Microsoft Outlook 2007 Service Pack 1 freezes and hangs occasionally for some users depending on their actions. A search on Google revealed more than 250000 pages for the search term Outlook Freezes. The developer of the Defrost Outlook software mentions one instance where his software can help overcome a seemingly frozen Microsoft Outlook: Fix for the hang of Microsoft Outlook when receiving meeting / appointments with HMTL entities.

The first public release of Defrost Outlook has the version number 0.8 and the author Daniel Cohen asking the users to contribute by sending him error reports and descriptions of hangs in Microsoft Outlook.

The source code and the binary of the application are available for download. The binary can be installed as a plugin for Microsoft Outlook and intercepts appointments and fixes them so that they do not freeze the system. The plugin is a workaround until Microsoft publishes an official fix for the bug.

continue reading "Defrost Microsoft Outlook"

Google Mail introduced a new feature recently that can be helpful in finding out if someone else has or had access to your Gmail account. The function is a bit hidden in the footer area of Gmail after you log in. Just scroll down to the bottom until you reach the line at the bottom starting with Last account activity.

Gmail provides information about the time of the last login and which IP has been used to login to the account. A Details link is available at the end of the line which opens a popup window with further information.

Activity on this account is the name of the window and it displays the last five activities in a table with information about the access type (pop, mobile, browser), IP of the computer that logged into Gmail and the time.

continue reading "Tracking Gmail Account Usage"

I already covered how one could make Gmail the default Firefox 3 mail client which would have the effect that mailto links would be opened directly in Gmail. This did not change the default mail behavior in Windows however which was not a huge problem for me because I use Thunderbird locally and the Gmail account is available in the mail program.

Some users prefer to do everything online however and they may have a problem with the options to send mails in Windows. gAttach! (via Freeware Genius) comes to the rescue. It’s a small software for Windows that integrates Gmail nicely as the default mail client. Some applications that are compatible to that program are Windows Explorer, Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat and Windows Live programs.

It also handles mailto links in web browsers. The main benefit of using gAttach! is that users can send emails and attach files to those emails from within Windows which are then handled and send by Gmail.

continue reading "Make Gmail The Default Email Client"

“This is a guest post by Ben Carigtan, a technology enthusiast and staff writer at Online-Tech-Tips.”

Is your outlook mailbox a mess? Do you miss reading important emails because of the tons of emails you receive on your inbox? Do you want to organize it in such a way that you move a group of emails automatically upon receiving? If you are someone like me who receives more than a couple of hundred emails per day then this tutorial is for you!

Keeping an organized Outlook mailbox is easy by applying rules. In Outlook you can do many things like “move to a specific folder”, “auto delete” and “auto reply”.

continue reading "Creating Rules in Microsoft Outlook"

URL Link is a very sophisticated add-on for the email client Mozilla Thunderbird that provides advanced link manipulation techniques. The most obvious - and probably common as well - function is to join links that spawn across multiple lines which is often the case when verification emails are send. It also substitutes spaces in links to %20 so that network paths can be followed.

Another excellent feature is the ability to mark text and perform a search or create a link from it. By default Google and Wikipedia are available but the add-on provides access to custom searches as well which can be added in no time in the add-on’s options. Three links can be created from any word that is marked, they lead to www.word.com, www.word.org and www.word.net with the option to add custom extensions like co.uk as well.

Another interesting feature is the option to convert email addresses in the mail body to links. Say someone added a mailto link in the body text of the email. This could be converted into a link to the domain of the email, e.g. from someone@something.com to www.something.com. It can also handle Javascript links.

continue reading "Thunderbird URL Link"