I think we’ve all e-mailed someone — or a group of people — but forgot to attach the file that we referenced in the message (d’oh). Well, thanks to a handy extension for Thunderbird that I ran across, that may be a thing of the past :). AttachmentRemember checks a message for keywords before it’s sent; and, if it finds any of those keywords but the message doesn’t have any files attached, a warning dialog pops up.
For example, suppose you set it up to look for the word “attach” (which will also catch “attachment” and “attached”, for example, since AttachmentRemember does substring matches). Anyhow, if you were to then write a message with the subject line “Proposal attached” but click Send before attaching any files, a little dialog box would pop up asking if maybe the message should have an attachment.
The idea seems obvious, now that I’ve heard of it, but I’m not sure I would have come up with it on my own. If you choose to download it, though, just be sure to edit the extension’s options before using it (Tools → Extensions → AttachmentRemember → Options) as the list of keywords that it looks for is empty by default.
We use Outlook here at work (hey, stop snickering!) and I’ve noticed that it tends to save most of my incoming attachments as read-only files. I couldn’t figure out why it was doing this and it was mostly getting in the way of my workflow — for instance, a coworker might send me a proposal to work on, but I’d first have to change the file attributes before editing it.
Well, I came across the answer: Outlook is apparently doing that intentionally and it can’t be turned off:
Symptoms:
If you open an e-mail message attachment in the reading pane in Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, the attachment opens as read-only.
Cause:
This behavior occurs because the attachment handling function changed in Outlook 2003 to avoid data loss.
Workaround:
To work around this behavior, do not open the attachment in the reading pane. Instead, double-click the e-mail message, and then open the attachment.
This reminds me of the old doctor-doctor joke:
Patient: Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I move my elbow like this Outlook sets my files as read-only when I save them from the reading pane.
If you’ve used Microsoft Word — or really any word processor released within the last decade — you’ve probably seen those squiggly red lines underneath misspelled words. And, that’s now been added to Thunderbird as well. (Thunderbird is the free e-mail client from the organization that made Firefox.)
The thing is, the feature has been added to the Thunderbird codebase but there hasn’t been a Thunderbird release since then ;). Bug 278310 dealt with adding inline spellchecking to Thunderbird and that bug was fixed on February 2nd which means that the last release (1.0) from December 7th doesn’t yet include that code. Fortunately, the Mozilla Foundation (the people that make Thunderbird) release “nightly builds” which are built every evening from the current codebase.
[If you’re not running Windows, you can skip to the last paragraph of this entry.] While the Mozilla Foundation releases nightly builds for each platform, some third party developers also release optimized builds — these are designed specifically for the processor in your PC and run faster than the all-purpose official builds. And, when it comes to Thunderbird, a fellow named Moox releases several optimized builds. Just go to the “Thunderbird Trunk Builds” section of the page and download the build with the most recent date that corresponds to your processor:
M3 for Athlon Opteron/FX/64/Sempron and Intel Xeon/Pentium M/Pentium 4/Celeron D
M2 for Athlon XP/MP/Sempron/Duron, Pentium 3 and Celeron processors
M1 for AMD Athlon/K6-2 and Intel Pentium/Pentium2/PentiumPro
Suppose you’re running an Athlon XP system — the build for you would be “mozillathunderbird_20050218_trunk_ce_m2.exe” (which is the latest “M2” build as of this writing). The builds from Moox are self-extracting .exe files which include a “Thunderbird” base directory; so, if you want to run Thunderbird from C:\Program Files\Thunderbird\, set the self-extractor to extract to C:\Program Files\.
Once you’ve installed the new Thunderbird (from Windows, above, or for other platforms, from the official site), you’ll need to activate it. Just load up Thunderbird and go to Tools -> Options -> Composition and checkmark “Enable spell as you type” (I’d also recommend checkmarking “Check spelling before sending”, just to be sure). And, while you’re in the “Composition” options area, you may also notice another new option, “AutoSave every xx minutes” — I find that pretty handy and I’ve turned that on as well.
PS Need spellchecking for input elements and textareas in Firefox? Give Spellbound a try.
I’m looking for access to an SMTP server. This would be just to send a couple e-mails a day; and, I’m not asking for an open relay, as I could provide an ip address from where I would be accessing the server. If you have an SMTP server that I could use for this, please let me know :).
I just ran across SpamSlayer, which is a set of mail-filters for Mozilla that can apparently eliminate 80%-100% of Spam from your Inbox.
SpamSlayer is technically a “filter package”. It filters your email transparently and most spam never even reaches your inbox. Anything that looks like spam is directed into a separate “Possible Spam” folder for later review.
It looks interesting but, of course, I use SpamCop for my e-mail anyway. For just $30/year, SpamCop provides an account accessible via IMAP, POP3, or even webmail. And, through an extensive set of regular expressions, hardly any Spam gets into my Inbox. To top it off, SpamCop runs on Open Source software including as Apache, Perl, and MySQL — I highly recommend the service.