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:

• 1. Select the message to keep. You can do this by simply dragging your cursor over the material you want to save to highlight it, or by selecting SELECT ALL from the EDIT menu.
• 2. From the Edit menu, click COPY (Command C).
• 3. Open a new blank document from your word processor , put the cursor on it, and select PASTE (Command V) from the EDIT menu.
• 4. Your E-mail is now a document that you can save to a file, edit, print or whatever. You may want to delete any extraneous material like mastheads or ads before you print, since they use up a lot of colored ink .
• 5. After you have edited your E-mail, you need to save it to your computer. The easiest place to locate an item you have saved is the DESKTOP. That places the saved item where you can find it easily and lat er move it anywhere.
• 6 . If you want to keep all your saved E -mail messages in one place, you can create a folder for that. F rom the File menu select New Folder and give it a name, for example, Saved E-MAIL. From the desktop drag the document you have just saved to this new folder. From now on you can keep all your saved E -mail together in this Saved E-MAIL folder.

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:

• 1. For a picture of the entire screen, hold down the command and shift keys, and press the number 3 key. Hear the shutter click? Find a “picture” on the desktop. (Note: the Command key, which is also known as the Apple key, is the key on the bottom row of your keyboard next to the space bar.)
• 2. For a picture of only part of the screen, hold down the command and shift keys, and press the number 4 key. That will cause a tracer head to lightly appear. With your cursor drag the tracer head all around the area you want to copy, and then let go. Hear the shutter click? A picture should appear on your desk top. If you didn't quite get the part of the screen you wanted, do it again. After a few practice shots, you will be an expert. And, of course, you can trash the rejects. This procedure is helpful if you want to eliminate excess stuff, for example a banner advertisement.

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.