If you want to quickly send an email in the Windows operating system you have to start your email client, click on the write button and start writing the email. A much faster way is to press [windows R], type [mailto:] and hit enter. This opens the new email message window of the default email client on the computer system. It is even possible to add parameters like [mailto:admin@example.com?subject=test&body=test2] which would automatically add the recipient admin@example.com, the subject test and the body text test2 to the email.

There is probably a reference somewhere on the Internet that has a list of all possible mailto commands but I could not find it right now. It would be great if anyone would post it.

The second tip is more useful for recipients who sometimes have troubles if their email program divides a link on multiple lines making it lead to a non-existing page as only the first part of the link will be executed. Users who send emails should put long lists in <> brackets to avoid this.

Got any more email tips that you want to share? Let us know in the comments.

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Whatever it may be it turns out to be very, very easy to move a single profile or even all profiles from the default location to another one. The first step is to close the Thunderbird email client so that it will not write data to the profile folder anymore. The default location of the Thunderbird profile folder depends on the operating system in use, below is a list of common locations:

• Windows XP/2000, %AppData%Thunderbird
• Windows 95/98/Me, WINDOWS\Application Data\Thunderbird
• Linux, ~/.thunderbird/
• Mac OS X, ~/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/

Copy one or several of the Thunderbird profiles to the new location. Now open up the file profiles.ini in the original folder and edit the path pointing to the new profile folder locations accordingly. You also need to change the parameter IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0. Please note that this is valid for all profiles which means that you need to add the full path (e.g. c:\thunderbird\profiles\profile.code\ in the Windows operating system) to profiles that are kept in the default location. Start the Thunderbird email client. If everything worked well it should display the emails and other data as usual.

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Only compressing the folders will delete that email permanently from the computer system. That’s great if you deleted an email by accident and want to recover it but bad if an unauthorized third party tries to read your emails.

Microsoft Outlook provides the means to compress a folder immediately but no option to automate the task. It will however display a popup every 100th time that Outlook got closed asking if the user wants to compress the folders.

A far better solution to force Outlook to delete deleted mails completely at every shutdown is to change a setting in the Windows Registry.

Open the Windows Registry by pressing [Windows R], typing [regedit] and hitting [enter]. Navigate to the following Registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office

The next step depends on the version of Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Office that is installed on the computer. When in doubt perform the operation for all of the following subkeys.

Find the 9.0, 10.0, 11.0 or 12.0 keys in that folder. Click in the Outlook subkey and locate the key PST. If PST is not existing create it. A full Registry path to the right location could look like this:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\PST\

Only the 12.0 can change in the path. If you are in the PST key right-click in the right pane and select New > DWord.

Name the Dword PSTNullFreeOnClose. Double-click it afterwards and give it the value 1 to enable it. This ensures that Microsoft Outlook will remove deleted mails completely on every exit from the computer system.

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New rules are created using a wizard that is guiding the user through the process. It starts with the selection of one or multiple mail folders in Outlook or the Microsoft Exchange Server. All incoming messages and posts will be scanned for keywords that are defined in step 2. It is possible to define keywords that have to be included in the posts or keywords that do not have to be in them for the Outlook add-in to become active.

The notifications are defined in the last step. Four different notifications are available. It is possible to create a post in a folder, play a sound, create a copy in a folder or to create a notification in the popup window. The popup window is basically a monitoring window that has been created for that purpose.

The add-in is compatible with Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Windows Vista. It will also run on previous versions of Microsoft Windows (tested on Windows XP) and Microsoft Outlook but the specific versions are not mentioned on the developer’s homepage.

Advanced Folders Watch

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We will utilize IMAP to transfer the local mails to Gmail which will make it possible in the end to simply move or copy mails to the Gmail account in the local email client.

The first thing that needs to be configured is IMAP support in Gmail. This is done in Settings > Forwarding and Pop / Imap. You only need to check the IMAP enabled checkbox to enable IMAP access for that GMail account.

The rest has to be configured in the local email client. Thunderbird will be used as an example but the basic settings are similar in all other email clients such as Microsoft Outlook.

Here are the values that you need to create the IMAP account in your local email client:

Email Address: username@gmail.com
incoming server: imap.gmail.com
incoming server port: 993
secure connection: SSL
incoming user name: username@gmail.com

outgoing server smtp.gmail.com
outgoing user name: username@gmail.com
outgoing server port: 587
secure connection: TLS

Google provides detailed (but sometimes slightly outdated) information about setting up IMAP in various email clients.

If the setup was successful you should check for new mail. All Gmail mail header should be downloaded to the local mail client.

To backup mails you simply move the mail folders into the Gmail IMAP folders. They will be created there with a label taken directly from the folder’s name. All folders and emails will be accessible in Gmail in the Labels menu.

It is even possible to take it a step further and delete old mails in the email client afterwards. If you need to access them again they are still accessible in Gmail. It is still advised to create a local email backup before deleting any mails locally.

If you encounter difficulties moving or copying folders you could circumvent the problem by creating the folders manually. The emails can then be copied or moved into the newly created folder easily.

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Auto-CC is an extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client that can configure the email client to automatically send CC or BCC emails whenever an email is send from the program. The extension is currently experimental which means that users need to log into the Mozilla website before they can download and install the mail extension.

The email address that the messages are send to has to be configured in the Thunderbird Config Editor. The editor can be accessed by clicking on Tools > Options, selecting the Advanced tab and clicking on the Config Editor button. Adding the auto_cc filter will display four parameters of the Thunderbird extension.

• extensions.auto_cc.auto_cc_address: Double-click to enter the email address that will receive the CC or BCC emails.
• extensions.auto_cc.enabled: Auto-CC is enabled if set to true and disabled if set to false
• extensions.auto_cc.send_as_bcc: Will send the emails as BCC instead of CC if set to true.

A button can be added to the Compose toolbar to quickly turn the feature on or off. One thing that this extension is missing is the ability to select CC or BCC emails on an account basis. As of now all accounts are affected if the extension is enabled which might be ok in a work environment but not at home. The toolbar button is not the perfect solution because it quickly becomes an inconvenience to turn the extension or or off several times a day depending on the emails that are send out. It is also likely that the user will forget to turn on or off the extension from time to time.

As of now it’s a great solution for users who use Thunderbird in a work environment which requires to BCC or CC emails to another email address.

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Take Back Control Over Your Right Click Menus

An article over on Make Use Of which I particularly  liked as I’ve been looking around for a application to do this for a while.

Philipp Lenssen’s Top Google Apps Tips

Some great tips for using Google’s applications and services like Google Docs, Gmail and search. 

7 Beautiful Themes (Visual Styles) to Customize Windows Vista

As Long Zheng was saying yesterday, “Personally, the idea of using a third party visual style in Vista has never even crossed the mind and I’m someone who wouldn’t think twice about using a custom style in XP.” Even so, there are plenty of nice themes you can try, and Life Rocks has put together a list of what they feel are the 7 best visual styles for Vista. It’s a good list, I wouldn’t really disagree with any of the items on it.

Newsgator – The Most Complete RSS Solution

And some shameless self-promotion from me, this is my article, again on MUO, I spent a fair bit of time researching and writing this one so check it out!

What is rundll32.exe And Why Is It Running?

The How-to-Geek had a great post as always on troubleshooting a runaway .dll through the task manager. He also did a very useful post about useless Vista tweaks on Lifehacker.

How One Would-be Web Friend Turned Into a Stalker In Months

Louis Gray outlines a creepy experience with what seems to be a whacked-out entrepreneur. While reading it you’ll probably find yourself asking the same thing I did; Why the hell did Louis put up with this guy for so long?

The most underhyped Silicon Valley success: Meebo

In perhaps one of the best posts I’ve seen Robert Scoble write, he descends from his normal early-adopting, Friendfeed loving position and takes a very real look at an extremely successful service we never hear anything about; Meebo. Did you know they had 20 million monthly users? I sure didn’t.

Why don’t we hear anything about such a runaway web 2.0 success story?

“That A-list bloggers don’t use IM or chat much, so don’t get passionate about it the way they do about, say, Twitter (although Twitter has about 1/10th as much traffic [as Meebo]).”

…

“If you are an entrepreneur and you want to reach a mainstream audience, you should hang out on Meebo more to do your research, not on Twitter or FriendFeed.”

Some good advice there.

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Mailbox Alert does provide a better customization of the sound and notification alerts plus adds a complete new function to the alerts. The ability to start commands when a new mail arrives in a certain mail folder is excellent. The commands have to point to a file on the system but can contain parameters. I did not test if batch files are supported but I assume they are, why should not they ?

One possible scenario to make use of this new function would be to run a script that would move attachments to a network drive whenever a mail with attachments would arrive in a specific folder.

Defining notifications and sound alerts is pretty straightforward and does not really need any explanation. One nice feature are the global preferences that define how and where the Notification alert appears on the screen and how it reacts to a left-click. The available options are to close the popup or open the message.

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This only works with HTML emails and not with basic plain TXT emails. The recipient has to be able to receive and display html emails. Html emails can contain elements besides text, graphics for example. Graphics are hosted on websites who track access to these elements.

So, the trick is to add a graphic to the html email and check the stats to see if the graphic has been accessed from the server. If it was accessed the email was read. If it was not it either means that the email was not read or that the recipient reads only the text and has html disabled.

If you do not have a website you can use a service like Spypig or Statcounter and add those elements to your emails. Spypig is free which is great but it adds that silly pig image to the email and recipients with just a little common sense will be able to check on that and find out what you have been doing. Would not recommend this.

Statcounter is better because an invisible 1×1pixel image is added to the email, still if someone knows what to do they can see why the image was added.

The last method needs a website and access to a statistics script. Google Analytics is fine for example. What you do is you add a harmless image to the email, make it part of your signature for instance. Make sure no one else accesses that image and that it is unique for every email that you send and want to track.

This makes it less obvious that you want to track if the email was read or not and should be the preferred way. Still, if you do not have a website you might want to try one of the other two possibilities.

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This makes it very problematic to import the mails from an Outlook Express account into another mail client. Some mail clients, for example Thunderbird, offers a direct import function that is able to detect Outlook Express mails and import them directly into Thunderbird.

Other mail clients do not offer this function though. DbxConv is a command line utility that is able to convert dbx files from Outlook Express into the widely known mbx mail format. The easiest way of using this tool is to copy the dbx mails from Outlook Express into the directory of DbxConv and use the command DbxConv *.dbx to convert all files with the .dbx extension to mbx.

I would suggest to search for all files with the .dbx extension on your hard drive and copy those into the DbxConv folder.

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Thunderbird offers two possibilities to handle attachments differently. The possibility would be to save the attachment and delete the attachment in the mail folder in the process or to detach it from the mail while keeping the link in the mail intact for as long as the attachment stays on the hard drive.

Both options can be accessed by right-clicking the attachment in the attachment pane which can be found below the message if that message contains at least one attachment. The user would either choose Save As, Detach or Delete from that menu. The option to to save, delete or detach all attachments is available as well.

While this is fine if you do receive attachments every know and then it becomes lots of work if you get one regularly. A way to process mail folders directly would be to use the Thunderbird add-on Attachment Extractor.

This add-on can process complete folders and save, detach or delete all attachments found inside plus auto-extract attachments from mails automatically. This is far easier and better if you have lots of mails with attachments.

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