Read mail

- [Instructor] Let's read mail in Outlook. The first thing you'll need to do is make sure you're in the mailbox if you weren't there already, and you can get there by clicking the mail icon on the bottom left hand side of the screen. From here we have two different mail accounts. Tthe currently selected folder that you're in is highlighted on the left with a gray bar. Right now I'm in the Inbox of my red30tech Office Exchange account. I have another email account that I use with Outlook, my Gmail IMAP account and I can access that inbox by scrolling down, finding the account, and clicking on INBOX.

The contents in the middle of the screen change. If I wanna see both inboxes joined together I can expand All Accounts and here's a shared inbox. I'm going to collapse this though. I won't use it, because I feel like that's going to confuse things for us. From left to right, I have the navigation pane with all my folders, and I have the contents of the currently selected folder in the middle of the screen, and a preview of the currently selected email on the right.

I can change the width of any of these panes by hovering my mouse over the vertical lines in between them and clicking and dragging to make it wider or more narrow. For example, this is hard to read, so I'll click to expand it just a little bit, so that we can see everything clearly. I could do that with any of these. In the folder list on the left hand side I can see that certain folders have numbers next to them in blue. This tells me how many unread items each folder has.

You'll see that each email account has a different amount of unread mail. I can see which ones are unread, because they have a blue dot next to them and the subject line is in blue. I can click on an email, read the preview on the right hand side, and as soon as I click away the blue goes away and now the message is marked as having been read. Occasionally you'll get a message that to help protect your privacy Outlook will block automatic downloading of some images. So the message preview may look like this. At the top of the screen you'll see what to do if there was a problem.

I can click Download pictures, they'll download right away, and now your message will look correct. Let's take a look at that in an IMAP account. I'll click Download pictures and here they appear. As my Gmail account is IMAP it's different from an Exchange account and at the top of the screen I don't have the Focused inbox. If I go back to Exchange I need to toggle back and forth between views, so that I don't miss any mail. Focused inbox is when Outlook determines what emails it thinks are important and it puts those in the Focused tab.

Everything else is in this tab called Other. If you're looking for an email and can't find it you can always come over to the Other tab and see what's there. You can train Outlook what should be in Other and what's Focused. If something is in Other and is supposed to be in Focused you can secondary click on it and choose Move to Focused or Always Move to Focused. Alternatively, if something comes in your Focused inbox and it's not really important you can secondary click and choose Move to Other or Always Move to Other.

So that's how you can train Outlook while you're reading your mail. Finally, on the left hand side you can change these folders. If you don't want to use Favorites you can unmark something as a Favorite by clicking the star directly to the right of the folder name. If you wanna put it back in you can click on the star that appears when you hover your mouse over the folder. You can put anything in Favorites. Here's my Archive folder or my Trash or anything.

To remove it click the star.