The purpose of the address book function is to store the email addresses of your contacts so that you don't have to remember them or look them up when you want to send a message. This means that the "contact's" email address is seldom seen. If it is important to you to remember addresses you may not want to use this function that much. However, for most of us, it is valuable to know that someone's name and their email address are automatically linked.

 

Outlook Express stores the names and addresses of people with whom you are in contact in two ways, the contacts list and the address book. The contact list is seen in the lower left corner of the message page (if you have enabled it). This contact list may be automatically maintained and added to if you wish. On the Tools menu click on options and then press the Send tab. Make sure the option "Automatically put people I reply to in my address book" is checked. If you do this you will have to go through your contacts list at intervals and thin it out.

 

An alternative is to select the names of contacts you would like to add to your address book. When a message from that person is open you can automatically add them to your address book by using the Tools menu item Add sender to address book

 

You can manually add people to your address book by opening the address book (Click on the icon) from either the message page or the send page. Then select "New Contact" from the file menu (of the address book) or click on New and then on New Contact