OTHER
MEETINGS

The Meeting for Thursday, May 14, 2009, will follow from our DISCUSSION MEETING last month on your experience with browsers.

This will be a DISCUSSION about Your Experience with E-Mail Programs.

Last month, we had a very interesting discussion on a number of topics, and everyone seemed to enjoy learning about the experience of others. We did not have a big group, but hopefully more will be interested in the programs and procedures that others use to read, review, and compose email messages.

Programs that you may use to collect your email and respond to it can easily be as varied as your experience with browsers. The basic program that Microsoft provides with its operating system is Outlook Express, which is a smaller version of Outlook that comes with the Microsoft Office suite. Outlook has many features that can be very helpful in an office or group environment; however, most of these are not needed by the individual user.

The program that is now offered by Microsoft for handling your email is Windows Live Mail. The "Live" features of the program maintains an interactive connection to your email handling plus features from other Office programs. The entire Live system works with Windows XP and Vista, and it can be downloaded at no cost to the user.

A different approach to reading and responding to your email can also be achieved using the system for Web Mail that is available from most of the Internet Service Providers (ISP). This gives you access to the mail server of your ISP through a Web Page that is accessed through your browser. These Web Mail Pages can differ significantly from one ISP to another, and their features can be changed without notice by that provider.

One feature that we should discss is that most email programs can be used to access mail from a number of email accounts at one time. For most providers, this also includes mail stored on Web Pages. This eliminates the need to visit different web sites to collect all of your mail.

SPECIAL NOTE: Some members have indicated that the change of our regular meeting night as the THIRD Thursday in each month to the SECOND Thursday in each month has created conflicts in their schedule. If this is true for you, please let the group know, and we can consider changing back to the THIRD Thursday. If such a change will create a problem for you, please let the group know about that fact, also.

As usual, there will be a period of time prior to the presentation for members to ask about problems that they may have encountered during the last month.