How to Set Up Mail Preferences

In this lesson, we are going to prepare you to customize your web browser so that you can specify what page loads when you launch Netscape. You will also be able to send and receive e-mail through Netscape.

Both of these functions are available from the Edit menu above the toolbar in Preferences.

The Preferences menu exists for you to tell Netscape the way you "prefer" things to be. (Aren't you glad somebody cares??)

There are a number of things we could change or set-up, but we are going to focus just on the "home" page and the e-mail functions.

Let's start with the page that you see first when you launch Netscape (the "home" or "default" page).

This is done within the Preference called "Navigator."

You can see the URL (or address) of the "home" page in the white strip beneath "Home Page."

Let's change our "home page" from the UCF website to the Course Development & Web Services web site. I have this address in front of me, so I can just highlight the current URL by clicking and dragging and type in the new address. Then we click OK so that Netscape "remembers" this new page.

Now, whenever we click the "Home" button, we'll go to the page we just entered. Let's try it out.

You can set this up however you want. You might set up your online course web page as your "Home" page or one of your favorite sites. Bear in mind that it's probably best not to make it a site that millions of people are trying to access at the same time. If you do, your browser might start up rather slowly (and this will begin to annoy you).

Now we can set-up Netscape so that you can send and receive e-mail right from your browser!! You won't have to telnet into your Pegasus mail account. The details of how to use these e-mail functions are covered in the "E-Mail" tutorial on this CD-ROM. (We're just going to set it up right now.) This will take a few steps·

Going back into Edit and then Preferences, we expand the Mail & Groups Preference. We are interested in Identity and Mail Server.

We click on Identity to start.

In the window that appears to the right, we are concerned with the first two white strips. Filling them out serves the same function as writing the return address on a mail envelope.

In the first blank, type your name.
In the second blank, type your e-mail address.

Next, we click on the Mail Server Preference back over on the left. We are going to fill this out for using Pegasus. (If you have access to another Mail Server, you can enter that information.) The information you enter will allow Netscape to go into your Pegasus account to access your e-mail.

Pegasus needs to know who you are, so enter your Pegasus log-in name (your initials and the last five digits of your SSN).
The next two blanks are exactly the same. Here's what we type in both windows·

We also need to make sure that POP3 server is selected, and I would recommend leaving mail on server if you are going to be using multiple computers. Netscape will go on to Pegasus and move your mail onto your computer if you do not select this.

In this lesson, we've seen how to customize Netscape to show a desired web page when you launch and how to send and receive e-mail. Check out the E-Mail tutorial to learn more.