Define and execute surveys(Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010)

             You want to ask friends about a topic via email and want to specify “Yes”, “No” or “May be” as optional answers.

             You can gather votes easily with the help of the vote buttons. Draft a new message and select the recipients. In the menu bar, click on “Options” tab and check “Use voting buttons” in “Voting and Tracking” options. Select one from the three default options like “Approve/ Reject”, “Yes/No” or “Yes/No/Maybe”. You can even custom-define responses by giving the options separated by semicolon one after the other. Formulate the suitable question in the email text and send the message to the desired recipients. The recipients will be notified of the voting option at the top of the message. They can click on “Vote” to reply. They can reply immediately using the set replies or change it and send it by clicking on “Ok”.
              The sender can view the results of the answers in a summary and need not read or edit each reply individually. Instead, the sender can open his original email in the “Sent items” folder and click on “Tracking”. He will be able to see an overview of the results, followed by a list of the individual replies. However, this method of voting functions only internally via various Outlook versions, but not with other mail programs like Thunderbird.

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Restore sent messages properly in folder(Thunderbird)

             You get an error that a sent mail can't be copied to the “Sent” folder, whereas the mail has been sent correctly.

             The problem occurs sporadically when you send messages via an IMAP server. The sent messages must also be transferred to the “Sent” folder on the server, which is sometimes a problem. Usually, this problem can be solved by manually assigning the correct folder.
             Open the “Tools | Account settings” command. To the left, click “Copies & Folders”. The option “Place a copy in” should be activated. Change the option to “Other”. In the relevant combination field, select the mail account and “Inbox | Sent” in it. You can also select a different folder of the account or a local folder. Confirm with “OK”. If the problem is not resolved, click “Server settings” in the same dialog and then on the “Advanced” button. In “Maximum number of server connections to cache”, change the value to “1”. Confirm both dialogs with “OK”. This prevents collisions when accessing the server, but only one folder is monitored this way. You will have to increase this later.

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Use the correct reply format in emails(Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010)

               When replying to received emails, your signature is sometimes added in an incorrect manner. You want to know why this happens and how you can resolve this problem.
               Even if you have set HTML format as the default format in the options, it is not always used. This is because when replying to and forwarding mails, Outlook by default uses the format of the received email. In case of a “Plain Text” email format, only text is reformatted along with your signature. When replying to a Plain Text email, retain the same format since the recipient might not be able to read HTML messages. You can, however, format it as HTML when forwarding. You always need to adapt the setting in such a case. For this, go to the dialog box for composing an email and then in the “Format Text” tab or the “Options” tab in Outlook 2007 and change the setting in “Format” to “HTML”.

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Use the easy and practical message search(Thunderbird)

             You often search for a message of which you remember just half the details. But you know that this message has a file attachment, or was sent in a specific period.

             In Version 3.1 and higher, Thunderbird has an easy search field above in the program window. Enter a search term there. From the third alphabet onwards, Thunderbird shows the relevant email addresses. You can thus add an address with just a click. Else, you can end the entering of the search term using Enter in order to carry out a complete text search in all accounts. If you do not find a suitable search term, use a part of the mail address followed by an asterisk as a placeholder.
               The search result is in a new tab. There, you can activate the filter to the left and view messages with “Attachments”. You can also select a specific contact from the displayed list of frequent contacts and limit the search to one inbox folder or one email account. A recent development is the convenient time-related search limitation. For this, click the diagram icon above the search term.
                A gradient time bar shows the frequency of the relevant emails according to time by means of bars. By clicking the individual gray bar sections, you can refine the month and the year. Then click a blue diagram bar in order to see all the relevant messages from this time period. You can thus for instance quicklyfind a file attachment that you received on your birthday, even if you no longer know who sent the email, which account it was received in and also in which folder was stored.

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Call up the address book without starting the main application(Thunderbird)

              You want to quickly look up an address, but you are annoyed to see that Thunderbird asks you for a connection before starting the mail accounts.

              The first option is to completely disable the automatic call-up of messages. However, there is another way in which you can directly access the address book. You can create a shortcut on the desktop. For this, right click on the Desktop and select the context command ‘New | Shortcut’. Define 'C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe -addressbook' as the target and click ‘Next’. Then enter the name, e.g. ‘Address Book’ and click ‘Finish’. The next time you want to access the address book, simply click the shortcut that you have created.

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