Sometimes it is to your advantage to not download an entire e-mail from your mail server, such as when you have a slow Internet connection or you want to start looking through many e-mail messages for a particular one as soon as possible. Outlook offers the capability to download only the e-mail header, which includes the sender and the subject of the e-mail, and display these onscreen before downloading the message itself.

Suppose you will be out of the office and want to alert anyone who sends you an e-mail of that fact so they'll know when they can expect you to respond. In that case, you can set up Outlook to send an auto-reply to anyone who sends you a message.

For replies and forwarded messages, you can choose to attach the original text, to include and indent the text, or to add a prefix to each line of the original message or reply without including the original text.

If you frequently sign your messages using not only your name, but also additional information such as your job title and contact information, you'll appreciate Outlook's Signature feature. When enabled, it appends text of your choice to the end of every message that create and/or reply to.

If you like visually appealing message templates called stationaries, you may want to set up Outlook to always use a particular stationery for all new messages.

Outlook message window does not show all message fields. Many fields are hidden behind the Options button, where you can set message priority, delivery notifications, etc.

Usually Outlook users are using folders to organize messages, but you can also use colors. For example, you might apply a special color to all messages from a particular person. You can then see at a glance which messages are from that person.

If you want to be sure that someone has received your message, you can request a delivery receipt.

You can display or hide a Reading pane that displays the header and partial contents of the selected message.

When you answer questions or comment some points of the received message, it helps to include an indicator so that the person reading your message will know exactly what topic you're responding to.