From within the Outlook Address Book, you can create a new mail message to a contact or distribution list by selecting that entry (or holding the Ctrl key and clicking on multiple entries) and clicking on the new mail message button () on the toolbar. (You can also select your recipients, click on the File menu, and click New Message.) Once you’ve made that choice, a new mail message window will open with your recipients in the To line. All you have to do is type in the Subject and the Body and send your message!

You can also access the Outlook Address Book from a new mail message. Just open a new mail message and click the To, CC, or BCC buttons.

If you look carefully, you can see the address book icon () next to each of those buttons. When we click one of those mail fields, we’ll see the screen pictured below..

In the top part of the screen, we’ll see the same options we had in the address list. We can type in the box on the left to jump to a particular contact. We can also select which address list we want to see from the drop-down menu on the right. The contents of whichever contacts list we choose will be displayed in the main window.

To address our mail message, just select the contact or distribution list we want (remember that we can select multiple address by holding Ctrl and clicking each of them). Then, select which field we want to place those addresses in by clicking the To, CC, or BCC buttons at the bottom of the window.

Here’s an example of a completed Select Names window:

You can see how we used the search window at the top to jump to Elmer Fudd’s contact. You can also see how your contacts appear in the fields at the bottom.

Once we’ve got this window filled out, click OK to go back to your mail message. You’ll see your recipients there, too, like this:

You can go back to the Select Names box at any time (before you send your message, of course) to change your recipients. You can type them in the To, CC, or BCC fields too, even after you’ve used the Select Names box.