Introduction

Creating, sending, and reading e-mail are the activities that you'll probably perform frequently with Microsoft Office Outlook 2003. E-mail is a quick, convenient way to communicate with people both at your workplace and at other locations. It combines the immediacy and informality of a phone call with the benefits of written correspondence. E-mail provides a fast way to send and receive messages and even formal documents, such as reports , worksheets, and pictures.

One advantage of e-mail over postal mail is that you can send the same message to several recipients at the same time. Another advantage of e-mail is that your messages often arrive in the recipients' inbox within seconds after you send them.

One of the biggest improvements in Outlook 2003 is the integration of Microsoft Word as the default e-mail editor. Almost all of the text enhancement features that you use in Word to format your documents are now available in Outlook. If you are familiar with Word, you will recognize options and tools when you create your e-mail messages.