Washington Apple Pi

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How To Prevent E-Mail Overload

By Herbert Block

Washington Apple Pi Journal, reprint information

How may of us save messages we receive simply because we don't know how or where to save them? Or because we are afraid of deleting something important by mistake? The consequences, of course, are that the Internet mail accumulates and slows down your computer.

Below, I will show you, step by step, how to save your important E-mails so you can find them when you need them, and keep your computer running smoothly. I will also show you how to print a specific piece of E-mail without including the extraneous parts of the page that you don't want, like address headers, advertisements, etc.

Method # 1: The “ Select, Copy, and Paste” technique

The most straightforward way to save an important E-mail is to simply copy it into a folder on your computer. Here's what to do:

Method # 2 : The Picture/Copy technique

Some people prefer to select and save material from Internet E -mail using the picture/copy technique. That technique is valuable for more than just E-mail. F or example, you can use it to copy an advertisement of an item on sale, or to copy an extract of a long record with graphs, or for any other material you want to keep a visual image of.

The picture/copy technique creates a virtual camera snapshot, complete with the sound of the camera's shutter click. Here's how you do it:

Method # 3: The Drag and Drop technique

Finally, what if you want to save a photo that you received in an E-mail, but don't need the rest of the E-mail? There is a quick and easy way to extract the photo and save it. Just put your cursor on the photo and drag the picture to your desk top. Then let go. There is your digital photo, ready to be printed, saved, or dragged into another document .

Editor’s note: for those who get massive amounts of mail -- Journal editors, Webmasters, and the like -- there is yet another method. Select a whole bunch of messages at once in Mail. Then go up to the File menu, and select Save As… and give the messages a name, something like “February 2008.” If all the messages are pure text, the file -- with all of the messages lumped in one document, in the order displayed in Mail -- will be a text document. If there are attachments, embedded photos and the like, the file will be saved as .rtfd, which sounds exotic but isn't. Double-click on the resulting file and it will open in TextEdit, or you can optionally open it in Microsoft Word or Pages. Everything in the original messages, from formatting to embedded photos to attachments, will be saved in the file. -- Ed.