Tip 1: The benefits of compacting folders in email

Compacting folders in email clients can save you considerable amounts of space. Compacting folders doesn't mean compressing of folders. Many email clients tend to retain all email, even after you delete or move them. They even remain after you've emptied the trash bin. Actually, such mails are just marked for deletion, but aren't actually deleted. Compacting is a way of removing all such mails. You'll be surprised at the amount of storage space you can recover. For instance, I tried it on my Thunderbird mail client, and managed to recover more than 1 GB of space, just by recovering my inbox. I have noticed that Thunderbird does tend to eat up a lot of hard drive space for storing emails. Compacting folders is a great way to recover a lot of the unnecessary space it eats up.

Tip 2: Compress emails when backing them up

Most email clients are actually bloatware. They store emails in highly uncompressed form. so when you backup your mails, you can simply compress the mail folders. Sometimes, you can get up to 99% compression, so you can imagine the kind of space you can actually save on your hard drive.

Tip 3: How to open MS office 2007 files in OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org by default doesn't have support MS office 2007 formats I.e .docx, .pptx and .pptx. If you are a OOo user, and you receive a 2007 format file, you either have to ask the user to send the file again in a different format or find a office 2007 somewhere to convert it into a supported format. Well here is an easy way out to this, using “odf-converter-integrator” you can simply open 2007 format file in OOo. Its freely available and it can be downloaded from http://tinyurl.com/2o9k26 . Using this converter is simple, just install it, and double click on any 2007 format file, it will open it in OOo for you. It is available for Windows as well as Linux.

If you are looking for an Open Source mail client then Mozilla's Thunderbird is one  you can opt for. Here we give you tips on how to work efficiently with it

Sandeep Koul

Before talking about tips,  let's start with downloading Thunderbird mail client. Just visit www.mozillamessaging.com, download and install the latest version ('Thunderbird Setup 2.0.0.21') of Mozilla Thunderbird (6.4 MB). Once installed, we used this client for our Gmail account.  Just put in your Gmail address and you are done. Every time you are on Internet, this client will download mails on your disk after authenticating.   We installed Thunderbird on a Windows Vista machine. Here are some of the interesting  tricks that can help you in your daily work.

Backup and restore
Data is of highest priority and often people are worried about their data in mail clients. What tops the users' mind is what will happen to my mails if my machine changes? So creating backup of all your data is very important. There is simple way of creating backup of all the mails in Thunderbird.