A couple of years ago a friend asked me if it is possible in Outlook to select the folder where a email is saved after it is being sent. He had this feature in Lotus Notes and wanted this also in Outlook so that he can have all messages – sent and received – for a given project in one folder.

Unfortunately this function does not exist. Even after years and Outlook 2010 approaching, there’s no function like that. Even Gmail with the great feature that you have all messages in one threaded view, does not allow you to select the label for a email before you send it.

Now, there’s a solution – well, there has been a solution for some years, but I had it only on my work PCs It’s a VBA macro that can be installed in all Outlook versions (even in Outlook 2010 beta). After you click on “Send e-mail” a folder selection window allows you to select a folder.

Here’s a video of how it works:

Send and archive an e-mail in Outlook from Michael Hartmann on Vimeo.

As a nice side effect, you can also “archive” sent e-mails in your “Deleted Messages” folder and don’t have to worry about them anymore.

Go to installation and code or click on “Outlook send and archive” in the navigation.

Recently I have been invited to beta test ClickTale. Although I can’t tell much about the service itself yet there was one very interesting thing.

What is ClickTale
ClickTale is a website trackting tool that records the interaction of a user with the page, even mouse gestures. So it gives you the possibility to see how a user acts. You don’t know what he thinks since the mouse movement may not be the same as the eye movement. However, since many people move the cursor pretty soon to clickable areas (to not waste time) it still gives you a good impression. The visitors for the site are randomly selected to ensure that not just a special group (the early morning office surfers) are selected for all your available recordings.

Subscription models
As many other web services ClickTale has several subscription model to choose from. They allow for different amount of recordings per day. This is ok for sites where you want to test continuously, but this is not the usual case. For those who do tests every once in a while when a new feature is released ClickTale offers one-time boosts that give you a certain amount of recordings.

In my opinion this is a very reasonable choice to give the users what they need. I haven’t seen any other web service using this model. Sure, Backpack or Basecamp let you change your subscription each month, but this might not be the right thing sometimes. This is not to say that every service should have one-time boost but for this service this definitely makes sense.

Over the last months and even years I have registered with a lot of sites. Most of them I just try to check out because they are pretty new and are apps that seem to be worth using. However, I assume 90% of sites I register with I don’t use more than 2 – 3 times. Then I would really like to delete my account. Most of the time it’s hard to find how to delete your account, but sometimes it’s just impossible.

Today I wanted to delete my wordpress.com account. Why? I just don’t use it. I searched for a way and found a faq-page which told me something I just couldn’t understand.

Why would the software or database crash if an account is deleted? If you write your app code properly that won’t ever happen.

This question is a very important question, especially if someone thinks about OpenID. Can I unregister from a webpage. What happens to my data? Any suggestions?

Chicago based 37signals just launched Highrise, an online shared contact manager. It looks quite similar to their existing and successful applications, Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire and completes the “suite” of easy to use personal and business web applications.

Unlike Google or many others, 37signals does not try to replace currently existing desktop applications, such as Word, with a web version (Word will be around for some more years, so competing against is really hard and maybe even sensless). Instead, they create products that solve problems better than many others by making it just simple, easy and a pleasure to use.

Since Highrise is out just a few hours ago, I won’t give any detailed review yet. However, one feature I already like. Adding categories to tasks:

This makes the task list a lot easier to view. Also, look at the grouping in GTD style.

A friend told me yesterday about a new blog tool on the web – SixAparts Vox.com. First I was not suprised, but after a while I was completely exited.

So what is different with vox.com. It has one feature I always missed and that was for many people a reason to not have a blog – privacy control. It lets you decide who can read your post. Whether it’s the whole world, your friends or your family. Now you can decide who can read your posts and view your photos.

Why is that so important? Many people use their weblogs to communicate with friends and so on. However, weblogs can be read by the whole world. This is not how it should be – only your friends should be able to read it. So, many people switched back to good old email and sent an email to all their friends. Sometimes with very long text and images. Now, you can manage to do that with a blog tool and still get the privacy you had with email.

Another aspect is, that a new way to communicate will emerge. Lets look at an email conversation with 4 people. You write the first one to 3 of your friends, and all 3 reply to your first one. So, how do you integrate their comments in your email to all 4 again. Actually you can’t do that very well and even more, if those 4 reply to all 4 participants, it doesn’t get better. I am sure you had that experience.

I already used Basecamp to communicate with more than one person in an email like way and it was a lot easier than with email. Everybody sees each others comment and will react on this comment. Also, you can view the conversation more easily.

Now with vox.com you can start conversations, not just blog posts, with others using your blog tool and don’t have to use email anymore. Sure, there are still uses for email but this opens up a whole new world.