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.

Today Jakob Nielsen posted an article about the first 2 words in a link on webpages. His researched showed that many people can guess the content of good links within 11 characters. While that doesn’t mean that we should now limit all links to that length, I think there is a good hint in the results. Make most of what is important understandable quickly.

From reading many articles about e-mail usability lately I think these results can also give good tipps for e-mail subject lines. If you want people to understand your e-mail in an overview list quickly, create subject lines that can communicate the meaning in a quick way. You can still add additional info in the subject line, but have the first words explain the important part.

Long awaited and now finally there it is – reboot 9.0. The last two events have been amazing, the city and especially the venue. Don’t wait too long to register.

What is reboot about? Reboot is an event where people from all over the world, but especially Europe, gather and share ideas, opinions and discussions about the web, the world and lots of other things.

This year’s theme is “human”.

One of the best books I read this year is free for everybody now. It’s 37signals “Getting Real”. After reading their weblog for more than 3 years now, using almost all of their products (except Ta-Da lists) I have become a big fan of theirs.

The insights and opinions in their book are amazing, groundbreaking and helpful. I have been struggling with same problems when programming and after using some of their techniques it makes a lot more fun.

But be aware, after reading this book you might get big problems with the old-habbit people that don’t want to change.

Last week two applications caught my attention. WriteRoom (Mac) and Dark Room (Windows-clone). They both do share the same concept of distraction free writing. The only thing you can do is write, no highlighting, no bold or italic, just plain writing.

Especially after reading this wonderful article about managing you daily office life I tried the Mac-version. I really have to say that I did like it a lot. You just type in what comes to your mind and don’t care about layout. That you can and have to do later. However, even after writing just two or three things I changed the way I wrote. I paid more attention to the style of my writing so that even without formatted headings you can do a lot with basic text layout.

So is it a replacement for word? Yes and no. Sometimes I just want to type in stuff and word will not be the tool to layout it at the end, e.g. when writing emails. However, as I neve used layout techniques to a high extend I tried the Word full screen feature. This is almost the same as with WriteRoom, it doesn’t show anything but text and grey background. Then I set up my keyboard shortcuts to have some for heading 1 to 3 and that’s all I need now. It saves the same purpose of distracting free writing for me since there are no toolbars and so on. So, give it a try and see for yourself how different writing can be.