Over the course of the next couple of days, I’m going to post quite a few articles in relation to the 89 best PC tips. This will include everything from Audio, iTunes, Email, Productivity, Mac OS X Tips & Tricks, Security, Travel, Video, the Web and even Media in general! This is a very well thought out and well written list originally from Laptop Mag. I enjoyed reading this article so much that I decided it was worth re-publishing. All of the original copyrights are in place, the next series of articles, titled 89 best pc tips, are completely credited to LaptopMag!
The following series of tips is in complete dedication to E-mail and Messaging technology.
#1 – Move Outlook Files Out Of The Closet
For some reason Microsoft has chosen to hide the data files for Outlook deep inside a series of buried folders. This makes it difficult to back up. Here’s how to move these files to an easily accessible folder in My Documents.
First, right-click on Personal Folders in the left-hand navigation tree in Outlook. Click on Properties and then Advanced and take note of the path listed under Filename (it will end in .pst). Close Outlook
Now, open Windows Explorer, activate the display of hidden folders, and then copy the contents of the original folder to a new one in My Documents. In Control Panel, open Mail and click Show Profiles, and chose the old location. Then click Properties followed by Data Files. Select the data file from the list and then click Settings. When you see an error dialog box saying that the files could not be found at the old location, click OK. Then, navigate to the new folder in My documents, and open and close it. Restart Outlook.
#2 – Clean Up Your Yahoo! Inbox
To select multiple messages, hold Shift after selecting a message to select multiple messages. Hold Ctrl to add specific messages to the list. hit CTRL and A to select all messages in a folder or search results. This is a great way to select everything in your Inbox and move it to an archive folder.
#3 – Conference calls made easy (video too!)
One of Skype’s newer competitors, ooVoo (www.oovoo.com), has a slick interface that lets you videoconference with up to six people at once, import and share e-mail contact lists and send files up to 25MB in size. The service even lets you send video our voice messages to people who aren’t signed up for ooVoo. Since it’s in beta, it’s free too!
#4 – Backup your Gmail account
Gmail’s POP3 access lets you download your entire account for offline storage. To download all e-mail from your account when you initiate a Send/Receive on your e-mail client, you need to reset Gmail’s POP settings. In Gmail’s “Forwarding and POP” settings page, select the Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded)” option and click the Save Changes button. This ensures that when you do your first download, all e-mail will be sent.
If you want to retain the e-mail on Gmail’s server, be sure that the setting “Delete e-mail from server” in the Account Settings is not checked, otherwise the e-mail will be deleted from Gmail after it is downloaded. To maintain the backup, periodically initiate a Send/Receive session to bring in any new e-mail.
#5 – Shut down those messaging apps.
Meebo ($Free – www.meebo.com) [Previous Article], lets you chat with all your friends in one window, regardless of whether they’re on AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo messenger, or MSN. Paste a video link into a chat and you can watch the video with your buddies. Other cool features include VoIP (via The Pudding), video chat (via TakBox), and synchronous live games.