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When to BCC Emails in Outlook

Posted by: standss | Comments (0)

Thursday, March 29th, 2012

I saw an interesting article on using BCC on Microsoft’s Outlook blog. I am sure most readers know about BCC but when should you use BCC? Here’s what we think.

Firstly… what is BCC?

BCC stands for blind carbon. People that you BCC on an email will receive the email but their names will not be visible to other recipients of the same email i.e. the other recipients will not know that the BCCed person also received a copy of the email.

Recommended Uses of BCC

Hide one or more recipients from others: You may need to send a copy of the email to someone without the other recipients knowing about it.
Prevent Reply-to-All Storms: You may choose to BCC many people on an email if they do need to discuss the email further amongst themselves. Using BCC instead of CC means that everyone can’t get involved in unnecessary discussions or have to receive useless one-word emails like thank you or ok.
Circulate Jokes: I know that many people do not recommend circulating jokes but some jokes just are too good to keep to yourself. Unless you are forwarding the joke to a close group of friends and want further comments to follow, email the joke to yourself and BCC everyone else.

Not Recommended Uses of BCC:

Putting down your colleagues: Don’t BCC management on a conversation to show that you are doing your work well while others are slacking off. If you need to complain about someone, don’t be sneaky about it.
Sending out sales or marketing newsletters. If you use the BCC to send to people you don’t know well, your email just looks like SPAM. Use something like Email Merge for Outlook instead.

Replying to a BCCed email

Before you reply to your next email, check to see if you were BCCed (does your name appear in the To or CC fields). If not, than the email was addressed to multiple people, think twice before replying!

Why were you BCCed? Does the sender want to hide from the others that you were sent a copy of the email too?

If you reply-to-all on an email that you were BCCed on then the secret is out. Everyone knows that you received the email as well.

If you get BCCed on a lot of emails then you may want to use something like Send Guard for Outlook… which will warn you anytime you try and reply-to-all an email that you were BCCed on.

Please share you own ideas of using BCC by leaving a comment on the blog.

Categories : EmailMerge for Outlook, Outlook Email Tips, Outlook as a Business Tool, SendGuard for Outlook

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How to Handle Emails You Receive That Are Intended for Someone Else

Posted by: standss | Comments (1)

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

Do you occasionally receive emails that were accidentally sent to you (maybe because your email address is very similar to someone else)? What should you do when this happens… and how can you avoid making this mistake yourself.

I recently saw an article on LifeHacker on this topic. Their recommendations were as follows.

You’re not actually ethically bound to do anything.
Forward it. Don’t Delete it. Their recommendation is to forward it to the intended recipient and CC the sender (I recommend something different below)

My Recommendation

My preferred method for dealing with these emails is to, REPLY TO THE SENDER and let them know that they accidentally sent you the email. I do this because:

It makes the sender aware of the mistake so they’ll be more careful in the future.
The intended recipient is not aware that someone else received the email. This may be important if the sender is a good friend and the email contained confidential information (a lawyer friend once sent information to me that was meant for someone else… there was nothing confidential in that email but the next time there may have been).

How to avoid making this mistake yourself

This mistake is very easy to make if you’re a Microsoft Outlook user. Outlook has an Auto-complete feature that completes email addresses as you type them in the To, CC or Bcc fields of emails. It is very easy to accidentally pick the wrong email address from this list.

We have covered how you can protect yourself in the past in:

Preventing Disasters caused by Outlook’s Autocomplete feature

For additional protection you may also want to look at Send Guard for Outlook which can prompt you for confirmation before any emails are sent out.

SendGuard Send Confirm screen

The prompt has the recipient’s name which can serve as an additional warning. (SendGuard users… you can turn this on using the Settings Screen and selecting the Send Confirm tab)

What do you do when you get misdirected emails? Do you forward it or reply… do you delete? Please share your own ideas by leaving a comment.

Categories : Outlook Email Tips, Outlook as a Business Tool, SendGuard for Outlook, Sending emails

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Outlook Tip: Add Attachment to Email using Drag and Drop

Posted by: standss | Comments (2)

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Adding attachments to email is no big deal, even beginners would know how to do this (Click on the Attachment button and browsing the file).

But the problem with this method is that there is a possibility you might forget to add the attachment to the email. Why?

Because we send hundreds of emails in a day (not all require an attachment), the most obvious sequences of steps are, open a blank email > enter the email address > subject > content > and then click Send.

If an email needs an attachment, it would likely be the last thing you will add and so there is chances you will miss it. Which means you will again have to send another email with the attachment wasting your time and maybe annoying your clients/customers.

Here is how you can use Drag and Drop to add an attachment to the email first and then enter the other details

Open Outlook
Click on the Inbox
Go to the location where you have saved the file you wish to attach
Drag and Drop the file in the Inbox.

This will now open a blank email with the attachment added. You can now enter the email address, subject (this will be the same as the name of the attachment but you can always change it), enter the content and click Send. Simple and Safe!

For those who still prefer the traditional method of adding attachment, you can try SendGuard for Outlook. This simple Outlook addin automatically prompts you if it feels that an email is missing an attachment. You can focus on the more important stuff like the email content while this outlook add on runs in the background and protects you when needed.

Did you find this tip useful? Let us know by leaving a comment below

Categories : Outlook Email Tips, Outlook as a Business Tool, SendGuard for Outlook, Sending emails

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How I make sure that I only need to send emails ONCE!

Posted by: standss | Comments (0)

Friday, January 6th, 2012

How much time do we waste every day having to resend emails… or makeup for emails that were sent incorrectly or to the wrong people to start with?

We originally designed Send Guard for Outlook at the request of several large companies (it has now been deployed to organizations ranging from 1 user to more than a 1000 users).

However I was surprised how often it was prompting me for missing information once I started using it myself.

SendGuard for Outlook has a collection of extremely useful tools that ensure your outgoing emails are COMPLETE (with no missing information) and are being sent to the CORRECT (and only the correct) people.

SendGuard works inside Outlook and takes no time to learn – you continue to write and send your emails the same way you always have. SendGuard will automatically warn you and let you take corrective action if it detects a mistake.

SendGuard even gives you a way of changing your mind about an email after you have clicked Send.

Have you ever:

Forgot to attach a document to an email message (which delays matters or could even result in missed deadlines)
Clicked Reply when you meant Reply-All (and thereby forgot to keep everyone in the loop)
Clicked Reply-All when you meant Reply (and accidentally disclosed confidential information to the wrong people
Forgot to write a subject or sent an email with an old subject line (the correct subject on an email generally gets a much better response)
Fired off an angry message that you later regretted.
Emailed someone using the wrong email address (for those of us with more than one email address).

If you are running a business, particularly a professional business, these seemingly small errors can make you look unprofessional and waste precious billable time.

SendGuard for Outlook protects you from all these mistakes by automatically warning you if it detects the possibility of any of the above mistakes (and more).

Learn more and download a fully functional 30 Day Trial of Send Guard for Outlook

Also remember to check out the NEW YEARS RESOLUTION OUTLOOK PACK. We have bundled SendGuard for Outlook with 3 other Outlook Email Overwhelm boosters. You can save more than 50% for the next few days.

Categories : Outlook as a Business Tool, SendGuard for Outlook, Special Discount Offers

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Your Personal Email Security Guard in Outlook

Posted by: standss | Comments (1)

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

In a earlier post, I mentioned how emails are causing stress and frustrations for many people and showed how you can take control of your emails.

With so many emails to handle each day, it is very common for us to make mistakes (we are all human after all), and if you are running a business, particularly a professional business, this mistakes can make you look unprofessional and waste precious billable time.

Please raise your hand if you ever:

Forgot to attach a document to an email message (which delays matters or could even result in missed deadlines)
Clicked Reply when you meant Reply-All (and thereby forgot to keep everyone in the loop)
Clicked Reply-All when you meant Reply (and accidentally disclosed confidential information to the wrong people)
Forgot to write a subject or sent an email with an old subject line (the correct subject on an email generally gets a much better response
Fired off an angry message that you later regretted.
Emailed someone using the wrong email address (for those of us with more than one email address).

This errors may not seem so much but in a professional environment, they could make a person (company) look unprofessional and waste valuable time.

Our Outlook Addin SendGuard, protects you from all these mistakes by automatically warning you if it detects the possibility of any of the above mistakes (and more).

It acts like your own email security guard running in the background. SendGuard works inside Outlook and takes no time to learn – you continue to write and send your emails the same way you always have. SendGuard will automatically warn you and let you take corrective action if it detects a mistake.

Click here to download a fully functional 30 day trial of SendGuard addin.

Do you have your own methods of preventing common emailing mistakes?

Please do share it with us by leaving a comment below.

Categories : Outlook Email Tips, SendGuard for Outlook

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How to NEVER send a sensitive Outlook email to the wrong person

Posted by: standss | Comments (0)

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

Our last post discussed the risks of accidentally sending a sensitive email to the wrong person because of Outlook’s AutoComplete feature. Here’s how you can still use Outlook’s AutoFill and still protect yourself from this kind of mistake.

This technique works particularly well if there are certain people from whom you need “better protection” e.g. if you’re a lawyer, you need to be extra careful that you don’t send sensitive information to opposing counsel… or you send information to a report in the media

Our Outlook Addin Send Guard for Outlook has a feature called Send Confirm. If you enable this feature, Outlook will prompt you before it sends out any email.

Send Confirm Prompt

You probably don’t want a prompt for every email you send out but…

You can configure Send Guard so that Outlook will prompt you only when you send out emails to particular people (e.g. your boss, opposing counsel, reports from the media etc.)

Here’s how to configure Send Guard to do this (please note that if you are not already a user of SendGuard, you will need to download and install the Outlook addon before you can do this)

Open Outlook
For Outlook 2003/2007, on the main menu, click Tools > Standss > SendGuard > Settings
For Outlook 2010, go to the Addins tab > Standss > SendGuard > Settings
Click the Send Confirm tab
Select the third option “Display message only for these email addresses:“
Click Add, type in the email address and click OK. You can repeat this step to add other email addresses.
Click OK

Now anytime you click Send to send an email to anyone on the list, Outlook will ask for confirmation before the email is sent out.

If you’re a SendGuard user, I hope that this tip helps you get even more out of your software.

If you’re not a SendGuard for Outlook user yet, you can learn more about this addin and download a fully functional 30-trial from our website.

SendGuard has a number of other protection features built in including:

Reply-to-All Filtering to prevent disclosing sensitive information by accidentally clicking Repy-to-All
Reply Prompts to ensure that you reply to everyone who needs to be kept informed.
Missing Attachment warning to ensure that you send all information
…plus much more.

Categories : Outlook Email Tips, SendGuard for Outlook

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SendGuard for Outlook Update: Reply-to-All and Reply to Outlook emails is now 100x safer

Posted by: standss | Comments (0)

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

It always amazes me with the fantastic ideas that our readers/users come up with. Here is a simple (why didn’t we think of this earlier) idea that a user suggested to us that virtually ELIMINATES any chance of you replying or replying-to-all to the wrong people.

Before I show you the cool new implementation the user suggested:

What is the danger of doing a Reply-to-All when you really meant to do a Reply?

You may receive an email addressed to many people… and want to respond to only the sender with some confidential information… or maybe a not-so-positive comment about one of the other recipients. An accidental Reply-to-All instead of a Reply… and suddenly everyone sees what you wrote.

And vice versa…What is the danger of doing a Reply when you meant to do a Reply-to-All?

In many cases you need to do a Reply-to-All to keep everyone informed in discussions. Do a Reply instead of a Reply-to-All and some people are left out…

This is usually less catastrophic and at the worst case usually means that you have to waste time resending emails… still a mistake better avoided if possible

What was our OLD Solution?
SendGuard for Outlook had a couple of prompts that came up to warn you when you were doing a Reply-to-All or a Reply on an email with multiple recipients.

Old reply to all

It was a good solution but it was still easy to accidentally click Yes when you were in a rush.

What is the new SAFER and FASTER solution?
With the new version, anytime you click Reply or Reply-to-All on an email with multiple recipients, SendGuard for Outlook will show you exactly who you are sending the email to.

New Reply to All

I love this screen and really wish I had thought of this myself. It’s so simple and so effective!

Reply-to-Alls are SAFER! You can immediately see exactly who will be receiving the email. As a result there is almost no chance of sending confidential information to the wrong people… or accidentally clicking Yes when you meant No on a warning prompt.
Plus..you SAVE so much TIME if you need to change the recipients. You can change the recipients directly on the prompt… by ticking or unticking names… no need to go back to the email

I love it. It may seem like a small change but you’ll be surprised how much easier and safer it makes Reply-To-Alls.

You can download the latest version of Send Guard for Outlook from here.

This update is FREE for Existing users of SendGuard. Install it over your old version and your registration information will automatically be retrieved.

Haven’t tried Send Guard yet? Find out more about Send Guard for Outlook and download a fully functional trial today.

Categories : Outlook Email Tips, SendGuard for Outlook, Sending emails

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How to get back a message you have Sent?

Posted by: standss | Comments (0)

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

Have you ever wrote and sent a not-so-diplomatic email while in a bad mood and later wished there was only some way of calling the email back?

The Good news is, Outlook already has a built-in Recall feature which lets you do just that.

The Bad news is, it only works with Exchange server accounts and has a very low success rate, mostly because recall only works with unread messages.

For those who have a Exchange Account

If you would like to recall a email you sent a co-worker:

Go to the Sent Items folder and open the email you want to recall
In Outlook 2010/2007, click on the Other Actions menu (or Actions depending on your Outlook settings) and select “Recall this message…”
In Older versions, click on the Actions menu and select “Recall this message…”

2010/2007

Older Outlook

After clicking Recall this Message, a dialog comes up, giving you the option of Deleting the message (if unread) or replacing the message with a new one.

If you enable the option to be told if the recall was successful, you’ll get a message back within a few minutes letting you know if the recall was successful or failed.

Note: the above method is only useful if the email you sent has not been read by the recipient.

Prevention is better then Cure

We all have heard the saying above but often enough end up looking for cures rather then preventing the mistakes in the first place.

SendGuard for outlook is a simple add-in which allows you to delay all or selected emails for a preset time in your Outbox. This lets you change your message if you’ve had a change of heart after clicking Send. For the super cautious, SendGuard can be configured from the settings screen to get confirmation before sending out emails to all or selected recipients.

What would you perfer, sending the email and then looking for a way to recall it OR safeguard yourself from sending the email in the first place?

let us know by leaving a comment on our blog

Categories : Outlook Email Tips, SendGuard for Outlook

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How to write emails that get RESPONSED to ON TIME!

Posted by: standss | Comments (1)

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

Here are few simple things you can do to greatly increase the chances of getting a response to your email that are useful and on time.

1. Make sure that your email has a meaningful Subject.

Before anyone responds to your email, they have to read it… and they need to actually open your email before they can read it.

We all get too many emails these days and the email with the most important/relevant/interesting Subject gets our attention first. Everything else can wait till we have time.

If you need a response from the reader of the email, make sure that the Subject spells out the topic quickly.

A Common Mistake
One common practise that results in many many emails with the wrong Subject:

You want to write to Mr X whose email you don’t have immediately available… so you find an older email from them… and click Reply. You delete out the contents of the email and write what you want to write… but leave the old Subject.

Remember to change the Subject… or use something like Send Guard for Outlook which automatically prompts you if you try and Reply to an email that is too old (you get to decide what is too old)

2. If your email has a deadline then put the actual date/time in the Subject too.

e.g. XYZ Meeting. Please confirm if attending by 3 PM 14-Feb.

This way there is an immediate indicator to the reader if action is required quickly.

Personally I find an actual date/time in the Subject to be much more effective than putting words like URGENT. Too many spammers use those words to try and get action now.

Put in an actual date/time so it is super-obvious exactly when a response is required by.

3. Try not to ask for too many different unrelated things on one email

If it is going to take too much effort (like looking for information not immediately available) to respond to your email then the reader will probably leave it in their Inbox for later… for when they have more time.

Unless it is something that is critical for the reader (as opposed to being important to you), there’s a good chance you won’t get a response… at least not quickly.

I hope you find these tips helpful in getting better responses to your emails. If you have your own tips for getting faster and better responses, please let us know by leaving a comment on the blog.

Categories : Outlook Email Tips, SendGuard for Outlook

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How to Avoid Sending Emails to the WRONG person

Posted by: standss | Comments (1)

Monday, November 1st, 2010

This happened to me yesterday. I used Outlook’s auto-complete feature to select an email address while addressing my email and selected the wrong person. I ended up sending the email to completely the wrong person.

My Outlook is configured to send out emails automatically and I wasn’t able to stop it … although I realised my mistake within seconds of clicking Send.

Luckily for me, the content of the email wasn’t confidential so there was no real damage done. But things could have been worse …

Here are two ways to avoid this problem.

Option 1: Disable the Send Immediately function (not my preferred option).

You can setup Outlook to only send out emails according to your preset schedule or when you click Send&Receive.

To turn off automatic sends:

If you are using Outlook 2010, (on the ribbon) click File–Options. Click the Advanced section and then scroll down to “Send and Receive”.
If you are using earlier versions of Outlook, (on the menu) click Tools-Options. Click the Mail Setup tab.
Remove the tick next to “Send immediately when connected“

Option 2: Delay all outgoing emails in your Outbox for (say) 30 seconds – this is what I have now implemented

It is possible to do this manually but it has to be done for every email you write … I am way to lazy for a manual solution … it’s not going to happen.

Instead I use the Delay Guard feature in SendGuard 4 Outlook to delay all my outgoing emails by 30 seconds. The settings screen is shown below.

SendGuard Settings

I have set it up so that it asks me if I want the email delayed whenever I click Send (if you find the message intrusive, just remove one tick on the settings screen for all emails to be automatically delayed without the message)

Delay Emails in SendGuard

Why 30 seconds? I find that I realise within 30 seconds of clicking Send if there’s something wrong with the email I just sent. After 30 seconds I’ve moved on to something else and the email would have been sent out any way.

Categories : SendGuard for Outlook

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