bruceb news

I’ve been using X1 to do lightning-fast searches through e-mail and contacts in Outlook, and files on my computer and on the network. A new version will be released next week that adds the ability to search for phrases, enhanced Boolean AND/OR/NOT searches, and some other tricks. It’s a pleasure to use, but a bit pricey at $99. Download a 15-day trial version here.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft acquired Lookout Software, the manufacturer of the product that was poised to be competitive with X1. Lookout can now be downloaded for free, but with no support and no upgrades planned. […] continued

When you print a message from Outlook, the chances are that the printout will not include a list of the files attached to that message. This drives many people crazy.

I went looking in the Microsoft tech support forums. Lots of people are unhappy about Outlook’s printing options. This problem may disappear in a future service pack.

In the meantime, there is a workaround, described in this Microsoft tech note.

- Open the message by double-clicking on it.

- Click on Edit / Edit Message.

- Click on Format / Plain Text.

- Click on Print.

The printed version will show the attachments. […] continued

There’s a new utility being developed that might be your new best friend.

X1 indexes Outlook e-mail and contacts, as well as all your files, and does lightning-fast searches for words in them.

Some of you have just had adrenaline shoot into your body. I did when I read about it. This fills a huge hole in our toolbox. As Outlook becomes the focal point of our business and personal lives and our folders fill with thousands of e-mail messages, it becomes ever more frustrating that it has no effective way to find things.

X1 is simple and easy to use. […] continued

If you’re using Outlook 2003, go to the Office Update site and install whatever updates it suggests. Among other things, you’ll get a brand new update for the spam filter in Outlook 2003. Here’s more information about the update.

Here’s an interesting collection of add-ins for Outlook that might solve some issue for you. I don’t have any experience with them so I can’t vouch for their quality, but they do address some real life problems.

Example: if you enter fax numbers for your Outlook contacts, Outlook will display both e-mail addresses and fax numbers in the same list when you display your address book – for example, when you click “TO:” in an e-mail message. Outlook is trying to be helpful – it thinks it’s possible that you’re going to send the message by fax instead of e-mail, even if you don’t have a modem or any other access to computer faxing. […] continued

Outlook 2003 continues to do a good job of filtering out spam. There’s so much spam coming in to my mailbox that I simply stopped looking in the Junk Mail folder.

I just turned on the option to permanently delete spam instead of moving it to the Junk Mail folder (Tools / Options / Preferences / Junk E-Mail). There’s a risk that I’ll miss something and have no way to find it. But now I won’t have to do housekeeping on that folder to empty it out – today it was two thousand messages that had accumulated in a week. […] continued

Microsoft Outlook’s 2003 has been doing an extraordinary job of filtering my spam – almost no false positives and a 95%+ job of sending spam to the junk folder. My fear, tough, was that it would start to falter as the spammers became familiar with it and found holes to drive spam through.

Perhaps not. The Outlook anti-spam filter will be periodically updated. The first update was quietly issued by Microsoft today. If you’re running Outlook 2003, click on Help / Check For Updates to visit the Office Update site and get the enhanced junk mail filter.

I don’t see any mechanism to install these updates automatically, and it seems clumsy to require users to periodically visit the site to see if anything is new. […] continued

(I hate to jinx anything by mentioning it, but the spam filter in Outlook 2003 is catching 98% of my spam. And there’s been close to zero false positives. I spent about a week watching the junk mail folder and adding a few newsletters to the “safe senders” list, then bumped the filter from “low” to “high.” I haven’t had to change anything since then. It’s pretty remarkable.)

Microsoft Word is full of tricks. On this page, I described one simple trick to customize the way addresses appear when you drop them in from Microsoft Outlook.

A client told me about how to make Word print out customized return addresses on envelopes – special font layouts, or inserted graphics. Create the perfect return address on a blank page in Word, highlight it, and click on Insert / AutoText / New. Name it EnvelopeExtra1. Now Word will automatically print that as your return address when you create an envelope with the Envelopes And Labels tool. Cool, eh? […] continued

The onslaught of spam continues to be everyone’s number one complaint. Recently I’ve been hearing very nice things about a program named I Hate Spam, from Sunbelt Software. It’s spam blocking software that works with either Outlook or Outlook Express, and reportedly blocks 95% of the spam. It does this by several techniques – among other things, it allows all messages through from people in your address book, and it blocks all messages from spam mailers identified in a list that’s updated every day. Here’s an article that describes it in detail. (I’ve seen one article comment that it’s far more effective in Outlook than in Outlook Express, for what it’s worth.) I’m going to give it a try – if it can cut down the clutter, it’s well worth twenty dollars. […] continued