Software
Review of: |
| I
get a bunch of messy e-mail. Messages that have been sent from you to him,
then forwarded to her, then after about a gazillion other pass-thoughs,
end up on my desktop. They have an endless string of >>>>>>> marks,
each one of them indicating a time when the message was forwarded, and
the lines get chopped up in random places. There are hard returns, which
put the kibosh of text wrapping at the end of each deformed line.
If I want to forward this messy message to some other poor fools, I can just click on the forward button on my e-mail program and they will get it with more >>>> marks and even weirder line breaks. But what if I want to send someone a clean copy? Or if I want to cut-and-paste the e-mail message into a word processing document or a web page? I could, of course, manually remove all of the >>> marks, and tediously take out all of the hard line breaks and oh, maybe ten hours of mind-numbing labor later, I will have clean copy. In your dreams. This Susan is most definitely a lazy Susan. I use a free shareware utility, The Cleaner. First, I open up the original e-mail message and copy onto the clipboard the text I want to clean up. To do this, hold down your left mouse key and drag it over the text so that it is highlighted. Then, use the keyboard combination Ctrl-C, or use the mouse to select Edit-Copy from the screen menu. The text is now in your computer’s memory. Next, open up the Cleaner. Click on the little smiley face and your text will be pasted into this program, all cleaned up. No >>> marks. No hard returns. No weird line breaks. The cleaned-up text is automatically transferred into your Windows clipboard’s memory. Finally, open up a new e-mail window, or a new word processing file, and position the cursor where you want to paste the cleaned-up text. To get it onto the screen, either use the keyboard combination Ctrl-V or use the mouse to select Edit-Paste. Done! Cleaner has a few options: Remove hard carriage returns; assume first line is title; don’t wrap lines starting with numbers; don’t wrap lines ending in punctuation marks; don’t wrap upper case lines and leave blank lines. They results may not be perfect, but in my experience it gets the text back to about 95% of its original, pristine condition. And saves you lots of time! You can get e-mail Cleaner for free at PCWorld. The developer, Steve Chin, has a newer version out. You can visit his web site at <http://members.tripod.com/schin26/index.htm> to download the version 2.01, which has more text formatting options and integrates smoothly with Outlook 2000. I’ve been so happy with the first version I haven’t bothered upgrading. Now that I’ve figured out how to clean up my e-mail, I just have to figure out how to convince my friends to clean up their jokes. . .
Susan Ives gets lots of e-mail; most of it clean. |