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A new feature in Outlook 2010 is the ability to apply multiple actions at once to your email messages. Here we will take a look at creating your own Quick Steps for managing your email in Outlook 2010.

Customize Quick Steps

If you’re using Outlook 2010 you’ll notice the new Quick Steps section in the Ribbon. There are some included by default and they can be customized. To configure or change Quick Steps, on the Home Tab, use the dropdown arrow in the Quick Steps box, then select Manage Quick Steps.

The Manage Quick Steps window opens and here we’re going to modify the To Manager step. Highlight To Manager and click on the Edit button.

Now we can edit the step. For example, we want to always forward certain emails to our boss. Enter in your managers email address and you can also select to flag it, select the type of importance, and add extra text for it. We also added an action to move the email to a specific folder in Outlook.

Keyboard Ninjas will like the fact that you can create a shortcut key for the step too. When you’re done making adjustments to the step make sure to save it.

After saving your Quick Step, open an email you want to send to your boss and click To Manager from the Quick Steps box.

The email will be opened so you can forward it, and add more recipients as well if you want.

Create Your Own Quick Step

You can also create your own Quick Step. Under the Home tab click Create New from the Quick Steps box.

Now you can choose actions for your new Step, create a name for it, and add text that will displayed when you hover over the new Step.

For example here we want to copy an email to a specific folder and flag it. You can add multiple actions to your custom Quick Steps which can make managing your email easier.

Here is the final selections for our new Quick Step. We named it Copy to our misc folder, flagging it, created a shortcut key, and included a Tooltip text. When you’re finished click Finish.

Now in the Quick Steps box on the Ribbon you will see your new Step and can use it for emails you specify.

Here we have an email open and are using our new Quick Step with it.

Keep in mind that if you have multiple email accounts in Outlook, you’ll need to customize the Quick Steps for each account.

If you no longer want a Quick Step, just right-click on it and Delete.

There are a lot of customizations you can do with Quick Steps to make managing your email a lot easier. The cool thing with Quick Steps is you can assign multiple actions to each step. If you want to be able to manage your email more efficiently, customizing existing Quick Steps and creating your own is a great new feature in Outlook 2010.

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Overview

Many people only use webmail today, but we’ve often found that desktop email programs can save you time and keep you productive even when your internet connection is down.  Postbox is an innovative new email program that brings the best of popular webmail features, such as tagging and conversation view, and combines it with social media and content discovery features to give you the best of both worlds in a desktop email program.  Postbox is based on Thunderbird and is in fact designed by many from the Thunderbird team, so if you love Thunderbird but would like more advanced features, this is definitely an email program you’ll want to check out.

Key Features:

• Fast email search with advanced search operators
• Makes it easy to find all images, attachments, and links in your emails, and then easily add them to new emails
• Social network integration
• Conversation view for emails makes it easy to keep related emails together

Installation

Postbox is very easy to install, and the installation process works very much like Firefox or Thunderbird’s installation.  When you run the installer, it will first extract the files.

Then you’ll see a standard installer window; simply install as normal.

The Setup automatically selects to use Postbox as your default mail application.  If you’re just trying it out and want to keep your existing email program as default, be sure to uncheck the box during the setup.

Once installation is finished, you can run Postbox to get started using it.  Enter your name, email address, and password to get started.

Postbox will then try to automatically find and setup you email account without any more input, and it found our account info within seconds.  If it doesn’t find your email server info automatically, click Manual Setup; otherwise, click Finish to start using it.

Postbox will now automatically sync with your email account, and within minutes you’ll be ready to start using your new email program.

If you didn’t select to make Postbox the default email program during setup, it will ask again when you first run it.  Simply uncheck the box on the bottom to keep from being prompted again.

When you first run Postbox, you’ll be reminded to purchase or enter your license key.

Once you’ve purchased Postbox, you can enter your license info by clicking Register in the drop-down notification, or select License in the Help menu.

When you purchase Postbox, you’ll receive a License Code in an email.  Enter your name and License Code in the popup window exactly as they appear in the email.

You’ll immediately see if your license code was entered correctly.  When you see License code confirmed, click Ok to continue.

Now click Ok again to close the window and start using Postbox.

Features

One of the first things you’ll notice in Postbox is the buttons on the top right under the search box.  These give you quick access to all Attachments, Images, and Links in your emails.

Here we can see all images that are attached to emails we’ve received, and can quickly open the relevant email, save the picture, or send it in a new email.

Here’s the link view, showing all links received in emails.

Each of these special search folders will open in a new Firefox-style tab, which makes it easy to switch between your content and emails.

Then, when you’re composing emails, you can quickly add any images, attachments, or more that have been included in previous emails to your new email directly from the sidebar.

When you’re reading new emails, Postbox will highlight important information, including links, attachments, addresses, and more in a sidebar pane.  This is very similar to Xobni for Outlook, and works very nicely.

Postbox also includes full support for conversation view in messages, which lets you see all the emails sent back and forth in a single conversation together.

Your conversation emails will appear inline in the reading pane, and you can show or hide each one.

One features we really enjoyed was the quick preview of the contents of a folder in tooltips.  Simply hover over a folder, and you’ll see the titles and the first part of new messages in that folder.

You can also keep up with your emails by assigning Topics, which work similar to tags in Gmail.  This is a nice feature that is not usually included in desktop email programs.

Postbox also integrates social networking directly in your email experience.  If you think of something you want to tell your friends or the world, click the Post button in the toolbar, and select your favorite network.

Now enter your status update, and click Update.

The first time you use a network, you’ll need to authenticate it, but after that, you can post an update in just two clicks.  Postbox will also use your social network login to add user avatars to your emails.

If you select text in an email and right-click it, you can instantly search for info about that topic or post it as an update to your favorite social network directly from Postbox.

And if you need more features, Postbox supports a wide variety of extensions, including the popular Lightening extension from Thunderbird.

Performance and Support

Postbox’ performance was great for the most part, but it was slow at times accessing IMAP folders.  On folders we didn’t access regularly, it often took several seconds to display the emails.

To speed this up, open your Account Settings from the Tools menu.

In the Account Options window, select Offline & Disk Space on the left side, then click Select folders for offline use.

Now select the folders that you want to be stored offline.  Once the initial download is complete, it will be much faster to access the mail in these folders.

From the Tools menu, you can also select to Index All Folders to speed up search even more.  If you haven’t already downloaded your messages, this step will have Postbox download the messages first, then index them.

Postbox has a very helpful and easy to understand help section on their website, as well as a quickstart tutorial that you’ll see when you first download Postbox.  Do note that Postbox help is only available online, so you won’t be able to access the help files while your internet connection is down.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a new email program that gives you more features than your standard webmail or free email app, Postbox is a great option.  The quick search features that let you easily find attachments, images, and links are very helpful and timesaving, and the auto-filled address book works great.  Postbox feels very polished, and is much more on the par of Outlook than Thunderbird or other free email apps.

Postbox is available for purchase directly from their website for $39.95, and students are eligible to purchase Postbox at a 50% discount.  You can download and install a free 30-day trial to see if you’d like it before you actually purchase.  Alternately, Postbox Express is a free, scaled-down version of Postbox that includes less features, but is available fully for free.

Works on Windows 7, Vista, and XP, as well as Mac OS X.

Download and Purchase Postbox

Extra Links

Learn More About Postbox Features

Get Started Easily with the Postbox Quickstart Guide

Learn more about the free Postbox Express

Compare Postbox and Postbox Express

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Do you have an external drive connected to your Windows 7 computer and would like to access it from the Taskbar? Here we show you a work around that will allow you to pin it to Taskbar.

Adding Drive to Windows Explorer

You would think the process would be as easy as dragging the external drive icon to the Taskbar. Unfortunately that isn’t the case. If you try to drag the external drive icon to the Taskbar, it just adds it to Windows Explorer.

Then if you right-click on the Windows Explorer icon, you’ll be able to access it from there. This might be enough for some users, but we want to add it to the Taskbar as an icon.

Steps for Pinning External Drive to Taskbar

With a quick work around we can add the drive as an icon. First what you need to do is right-click an empty area on your desktop and select New Text Document.

Then name the text doc whatever you want to call it and change .txt to .exe. Like in this example we’re adding the external E: drive, so we named it Drive E.exe then hit Enter.

After hitting Enter you will get a message asking if you’re sure you want to change the extension, click Yes.

Now you’ll have the “dummy” executable on the desktop. Right-click on it and select Pin to Taskbar.

Now you’ll have the executable icon on the Taskbar. Right-click on it, then right-click on the name of the file and select Properties.

Under the Shortcut tab change the Target to the drive letter and Start in to the drive letter as well and click OK. You can actually use this technique to add any folder to the Taskbar too. The main thing to remember is changing the Target to the correct path.

While you’re there, you might want to change the icon to something more appropriate like a hard drive icon. Or if you want to change the icon to something not included in Windows 7, check out our guide how to customize icons in Windows 7 and Vista.

And there you go! As you can see we have a more appropriate looking hard drive icon on the Taskbar…

And when we click on it, it opens up to our external USB drive so we can access its content.

Or maybe you want to have the drive open to a specific folder. Just change the Target path to the folder you want it to open in.

Then when you click the icon it will open to the directory you specified.

Although it might seem like a goofy method for simply pinning a drive or other folder to the Taskbar, the work around is effective. This will allow you to access the external drive with only one click and save a few steps in navigating to it.

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Whether you prefer reading on your computer, eBook Reader, or on paper, sometimes it can be nice to have your research together in a book format. Here’s how to turn Wikipedia articles into a PDF for offline reading or print as a paper book.

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There might be times when Windows 7 seems to not be working correctly and one way to help troubleshoot is use System Maintenance. Rather than going through several menus to access it, we’ll create a shortcut to it.

To get to System Maintenance you can go through several menus in Control Panel to launch it. If you want easier access to it, we’ll show you how to create a shortcut to it. It’s a basic troubleshooting feature that can clean unused files, perform maintenance tasks, and help prevent problems with your PC.

Create Shortcut to Troubleshoot Using System Maintenance

Right-click an empty area on your Desktop and select New Shortcut.

Now type in the following path in the location field.

%systemroot%system32msdt.exe -id MaintenanceDiagnostic

In the next step name the shortcut something that will help you remember what it’s for. Here we are using Troubleshoot System Maintenance.

Now we have the new shortcut icon on the desktop. If you want to change the icon check out our article on how to customize icons in Windows 7 and Vista.

Double click on the icon and it will bring you directly to System Maintenance and you can begin using the wizard to search for problems, if you want check the box to apply repairs automatically.

Luckily on our system nothing was needed to be changed or updated.

If you do experience problems, you can get a full report on what issues were found.

Then if you want you can easily add it to the Taskbar with a drag and drop.

If you’re experiencing problems on your Windows 7 PC or want to prevent them, running System Maintenance is a good place to start. By creating a shortcut to it, you’ll save a few mouse clicks for easier access to it.

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