I would like my 10 yr old son to start to send me emails every day to improve
his coordination and keyboard skills. I thought the easiest way would be to
put a shortcut on the desktop that, when opened, would open a new email
message with his specific email account. That way, all he has to do is click
the shortcut icon, type the email, and hit send. Is there a way to do this?

"bill" wrote in message
news:4D8156B3-FCEF-4DC2-AF3A-(E-Mail Removed)...
> I would like my 10 yr old son to start to send me emails every day to
> improve
> his coordination and keyboard skills. I thought the easiest way would
> be to
> put a shortcut on the desktop that, when opened, would open a new
> email
> message with his specific email account. That way, all he has to do
> is click
> the shortcut icon, type the email, and hit send. Is there a way to do
> this?


Not with Outlook since it must be *fully* running to send e-mails.
Create a shortcut on the desktop that goes to "mailto:". This is the
protocol for e-mails. Name the shortcut something like "Send e-mail".
When you double-click the shortcut, whatever is your default MAPI (mail)
client will open. However, for Outlook, what opens is the new-mail
editor (or Word if that is what you configure Outlook to use). When you
click Send in the new-mail window, that message goes to your Outbox in
Outlook. However, only a portion of Outlook is loaded to present the
new-mail window. All of Outlook must be loaded to actually do the
sending of the new Outbox item.

Unless Outlook is left running in the background, the newly composed and
sent mail will only sit in the Outbox and not actually get sent. Yeah,
it sucks, but Microsoft decided for some unknown reason to expend 80% of
the load time for Outlook to load only the functionality for composing
new mail and not 100% of Outlook so it could also send it. If Outlook
was not running when you sent the new mail then it sits in the Outbox.
When you open Outlook, it still does not get sent because it wasn't a
new event that occurred while Outlook was open. So you have to
double-click on the item in the Outbox while Outlook is open and resend
it. Since Outlook is fully loaded this time, the mail actually gets
sent.

I don't know if Outlook Express works similarly. You could try to
configure OE as the default e-mail client and see if using the mailto:
shortcut and clicking Send in the new-mail window gets the new mail
actually sent at that time.