14. Outlook Express—Email and News

Email is a fast, convenient, and cheap way to exchange written messages and files over the internet. Windows includes Outlook Express to let you send and receive email, as well as read newsgroups (internet discussion forums). You can communicate with anyone who has an email account. Your recipient doesn’t have to have Outlook Express to read and reply to your messages; any email program can talk to any other one.

You can’t use Outlook Express to manage your email with any of the free, web-based mail services—Gmail, Yahoo!, and Excite, for example—except for Hotmail and MSN, both of which belong to Microsoft.