The most common way to show an image, smiley or emoticon (as they also known as) in a post on a message forum or in email etc is to hotlink to them. Alot of people don't know what hotlinking is when you tell them but some of those have probably hotlinked before. Basically, hotlinking is allowing images and files to be used on other websites or email etc without the file being used on the originating website. So for example, by entering the right vb code on a vBulletin forum the image would appear as well as be animated if that's how the file is meant to be.

To save a smiley or image onto your computer all you have to do is right click on the image you weant to save and from the menu select save as.. - Then all you have to do is choose a place on your hard drive to store the image. Once on your computers hard drive it is there for good unless you delete it yourself.

To view the file at a later date, you will need some sort of graphics viewer, Irfanview is good for this because if the image is an animated GIF ;like many smileys; it will display the image moving as it was intended to be seen as.

To insert an image or smiley into Outlook Express, simply Copy Paste the image from the source website straight into Outlook Express where you want the smiley to appear, if the website where the image is stored supports hotlinking then when you send your email, your friend will see the smiley.