In this, the first edition of reader mail, I cover a question asked by Steve, and it’s a doozy because it’s very "involved", as they say.

Hey Rich, you got some great stuff. My question is this. I use to have outlook express for my email. I just got a new cpu w/windows 7 and now they want me to use Windows Live for my email. I have not (as of yet) because I use my local service Comcast. But the problem is when I want to send a page that I am viewing on the net and right click it will only let me use Windows Live. Then wants me to sign in and so on. (I just want ONE email account and not have other email accounts) I thought I could get around this by installing Microsoft outlook that came with M/word. I just want to be able to forword things from pages that I view via the net. I had just ran across your stuff and the way you explained it made it sound so easy. I am older and cpu’s are a new thing for me so no matter what I try things just never seem to work. And when I talk to people they tell me they are s o easy which is B.S. I still would like your help on this and information on my other cpu (Windows XP) it just needs more memmory sticks but the kid at the store wanted to sell me two of the R-11 and that is what is in the dam thing so I took them back. Thanks for your time.

Steve

Steve left a few parts out that I had to guess, but I was able to put this all together.

The last Windows operating system Outlook Express 6 was able to run in was Microsoft Windows XP. The reason it’s not available for Windows Vista or 7 is because OE6 uses Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 as its rendering engine for emails. Even if you upgrade IE to 8 in XP, OE6 will still use IE6 to render mails, and this is why OE6 won’t work in Vista or 7 because those Windows OSes come with a later version of IE. As such, you have to use Windows Mail (Vista only) or Windows Live Mail (Vista or 7) as the free Microsoft mail client in newer Microsoft OSes.

What Steve is referring to when you right-click and "send a page" is a Windows Internet Explorer Accelerator called "E-mail with Windows Live":

When used in the IE browser it looks like this:

What this does is either launch the Windows Live Mail client or Hotmail, copies and pastes the link from the site you’re currently on, and then you continue your message and send.

There is the ability to add in right-click support for AOL Mail and Gmail, and it’s here:

http://ie.microsoft.com/activities/en-en/default.aspx?c=Email

…however this doesn’t cover Comcast (or any other ISP) email.

In Steve’s situation, the only automated solution, unfortunately, is the XFINITY Toolbar, which is Comcast’s direct way of integrating their mail into the IE browser – HOWEVER – I don’t recommend using it because I think toolbars are evil and the XFINITY toolbar in particular installs a whole bunch of crap you may not want. If you want to install it, go right ahead, but it’s not something I’d recommend.

The only proper solution is to copy and paste web page links manually into email.

For any web page loaded that you want to send to a friend, single-right-click the address bar so it highlights the address and pops up a menu, then left-click Copy, like this:

As long as you’re right-clicking somewhere on the address in the bar, that’s all that matters and you will get the right-click menu with the Copy option.

After that, go to your email of choice be it a client or webmail, go into the body of the message, right-click and select Paste, like this:

It doesn’t matter if you use mail in a browser or in a client, as what you’re doing is simply copying text from the clipboard buffer into a place where text can be typed (in this case, the body of an email).

I can’t think of any better solution than the manual copy/paste method. Yes, it does require manual involvement, but it works and doesn’t require the installation of anything.

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