This is an enhanced e-mail. It has a picture background and also plays music. You can create an e-mail like this using Microsoft's Outlook Express 5.0. This is the e-mail programming supplied with windows 98 (2nd edition). If you have an earlier version of Outlook then you can download the update for the 5.0 version free from Microsoft's web site. To find this site just go to the top of this page and click on tools. Then move down and click on Windows update. Your browser should open to the Microsoft site. Once there click on Product updates and it will check your computer to see what you have installed and give you a list of updates that are available for you to download.
Once you have Outlook 5.0 installed you can even add moving pictures to your e-mails. You can purchase artwork almost everywhere these days ....I even found some software at a local "Menards" lumber yard this past Christmas. Normally though, I usually just see things as I surf the web on other peoples web pages and save their artwork to my computer.
Whenever you see something you like on the net just right click on it and choose ...save picture as... from the menu that appears. Then give it a name you can understand and save it to a file. That is how I got the above pictures, the Pluto background, and the music. Every now and then the stingy "crud" that owns the web site won't allow your computer to save a picture. You will get a message that says "that option is not available" when you right click on a picture. You can sometimes get around this by clicking both the left and right buttons of your mouse at the same time.One word about artwork and pictures....most of what you see on the web is in a file format known as "JPEG". This format generally uses a smaller file size than other formats such as "BMP" or "GIF". Two identical looking pictures on your screen can have thousands of KB's of differences in the size of their files.
Outlook 5.0 allows you to use either "midi" files or "Wave" files for your background music. Midi files are computer generated digital music files. These files tend to be smaller (sometimes a lot smaller) than wave files.
A wave file is normal everyday music. (just like you hear on any music CD) Wave files can be manipulated to change their file size but this also compromises the quality of the sound. An average 3 1/2 minute song on a music CD has a file size of about 65MB. The music you hear in the background of this e-mail has a file size of 240KB.
*REMEMBER*
Most e-mail servers limit the size of your mail box to around 3MB so you do need to be careful in what you put in an e-mail. Music, photo's, and graphics can take up a lot of space in an e-mail so don't exceed your mail box's limit. This whole e-mail with the moving artwork, sound, and background is about 700KB in size. Most users with "Dial-up Modems" can download 1MB in about 5 minutes. So to get this e-mail would take about 3 minutes to download. Those of you fortunate to have either a "Cable Modem" or a "DSL Connection" can download in seconds what a "dial-up" user takes minutes to download.
I hope this has answered at least a few of your questions and has given you an idea of what is possible.
