Heinz's Email Blog

Every day, for centuries, a sane person can drink 3 or 4 bottles of cola. How is that possible?
Colas, unlike other soft drinks, trigger taste amnesia: if you like coke at all, the day's fourth can tastes just as good as the first, says Warren Buffet. At the same time and rate, you'll get sick of, say, iced tea or lemonade quickly.
With emails, too, a little variation now and then delights. How about a cola theme?
›› This stationery is softer than the softest drink. Cheers! (Outlook, Outlook Express)

"You see," says Humpty Dumpty, "it's like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word."
It, of course, is "slithy", a term in the poem Jabberwocky, which Alice asked Humpty to explain. Thus Lewis Carroll coined portmanteau word for a blend — a word made up of other words, or word fragments. Prominent portmanteau words are "brunch" ("breakfast" plus "lunch"), "pixel" ("picture" plus "element"), "qubit" ("quantum" plus "bit") or "Microsoft" ("microcomputer" plus "software").
Incidentally, we'll encounter both "Microsoft" and the portmanteau way of coining words while securing our email password:
›› Secure your email account from hackers breaking into it with a strong password. Here's how to turn your favorite sentence into a complex password that defeats many an attack.

1 Download this bagua desktop background and make sure it is stretched to fill the screen. 2 Identify the area in which your email program lies.
If it is the relationship area, you should not remove any duplicate emails. In fact, it would be a good idea to create copies of all messages not yet duplicated.
All right. Now that — as I see — you've moved your Windows Mail or Outlook Express out of the relationship area, we can rid them of all superfluously duplicated emails. (And yes, it is nice to have things in pairs — vases maybe — in your house or apartment's relationships area.)
›› Delete Duplicates snappily finds and cleans duplicate emails that have accumulated in Windows Mail or Outlook Express. (Windows)

In the morning, would you greet your neighbor with "Today is..."? In the evening, would you say "Tonight is..."?
What if I told you that "konnichi" means "today" in Japanese, that "konban" stands for "tonight", and that "wa" is a particle marking the topic? Yes, the Japanese greetings "konnichiwa" and "konbanwa" mean "today is..." and "tonight is...".
I understand what followed was a comment on the weather — important for peasants everywhere, of course, and for starting a chat anywhere:
›› In AIM Mail and AOL Mail on the web, you can not only send emails but exchange instant messages with people signed into AIM, too.

Do you have UFOs on your disk? To make more sense of these unidentified file objects, you can use a smart tool called DROID.
DROID looks at a file's contents and, if available, its extension (e.g. "txt") to tell the format. The format, in turn can tell you about the file's origin, and how you might be able to open it.
Speaking of file formats and extensions: what are these .pst files in my account? "Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders," says DROID:
›› Outlook uses PST or Personal Folders files to store all data from email to contacts and calendars.

Why do we use spoons to stir tea or coffee and not forks? It can't be because forks — handy little pastry forks — don't work: they do. (I've just tried. Admittedly, poking around in tea is not the most elegant or obviously meaningful activity. Then again we don't spoon the tea either, do we?)
Now, if Windows Live Hotmail does not hand you a context menu to stir your mail, turn your hand to the keyboard instead:
›› No right-click context menu! No pasting text into Windows Live Hotmail messages? Fortunately, Windows Live Hotmail provides an alternate route to copying, pasting and cutting text or graphics in email messages you are composing. (This should also work in other web-based email services that lack a context menu.)

"Garden" comes to us from Latin. "What?" I hear you think: "Was the ancient Roman's garden not a hortus?"
It was. "Hortus" may even share an etymological root with "garden". The hortus became a garden, though, only when enclosed: "gardinus". A piece of wilderness guarded from the wilderness, the peristylium was, for example, a place to cultivate roses and herbs.
Of course, you need a way to get into and out of your beautifully fenced garden — a classy gate:
›› Say "think of me" at the beautiful garden gate. (Outlook, Outlook Express)

Stroke, stem, arm, bar, tail and spine
Tower, lean, and intertwine.
It is, though, swash, ear, tail and spur
That make a font we can prefer
For sentence, paragraph and word
For reading mail in Thunderbird:
›› Have Mozilla Thunderbird display messages you are reading using your favorite font face and color.

If you have a window and the sun, you know which direction the hardwood flooring should run: with the rays of light. Excluding hallways (where, of course, the flooring will follow your walking path), this simple pattern will look just right — like plain text emails simply created in Mac OS X Mail:
›› If all your recipients see is gibberish, you can make sure Mac OS X Mail sends a message as pure plain text — certain to be received properly by everybody.

Leave some mayonnaise for the sansevieria, will you?
Thick and waxy leaves, it seems, like the mayonnaise treatment — polishing the upside with a mayonnaise-soaked paper towel — in particular and thankfully shine for weeks. I have not tried this yet, though. What I have tried are signatures in Gmail — and they'll make your outgoing emails shine for weeks on end:
›› Have Gmail append a few lines of text (sharing contact info or advertising your business) to emails you compose automatically.