First Class Email Tips and Tricks  

Sending messages to teachers in Greater Essex County schools is pretty easy. If you know the name of the recipient, just type it into the TO: field and type your message in the body of the message. This month, a couple of helping ideas...

Help with Spelling
I know I want to send a message to this guy but I don't know if it's "Doug Peterson", "Doug Peturson", "Doug Petersen", "Dug Peterson", "Doug Pederson", or some other permutation of letters that generates a name that sounds like that. In this case, First Class can certainly help you with its "pattern matching" feature. Just type "Doug" in the TO: field and press your enter key. First Class searches its list of registered users and will present a list of everyone who has the characters "D", "O", "U", and "G" in their name. Point to the one you want and double click your left mouse button and First Class does the rest, putting the recipient's name in the TO: field.

Help with Addresses Outside Greater Essex County
I think that everyone realizes that the First Class mail server actually does give you an Internet email address. In fact, you can tell anyone you may wish to correspond with that your email address is formed like the one below:

Doug_Peterson@gecdsb.on.ca

Of course, you'll change my name for yours but the "gecdsb.on.ca" remains the same for all of us. But, suppose that you wish to send a message to someone else on the Internet. For example, my account on ENOREO is:

dougpete@enoreo.on.ca

If you type the above address into the TO: field, you'll get an error message since there is no such user on the First Class server. How do you tell First Class that the mail doesn't stay locally but, rather, goes out to the Internet? Just tag a ",internet" to the end of the address. i.e.

dougpete@enoreo.on.ca,internet

and First Class knows enough to forget about checking for the address locally and sends it off to the Internet, and with any luck, it will be in the recipient's own mailbox in a matter of minutes.

Address Books
Now, as you can imagine, these addresses can be very painful to type each time you want to send an email message. Again, First Class to the rescue. You can set up your own private Address Book. Into this Address Book, you still have to type the entire Internet email address with the @ and the . in the right spots but only once.

Select a "New Personal Address" and you'll get a window that looks like this.

Next, fill in the blanks. So, if I was creating an entry for my ENOREO account, I would move my cursor around afill in the blanks so that it looked like this.

Click on the X in the top corner and save the information. You'll create one of these for every person that you want added to your address book.

Using the Address Book
Using your newly added entry is just as easy now as if the recipient was on the First Class system. Type the name in the TO: field and First Class first searches your Address Book and, if it finds the person's name, plops it into the email message. Finish your message and send it and away it goes over the Internet to the intended recipient!

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