A Great Tip for Windows Mail Users
March 19th, 2011
If, like me, you’re using Windows Mail instead of Outlook as your mail program, you’re going to love this tip.
I found that my Windows Mail program was running significantly slower than it used to. I’d click on “Create Mail” or “Reply” or “Reply All” and it seemed like it was taking forever to do its thing.
Here’s what I discovered: In the Send tab of the Options menu, there’s a box you can check or uncheck (it’s highlighted in the screen shot above) that tells Windows Mail to automatically put people you reply to in your Contacts list.
Which means everyone you’re sending mail to — everyone! — is being added to your Contacts. Which also means that Windows Mail is spending all sorts of time searching through and adding to that Contacts list as you go about your daily mail chores.
Over time it can get ridiculous. How ridiculous? When I went to Tools>>>Windows Contacts, I saw that I had nearly 3,000 items in my Contacts folder. I’ve pared it down to around 200, unchecked the box so it doesn’t start growing uncontrollably again, and my Windows Mail is running significantly faster than it was yesterday.
March 21st, 2011 at 10:46 pm
Hi Craig,
Great tip! One of the biggest irritants with Gmail was auto-saving any email address I’d sent an email to from my Gmail account. And it looks like based on feedback Google has decided to disable that functionality. They’ve assumed that the user would be interested in having that email handy for future communication. But as you’ve noted there are only a few that you’d rather store details about.
Address book services out there, like Plaxo, let you manage all your contacts from one place but what they don’t do is provide the flexibility to email them from their email editor of choice. The default for most is to open up a local client like Outlook but no provision for other services like Gmail.
My contact management service, AddyMate, lets you set the preferred editor including local clients like Outlook & Windows Mail, & online email services like Gmail, Yahoo, Windows Live or AOL. So, now clicking on an email address for a contact from within AddyMate will automatically pop-up an email composer window that you’ve set as your preference.
With this flexibility I can now lookup a contact from my centralized AddyMate address book & start writing an email in Windows Live, send the email & return back to viewing the contact’s details, without actually opening a separate window to log into Windows Live.
Let me know if you want to see what I’m talking about & since AddyMate is in user trials I’ll provide you an access code for signing up.
Thanks,
Rajdeep