At one time or another, we’ve all lost important emails – whether due to a computer system malfunction, or because of over-aggressive filtering techniques. Thomas has some tips about software to help recover deleted e-mails, and some additional tools that will make e-mail handling easier and more productive:
If you think you’ve permanently deleted an email, the first thing you should do is check your trash folder. Unless you’ve emptied it out lately (yeah, right!), your missing message is probably there. Just do a search at the top of your tool bar.
At one time or another, almost every IT professional has been guilty of using their email archive as a company database. It usually starts out small—a few passwords here, some ftp info there—and then quietly snowballs out of control. Before you know it, your email archive contains thousands of pieces of vital and confidential information. This is a dangerous game, because your virtual Alexandria can come crashing down without warning. If it does — and you don't have a backup — FINAL eMAIL can help you to recover. FINALeMAIL will restore individual emails and can even restore entire email databases.
Another program, Outlook Express Backup Wizard, saves your identities, email messages, address book, message rules, accounts and signatures to a single backup file and restores the saved data back to Outlook Express.
It's best to install this kind of software before you need it, since installation runs the risk of overwriting lost data. If you’re going to use your email as your database, you can at least treat it with a little reverence.
Have A Permanent Email Address
With ISP’s constantly merging, and free email providers limiting their services, it is getting hard to maintain an email address permanently. With more and more subscriptions and services being built around email addresses, it can be a real hassle when you lose an important one.
In response, new services have arisen to help you maintain a permanent address. POBox is a souped up forwarding service that lets you manage multiple aliases. Switch Email is a free forwarding service that also maintains a database of changed email addresses and attempts to reroute bounced emails.
View Yahoo! Mail Attachments
When you’re using Yahoo! Mail, attachments can really disrupt your workflow if you have to download them and then start another application to view them. Luckily, Yahoo! Mail lets you view many files online — without any support application. Just click the View Attachment button that’s next to your attachment. View Attachment supports many file formats including Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Word Perfect, dBase, and zipped files.
Monitor All of Your Email Accounts
If you’ve ever exceeded your mailbox quota or had an email account deactivated due to inactivity, Webtop Mail can help. Once downloaded and installed, Webtop will constantly monitor your email accounts, immediately downloading all email and attachments. You’ll never have to worry about a full mailbox or an inactive account again.
This small round-up of tools will make e-mail handling easier and more productive!