Desktop Email a Plus for Scandinavian Chair Leiren

Terje Leiren, chair of the Department of Scandinavian Studies and associate professor, knows about email attachments. In fact, he figured out the intricacies of downloading them so well that some of his colleagues were coming to him for help.

Handle Attachments Easily

[Photo:
Professor Leiren with Outlook Express running on his computer.]

Professor Leiren uses Outlook Express for email at the office. With Windows 98 and the latest word processing software, he opens attachments easily and has his system configured so he can write and receive text written in Norwegian and Swedish.

"Faculty in the department were sending me some of their email so I could print off the attachments for them," says Leiren, who also maintains the department's Web site. "It's quite a long process when using Pine on Homer, involving saving the file to the shell and using FTP."

Easy handling of attachments is one of the main reasons Leiren recently installed a desktop email client on his office computer and why more people in his department will be doing so. But there are other reasons, too.

"I primarily switched to Outlook Express because of its advantage in accessing attachments to email messages," explains Leiren. "But we also do a lot of document exchange with colleagues in other countries, so having the ability to use foreign language fonts in Outlook Express is a real plus."

Foreign Language Support

Once Leiren added Norwegian and Swedish to the language settings in his Windows 98 control panel, he could write messages and articles in those languages directly in Outlook Express simply by selecting the language icon on his desktop.

"To be able to use the foreign characters with just a click of the mouse is wonderful," Leiren comments.

"When you install a foreign language keyboard, or font, in the Windows operating system, it becomes available to all of your applications," explains Kirk Wolden-Hanson, senior computing specialist with the College of Arts and Sciences and C&C, who consults with Leiren. "That's the beauty of using a true windows application."

Compatibility Through IMAP

Leiren uses Unix Pine from home to access his same email folders. The ability to access mail folders from different computers is made possible because the campus email servers use IMAP, the standard Internet Message Access Protocol, as does the configuration for Outlook Express that comes with the UW Internet Connectivity Kit. That capability is important in a professor's busy life.

"The first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do at night," smiles Leiren, "is check my email."

University of Washington Computing & Communications
Windows on Computing, No. 22, Winter 1999
newsltr@cac.washington.edu