Even with rigid Anti-spam settings, unwanted email messages still manage to slip through my net; and they're usually from my mother-in-law. Lovely messages with the subject heading of something along the lines of "What makes a lovely daughter in-law..." frequently hit my In box. I then have to sift through five pages of sickly sweet prose about a daughter-in-law before an equally sickly sweet picture of a golden Labrador puppy appears usually dressed (for some odd reason) in doll's clothes. But as I page down, and down, and down, I also notice that there are multiple email addresses of other recipients on display for anyone to read. Now, I think it's touching that I am so well thought of, but I do mind that my private email address is probably now being distributed to global daughters-in-law across five continents.

Don't get me wrong: I know that there are occasions when you really do have to send your message to as many contacts as possible, so it's good to know that managing Outlook 2007 addresses is easy. It's even easy to hide addresses when sending to multiple recipients - by either using BCC (blind copy) or creating a group and sending the entire group as BCC; something that I must mention, tactfully, to my mother-in-law. Perhaps it would be best to send a BCC message to all the other daughter-in-laws alerting them to the fact that their details are travelling round cyberspace, sent by other ignorant (but well-intentioned) mothers-in-law.

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 comes with the flexibility of multiple address books that can help make sending messages easy and efficient. Using such a distribution list, you can then send an email to a group of people. You can set only one option for the Outlook Address Book (OAB). This setting controls the order in which Outlook 2007 displays names from the OAB: either First Name, Last Name or Last Name, First Name. To do this, choose Tools, Account Settings, and then select the Address Books tab. Now select Outlook Address Book and click Change to display the Microsoft Office Outlook Address Book dialog box. In the Show Names By box, select the display format you prefer.

To remove contacts from your OAB, open the folders list (or click the Contacts button in the Navigation Pane). Then right-click the Contacts folder in question and choose Properties. Click the Outlook Address Book tab and clear the Show This Folder As An E-Mail Address Book option to prevent the folder from appearing in the OAB. Change the folder name, if necessary, and then click OK. It's worth noting that you can't remove the default Contacts folder from the OAB.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 also allows you to set a host of other addressing options. You can configure other addressing options to determine which address book Outlook 2007 displays by default for selecting addresses; which address book is used by default for storing new addresses; and the order in which address books are processed when Outlook 2007 checks names for sending messages. You can modify addresses, specify a default address book for new entries, and automatically add email addresses to your address book (dangerous for some mothers-in-law).

A new feature to Outlook 2007 is the Mobile Address Book (MAB), which is added automatically when you add an Outlook 2007 Mobile Service account to your profile. The Mobile Address Book is not a separate physical address book where contacts are stored. Instead, the Mobile Address Book hooks into your existing Contacts folder to retrieve contacts that have mobile device numbers. Now that I've sorted out my OAB, I must get my STML folder cleared out - that's Spam from the mother-in-law.