Autosave Outlook attachments
By Marc Perton
Now that I’m back to using Outlook again after a hiatus of a few years, I’m reacquainting myself with its pros and cons. In general, I’m a fan of the program, though there are a few things I’ve always found frustrating, including its spam filtering capabilities (where’s Bayesian logic when you need it?), and the fact that there are only three levels of Task prioritization (I’ve gotten used to five from my years of using the Palm OS). One thing I do like about Outlook is the fact that there are a lot of good plug-ins for it. Gina pointed out an interesting one recently: Bells and Whistles, which lets you customize a range of features, including the way you respond to mails. Another good one, which I’ve just started using, is EZDetach, a custom action that lets you set Outlook to automatically save attachments in specific folders. That’s particularly handy if you get a lot of docs sent to you by colleagues and get tired of constantly having to save them. As part of a filter, you can set it to only save attachments sent from certain addresses or with certain extensions, so you don’t have to worry about inadvertently saving that infected vbs file. Here’s hoping this feature gets included in the final version of Outlook 2007 (it’s not in the beta). If not, it’s good to know third-party developers are out there, filling in the gaps in Microsoft’s products.
