Creating and Sending E-mail

Netscape Messenger has many features that are beyond the scope of this manual. The basics of sending E-mail will be covered. However the more advanced features are best left to many of the excellent books that are available. I suggest that you become comfortable with the basics before moving to more advanced features.

It is time to send a message. Start Messenger if it is not already running. You should be able to do this by now without any instructions. The standard Inbox window will be displayed. Click on the "New Msg" button and the Message Composition window will be displayed as shown in Figure 4-5. The window is divided into two parts. The top part contains the addressing and other header information. The lower part is where the actual message is composed.

Figure 4-6

Figure 4-5

In the top line of the Addressing area, there is a "To" button and a small icon that looks like a person. This is the area where the E-mail recipients address is placed. To test whether the E-mail is working properly, let's type your E-mail address in the "To" field. This will send the message to you. But what if you wanted to send the same message to more than one person? You can type in as many addresses as you want on one line, separated by a comma. But there are other ways to send your message to more than one person. Click the space immediately below the original "To" button. A new "To" button appears as well as a new "person"icon. If you click on the new "To" button, a drop down list appears with 6 different choices. If you select any of these options, the button will chance to the selected option.

But what do the various addressing options mean?

  • Cc. The cc field works like the carbon copy in the old fashioned world. A copy of the message is sent to everyone listed on the cc line. Usually, the message is sent to these people for their information only and no action or reply is required. The original recipient of the message will see the list of names on the cc line.
  • Bcc. Bcc means blind Cc and is used when you want to send someone a copy of the message but do not want their name to appear on the cc line.
  • Groups. This field can be used to list any newsgroups or Collabra discussion groups that you may wish to post your message to. We will not be discussing these groups in this manual.
  • Reply-To. The Reply-To line is used to specify the E-mail address of an account that you wish the reply sent to. This is useful if you want replies sent to a different account from the one you are using to send the message.
  • Follow-up-To. This field is also used with newsgroups and Collabra discussion groups.

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