Archive for the ‘email’ Tag
Better Ways to Send Attachments Via Gmail
Filed under: hard | Tags: attachments, email, extension, files, firefox, gmail, windows
Leave a Comment Sending attachments via Gmail is pretty straightforward in Windows, but it’s not great if
- you want to send your attachment direct from the program (Word etc)
- you want to send more than one attachment per email
- you’re used to dragging and dropping attachments
Here’s how to make it easier.
Sending files direct from a Windows application
Affixa is a small program that sits between you and Gmail, turning Gmail into the default email client for mailto: links (links on webpages that launch whatever is your Windows email program).
Affixa is relatively painless to install.
Now , for example, you can send a file straight from Microsoft Word via Gmail.
You can do the same thing right clicking on a file in Windows Explorer (or whatever it’s called in Windows Seven) and then selecting Send to/Mail recipient:
Affixa will alert you when the email is ready:
Sending multiple files via drag and drop
If you’re a drag and drop person, you can add files to Gmail using Affixa’s basket, a small app that sits in the system tray into which you can drag files, or groups of files.
When you’re done collecting the files, hit the email button at the bottom and Affixa adds them to an email:
That email is then put in your Gmail draft folder. (Be patient; this can take a while. Probably too long.)
Another option, if the files are all in the same folder, is to use a Firefox extension called dragdropupload which lets you drag multiple files straight into Gmail (and Facebook and Flickr).
Once the extension is installed, create a new Gmail email message and then drag the selected files into the light blue area around the Subject field.
You’ll know if you’re doing it right when the mouse turns to a thumbnail of the files with the number of files above it in blue:
I find this works more quickly than Affixa.
The basic version of Affixa is free; a more fully featured version costs £2 a year. The Firefox extension is free, but its author Sankazim welcomes donations via PayPal.
Migrating Thunderbird Between Computers
Filed under: medium | Tags: email, exporting, settings, thunderbird, windows7
Leave a Comment If you want to move your Thunderbird email, settings and plugins to another computer on Windows Vista or Windows Seven, here’s how to do it. (If you’ve got another version of Windows, you may need to tweak the process to locate your Profile folder. Check out details here.)
Set up Thunderbird on your new computer/drive and launch it.
Don’t bother importing anything. But you need to get Thunderbird going to set up the AppData folder. This is where everything gets stored.
Close Thunderbird.
Now find your old Profile folder. The easiest way to do this is to copy the following into your Explorer address bar:
C:\users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming
(clicking on the address bar will change the appearance from
to the more familiar:)
If, like me, you’re moving from one partition on a drive to another, or your old stuff is on an external drive, you may also need to change the driver letter.
And then replace the [User Name] with your old user name (and remove the square brackets.)
This should take you to the following folder:
Go into the Profiles folder and find whatever folder in there has the suffix default:
Now open another Explorer folder (right click on the folder icon in your taskbar and select Windows Explorer:)
Do the same thing as before, pasting in the above text and replacing it with your new Thunderbird location. Find the profile folder. There should be an existing default folder in there.
Now drag the old default profile folder you found above into the new Profile folder. (This should keep a copy of the old profile folder, so long as you’re moving between drives. Otherwise you may want to make a backup copy first.)
You should now have two default folders together in one folder.
Now select the new default folder that Thunderbird has just created, hit F2 and then rename its suffix from default to old:
Now rename your old profile folder to the new profile folder, with the suffix default (you might just want to copy and paste the name by hitting F2 and the selecting the text, hitting Ctrl/c etc):
Now fire up Thunderbird and you should see your old emails, settings, and plugins, all working normally.
Thunderbird Identity SMTP Problem
Obscure one, this, but it might be of use to someone.
Thunderbird’s identify management is a dog’s dinner, in my opinion. One problem with it is that, at least in the present version, there’s a bug preventing you from saving changes from one SMTP server to another. In other words, you’ll think you’ve changed the outgoing server for your email identity, and then find that in fact you haven’t. Frustration follows.
One solution is to delete the offending identity and start over. I couldn’t figure out how to do that so I just removed the SMTP server that the program was defaulting back to (even if it wasn’t the default, if you follow):
Delete that one and then start over.
