Evernote CEO Discusses App (SXSW Video)

Phil Libin, Evernote CEO, discusses the current state of the app in this video from the SXSW ‘09 conference (courtesy of Arik Hesseldahl). One of the interesting notes is that the company is now “net margin profitable”, meaning that they are turning a profit even when you consider all of their overhead expenses. Their primary source of revenue according to Phil is their premium subscriptions, so they are already profitable even without the new ads.


Phil Libin, Evernote from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

Strip Outlook Attachments and Replace with Links

UPDATE OCT 2009: Reader jumpjack has created a Google Code project for this macro. You can download the latest source code on the project page.
_________________________________________

There are many good reasons to strip attachments from your email messages. The main reason for me is that I often embed email messages into my Outlook tasks for quick reference. Since some tasks have multiple emails (each with multiple attached files), I need a way to keep the task size manageable. So, I simply strip the attachments before embedding the email into the task. Another reason to strip attachments is to improve Outlook performance. Smaller PST files are less likely to be corrupted and are faster to search and index.

The Outlook VBA macro below is one easy way to strip attachments from your messages. Simply select one or more messages in the Outlook explorer window, then activate the macro. The result is shown in the screen shot below. As you can see, all of the attachments throughout the email are numbered and replaced with links at the top of the message. There is even a hyperlink to the folder containing the attachments. The macro also saves a text copy of the original email message along with the attachments for future reference.

You’ll notice that there is still one small attachment remaining called “Attachments Removed”. This is added so that the paperclip icon in Outlook is still active, which indicates that the message has (or had) attachments.

The attachments archive folder is organized with one folder per email, as shown below. The folders are named using the date of the message, the sender name, and the subject line. At the end of the year, you can grab the whole collection and zip it up for archive purposes. Since the links are hard coded into the emails, you’ll want to be consistent with your folder locations. That is why I simply use “C:\Outlook Attachments\” along with the year. If I ever want to restore some old messages and be able to browse the file attachments, I know exactly where to put them.
>> READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY >>

Backup All Outlook Contacts to VCard in 3 Easy Steps

For some reason, the Microsoft Outlook developers never really embraced the vCard format, and did not provide adequate ways to import/export to this format.  The “File > Import and Export…” menu only has ways to import vCards, and no options to export them.  Because of this, various tools and add-ins have appeared that allow you to backup/export your Outlook contacts to vCard, and some of them even cost money!  Why should you have to pay to back up your contacts?

Well, you don’t.  It turns out there is an easy (but non-obvious) way to do this in Outlook without any additional tools or add-ins.  Here it is in 3 easy steps:

STEP 1: Select all contacts in your Outlook contact folder (CTRL-A).

STEP 2: Select “Forward as vCard” from the Actions menu.

Forward as vCard

>> READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY >>

Handy Outlook Attachment Reminder Macro

Have you ever had one of those “oh shit” moments where two seconds after sending an email you realized something was missing?  And you know, by using the Outlook “Recall Message” feature, you’re just going to draw even more attention to your mistake.  It’s like a highway accident… people will open recalled messages before anything else in their Inbox just to see what you might have screwed up.

Here’s one easy way to prevent that from happening: use this Outlook VBA macro to automatically scan your outgoing messages and stop incomplete emails & invites before they get sent.   This macro will check for missing attachments on messages & meeting invites where you probably meant to attach something.  It will also check for blank subject lines, as well as blank locations in meeting invites.



Read the rest of this entry »

Discount on ClearContext IMS Pro!

Good news! The folks at ClearContext are offering Manage-This! readers a $15 discount on their ClearContext IMS Pro v4 product that is good through August 31st, 2008. Just enter the “managethis” coupon code when checking out.

Also, rest assured that anyone who purchases IMS Pro v4 will receive a complimentary upgrade to ClearContext Professional when it is released. Enjoy!