Say what you will about the up-to-date twitters and chat away on your instant messengers, but web users will always come back to their email. With many types to choose from, including various webmails and POP3 emails, it’s no wonder that most users will have more than one email account.

Checking each and every account regularly just to see if there’s any new mail becomes tedious very fast, which is why email notifiers have become such a big hit with many users.  Here are 5 of the best email notifiers for your perusal.

1. How to effectively manage 16 email accounts

ePrompter is a free service that allows you to easily handle up to 16 email accounts at one time.  ePrompter lets you read, delete and respond to any of your messages with a simple click on the account of your choice – without ever having to launch your email program or go to your webmail’s site. Importantly, when ePrompter retrieves messages, it leaves the original messages on your various email accounts’ servers and/or webmail sites.

2. Where to get an email notifier which is portable

POP Peeper is free another system tray app that offers visual and audio alerts for when a new email arrives in your inbox. Working with POP3 and IMAP servers, it also responds well to Gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail along with other major webmail services.  One key feature is that it is able to run directly off your portable storage device so you can take it anywhere and use it on any machine.

3. How to use email notifiers on Firefox

WebMail Notifier is a Firefox add-on that checks your webmail accounts and tells you the number of unread emails.  It handles most of the major webmail services and also allows you to set up user scripts for the webmail services that it doesn’t come preloaded with. It is however tied to Mozilla Firefox browsers only, so IE and Chrome users won’t be able to benefit from it. 

4. How to get notified about your webmail via Outlook

Released under the GNU GPL license, FreePOPs allows checking and downloading of e-mail from webmails from any conventional POP3 client program. This means it works in tandem with your normal POP3 email client like Outlook Express, allowing it to handle any POP3 email along with most webmail services.

While it isn’t exactly an email notifier per se, it does offer email checking services along with plenty of extra functions and plugins that allow it to be expanded for even more uses. FreePOPs is cross-platform and should work anywhere. It also works in the background, reducing system slowdown.

5. How to fight spam and get notified of email at the same time

The Chrysanth Email Notifier can handle POP3, IMAP4 and Gmail. More than just a notifier, it offers audio and visual alerts along with an internal email viewer. It can handle multiple email accounts and supports extra features like blacklists, whitelists and various customizable filters. For the most part, Chrysanth is quite easy to use with its most notable feature being its filters, minimizing the occurrence of spam to once in a blue moon. The app is freeware and runs in the background as a system tray icon.

This article written by Aaron Pek & James Yeang

Do you use email notifiers?  Tell us in the comments!

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Formatting is contextual.  One style may look great in one place, but look horrible in the next.  Here are a few quick tips on how to remove unwanted formatting from your documents.

1. How to remove unwanted formatting from your email

If you’ve received an email which has been forwarded multiple times, you’d notice that it can be hard to read if every line is prefixed with on more more ‘>’ characters.  Stripmail is a great piece of freeware which will help you strip any unwanted characters from your email and formats it into proper paragraphs and indentation so it’s much easier to read.  Stripmail is a free standalone utility which does not require installation so it’s incredibly light and portable.

2. How to remove unwanted formatting from any text in Google Docs AND MS Word and Powerpoint

Want a quick way to remove formatting in your document? Select the text you want to remove formatting from, and click Alt + Spacebar.  This built-in function will instantly do the job, and will work both in Google Docs and Microsoft Office.

3. How to remove unwanted formatting from Excel

The Alt + Spacebar trick doesn’t work in Excel, so what you can do is select an already unformatted cell, then click on the format painter button, and then select the area which you want unformatted.   

4. How to remove unwanted formatting when pasting web pages into MS Word

Things you copy from the web tend to end up looking really bad when you paste it into an MS Word file.  The way to get around this, once you copy the text, go to MS-Word and click Edit-Paste Special – Unformatted Text.  If you tend to do this very often, check out this excellent video tutorial on how to set up this up as a macro.

5. How to remove unwanted formatting when copying from your web browser

Have you ever copied something from your web browser to Outlook or Office and been annoyed that the text formatting (bold, font size, etc) came with it? Don’t you wish you could just copy the text itself, without having to copy it, paste it into notepad, then copy it again? This firefox extension gives you an option to copy text without the formatting. You can even set it to trim extra space in and around the copied text!

How do you deal with unwanted formatting?  Tell us in the comments!

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For those unfamiliar with this system, GTD is basically a time and commitment management system, and this definition from Wikipedia truly encapsulates the concept perfectly…

“GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of their mind and get them recorded somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate fully on actually performing those tasks. “

…and yes – speaking from experience, it really works. Jello GTD is a brand new open source plugin which helps you implement this system in Outlook

What’s good?

• It’s free, open source and under constant development
• It’s developer ‘Dr. Uqbarrun’ is quick and responsive to comments and suggestions in the comments sections, which has lead to quick implementation of features.
• Syncs with your handhelds

What’s not?

Having tried it out, it seems that there is no obvious way to associate email to the tasks created. As a lot of of my work is driven by emails that need to be actioned, this is a big drawback.

Conclusion:

If your work is not heavily email based, and you’d like a better way to keep track of your tasks, it’s certainly worth a try… after all it’s free. If anything this program will help whip a scattered workflow back into shape. It’s better than ending up like this…

Try it now – Jello GTD

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