to hear the sound again, they can hit F5. Leave it up to them to decide.
• Before you include a sound, have a look at its size. It isn't amusing to have the download of thirty emails held up by four or five hundred kilobytes of music embedded in one letter.
• Sound in email is just for fun, so stick to the mid format, which may not be high fidelity, but is small.

Pictures

Reduce your pictures before you send them. If you don't know how, read the instructions for photos in email. A picture that's larger than screen size definitely doesn't make sense in a friendly letter.

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Drop-Down Menu from Brothercake