outlook

UPDATE September 19, 2011: This offer has now ended.

It's just about 5:00 on a Friday afternoon and you can't wait to get your weekend started, but you have this one e-mail that keeps lingering over your head and whoever "they" may be, they keep responding. It's an e-mail with your high-level executives cc'ed on it, so you can't say anything to the big group, but you want to be able to vent to one of your colleagues without having to send it to everyone else on that email thread. Now, what … Read more

NirSoft's Nir Sofer writes small but useful programs that do small but useful tasks for even smaller fees, usually no fee, otherwise known as "free." His Mail PassView is a compact freeware tool that recovers and displays passwords and account details for several popular e-mail clients, including Outlook and Outlook Express, Thunderbird, and Eudora. It can handle POP3, IMAP, HTTP, and SMTP accounts, depending on the particular client.

Mail PassView opened with our Outlook 2010 data displayed in its plain main view, including not only our password and account name but also server, server port, account type, … Read more

A reader named Eddy contacted me the other day to ask how to block mail from specific people in Mozilla Thunderbird. Eddy also wants to be notified when mail comes from certain addresses.

While I am familiar with how to create rules in Microsoft Outlook to block senders and receive notifications when mail arrives from a particular person or address, I had never tried to do the same in Thunderbird. It turns out Thunderbird's filters make it easy to automatically block mail from a person or address, but there's no equivalent in Thunderbird to Outlook's ability to … Read more

Organizations large and small rely on Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations to get the job done. In some ways Outlook is the poor cousin of the three high-profile Office apps. But the true workhorse in Microsoft's ubiquitous suite is the unglamorous e-mail/contact manager/task scheduler.

These six tips for Outlook 2010, 2007, and 2003 will let you spend less time reopening archived messages, jog your memory about reminders, drag files to send them as attachments, add terms to the spell checker, clear space on the taskbar, and enhance your list of click-saving keyboard shortcuts for Outlook.… Read more

New to Google+ and looking for more contacts? A feature launched yesterday lets you hunt for potential prospects by uploading your address book from Microsoft Outlook and other desktop e-mail clients.

As described in a Google+ post by Google technical staff member Paul Lindner, the feature works with several e-mail and address book programs beyond Outlook, including Outlook Express, Mozilla's Thunderbird, and Apple's Address Book. But it apparently also supports any e-mail address book or contact list that can be exported to a VCard/VCF or CSV (comma separated values) format.

I tested the feature using Microsoft Outlook … Read more

For many moons I've been looking for the perfect to-do list app for my iPhone. For a while I used Producteev, which I likened to Evernote for task management. But you know what? It was overkill.

Ultimately I realized that what I need is not a Web-accessible to-do list or even one that syncs with Outlook (a key consideration last year when I asked CNET readers to name their favorite to-do list app). I need one that lives on my iPhone, offers a simple, logically designed interface, and reminds me when it's time to do something. Period.

Oh, … Read more

Windows users have long wanted greater flexibility in the system tray, but it's been up to developers like 4t Niagara Software to provide it. We looked at 4t Tray Minimizer Free, a free tool that can minimize any running application to the system tray, also known as the notification area. That's enough on its own, but 4t Tray Minimizer can also roll up any window to just its title bar; make windows transparent; hide programs without displaying a system tray icon; set hotkeys for minimizing, maximizing, and launching applications; and toggle the entire system tray open and closed.… Read more

Xobni, the popular and highly rated plugin for Microsoft Outlook has today announced the Xobni Gadget Platform and Store, which offers apps that add on to your add-on. With close to 20 big-name partners, including Dropbox, Evernote, Google Translate, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and so on, Xobni hopes to boost your productivity by souping up your Outlook inbox to yet another level.

To give you an idea of some of the platform's possibilities, the Evernote gadget puts the popular note-taking service's functionality into the Xobni sidebar. With it, you can view and take personal notes on a contact right from … Read more

Bumping up security, stability, and adding a few new features, Microsoft's Mac Team announced on their blog today that the first major update for Office for Mac 2011, dubbed Service Pack 1, will be available for download next Wednesday. The major new feature will enable syncing from Microsoft's Outlook to Apple's Sync Services.

Calendars, contacts, notes, and tasks will all be available for syncing to any Apple device, including iPads, iPhones, and iPods. One limitation to be aware of, according to the announcement on the Microsoft Mac Team blog: