The Bottom Line
- OE Quick Tools adds a number of useful features to Outlook Express
- Can strip attachments from emails, lets you re-send emails and can always Bcc an address
- OE Quick Tools offers to clean up text and paste without formatting in plain text messages, too
- OE Quick Tools text formatting can't properly quote and format text
- You cannot process a folder and have all attachments removed automatically by OE Quick Tools
- OE Quick Tools' templates aren't as useful as they could be
Description
- OE Quick Tools is a collection of Outlook Express add-ons.
- The OE Quick Tools attachment stripper removes attachments from email messages.
- OE Quick Tools lets you insert text snippets easily with user-defined keyboard shortcuts.
- You can also save and use messages as templates in OE Quick Tools.
- A text cleaner removes '>' characters and rewraps text (in forwarded emails, for example).
- OE Quick Tools can convert formatted text to plain text before you paste it to a plain text email.
- "Send Again" makes it easy to re-send emails (if you mistyped the address, for example).
- OE Quick Tools can always send a Bcc: copy of outgoing messages to a certain address (e.g. yours).
- OE Quick Tools supports Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/3/XP and Outlook Express 5/6.
Guide Review - OE Quick Tools 4.0 - Outlook Express Add-On
There's the attachment remover, for example, which strips attached files from archived emails to save disk space. Unfortunately, it works with individual messages only and you can't run it over all your emails easily.
Some will find the automatic Bcc: tool particularly valuable. Using this, you can automatically send a Bcc: copy of every outgoing message to any address — for auditing and archiving, for example, or to forward copies to your mobile device.
Another really useful tool in OE Quick Tools is called "standard text", little text snippets that you can insert in any message with just a keyboard shortcut. The templates offered by OE Quick Tools aren't as useful. Merely duplicating Outlook Express stationery, you can't use them for replies (with quoted text) or use variables in them.
Speaking quoted text: while the paste-as-plain-text function of OE Quick Tools that converts formatted text to plain text before pasting it in in (plain text) message is very useful, the text reformatting tool lacks in functionality. It strips extraneous '>' characters efficiently and rewraps the text, too, but this is not always what is needed when you reply to an email. For this, re-quoting of the stripped text would be useful.
