Customizing Outlook Express for Newsgroups

Outlook Express 6 comes with a fairly good package of preset options for reading and participating in newsgroups. Still, what works for the "average" user might not suit you. You can customize virtually every aspect of news reading in this program by reviewing the various settings available to you. To do so, follow these steps:

1.	In OE6, choose Tools, Options.
2.	Click the General tab to bring it to the front, and then remove the check mark next to Notify Me If There Are Any New Newsgroups if you already plan to reset your group list periodically without input from OE6.
3.	Click the Read tab, as shown in Figure 11.12. OE6 automatically downloads the first 300 headers at a time, but you can change that number here. You also might want to check the option Mark All Messages as Read When Exiting a Newsgroup. If you routinely ignore some posts in the group, selecting this option will help you determine which messages are actually new the next time you open the group. Figure 11.12. You can set the number of message headers that will be downloaded when you open a group here.
4.	Switch to the Send tab to make your default news-sending format HTML if you like, but doing so is not recommended because most news readers can't read HTML formatting.
5.	Click the Signatures tab to bring it to the front, and create a new signature to be used exclusively with newsgroups. Your news signature could include instructions for removing anti-spam measures from your email address. After you have created the new signature, click the Advanced button to open the dialog shown in Figure 11.13. Here, you can select your news account to "assign" the signature to it. After you have assigned a signature, it will be used only with that account. Figure 11.13. You can assign a specific signature to your news account here.
6.	On the Maintenance tab, check the two news-related Delete options if you want to save disk space. To learn more about setting the Delete options, p. 409.
7.	Click OK to close the dialog and save your settings changes.