Q:
For my job, I send out a lot of e-mails that are very important for people to see right away. How can I set them as high priority so that they will view them as soon as possible?
A:
Excellent question! As you go about your daily e-mailing, you know that some of the e-mails you send out are much more important than others. For instance, e-mails you send to clients at your business are more important than sending a joke to your best friend. (Or, maybe it's the other way around for you!)
Setting your e-mails as high priority, or even low priority, will help your receivers understand if the e-mail needs to be read as soon as they get it or if they can let it go for a couple hours. I'm not saying you should mark every e-mail you send as high or low priority, but it's nice to let your readers know what's going on. High priority is much more common than low priority, because it just lets everyone know how important the e-mail is. Setting your e-mail priority is very simple to do, so let's get started!
In Outlook Express, create a new message just like you would for any other e-mail. Along the toolbar buttons at the top, look for the button that says Priority. Click on it once to get High Priority, click on it twice to get Low Priority or click three times to have no priority at all. There's also a down arrow on the button, so you can click on that to choose either high, low or normal (none) priority as well.
A red exclamation point is used for high priority and a blue down arrow is used for low priority. Once you choose your priority, a message will appear at the top of the e-mail saying which status the e-mail is set to. Next, you can compose the e-mail like you normally would and send it off. When your receiver gets the e-mail, they will see either the exclamation point or the arrow beside their message. That way, they will know instantly if they need to read the e-mail right away or not.
If you use Netscape mail, click on the New Message button and look for the pull down menu that says Priority. When you click on the menu, a list of priority settings ranging from lowest to highest will come up and you can select which one you want. Then just compose the e-mail like you always do and send it off.
For Hotmail, click on New and look for the drop down menu at the top of the page that says "Set priority to." You can then choose between High importance and Low importance. Once you've made your selection, just type out the e-mail and send it off.
That's it. I hope this tip has helped some of you out!
~ Erin
