Do you ever get emails from business associates that have really nice signatures at the bottom? They will often include a logo that will take you out to business’ website when you click it. You don’t have to be green with envy over these cool signatures. Creating a signature line in Outlook 2010 is extremely easy. In this post, I will show you how you can accomplish this in a few easy steps!

The first thing we need to do is click on the “File” tab in the upper left corner of Outlook. Once you are there, click the button labeled “Options”. See the arrow pointing in the picture below.

When you click the “Options” button you will get a dialog box like the one pictured below. On the left side of the dialog box you need to click on the option that says “Mail”. Once you have clicked the “Mail” option, click the button on the right side of the page that says “Signatures”.

You should now see a dialog that allows you to create a new signature. Take a moment to look at the picture below. Let’s explore some of the options available to us. Notice that you can have multiple signatures. In this example, I created the Techie Buzz signature by clicking the button labeled “New”. To the right of that signature you have the option to assign that signature to an account. Remember Outlook has the ability to handle multiple email accounts. It also gives you the ability to assign separate signatures to those accounts as well.

At the bottom of the window, you will notice a blank area. This is where you type the information you would like included in your signature. I decided to include my name, email address, and our company logo. To add a logo, you first need to have an image file saved on your computer. In the picture below, you will see highlighted in red the image button. Click this button.

You will get the dialog box pictured below. Navigate to the folder on your computer that contains the image you want to include in your signature. Then click the picture and click the “Insert” button to insert it into your signature line.

Now that you have your logo inserted, you can add a hyperlink to it so that when someone clicks it, they are directed to your website. To do this, find the “Hyperlink” button highlighted in red in the picture below.

You will now see the following dialog box, pictured below. At the top you will see the “Text to display” box. What this means is when people put their mouse over the logo, they will get a little description. You can make this say pretty much anything you want. At the bottom of the window, you will see the “Address” box. Type the website address you want the link to go to, then click OK.

Now that you have your information typed and your logo inserted, I would like to warn you about one more pitfall. By default, the font color is set to “Automatic”. Most of the time this will appear black. The problem however, is if you want your signature font to stay a consistent color, you have to set it because the “Automatic” setting will use the default font of any email you reply to. Have you ever noticed that sometimes when you hit reply on an email that your words are typed in blue? The same will happen to your signature unless you specify something other than “Automatic”. Picture below, I have highlighted my name and clicked the “Font Color” dropdown menu. This is where you need to go to set your signature’s color.

Once you have followed all these steps, you need to specify on the right side of the window whether you want to use your new signature just for new messages or whether you want to include them in replies as well. Click “OK” at the bottom and you’re all set. When you open a new message to send to someone you will have a nice ready made signature at the bottom of your message. Good luck and if you have any questions about this tutorial feel free to comment.

It’s not a coincidence that I ran across this cool freeware app today. After reading about my advice to replace Outlook Express with Windows Live Mail, my friend Bob Constans sent me a tip about CodeTwo Outlook AutoConfig.

What is Outlook AutoConfig?

According to the author it’s …

a free tool that will automatically create your email account in Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail just by providing your email address.

That’s right, all you do is launch it, enter your email address, name and client.

Here’s what it looks like.

Outlook AutoConfig will look up the email provider in it’s database and automatically configure your email client to use the correct settings. If it doesn’t work on your provider, you can contact the author to have your provider added to the database.

The next time you launch your email, you will be prompted to enter the password for the account.

Download Outlook Autoconfig [Windows 7 / Vista / 2003 / XP / 2000]

Techie Buzz Verdict:

Manually adding accounts to an email client is one of the toughest tasks involved with email setup. Outlook AutoConfig can make it painless. Since it’s a stand-alone program, no installation is needed and it’s simple to use. I highly recommend it.

Microsoft has just released version 14.0 of Outlook Connector. Outlook Connector is now know as Outlook Hotmail Connector and is compatible with Office 2003, Office 2007 and Outlook 2010.

Outlook Hotmail Connector basically allows you to access your Windows Live Hotmail account in Outlook without having to use POP or IMAP. The new version includes better Junk filter settings, integrated send/receive, integrated connection status and rules support for secondary accounts.

You will find the download links below for your Outlook version and operating system type.

Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 for Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010 32-bit

Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 for Outlook 2010 64-bit

I use both Gmail and Microsoft Outlook on a day to day basis, making use of email, contacts and calendar to manage my day to day life. However, managing multiple calendar entries and contacts can be quite a hassle.

I use a software called Google Calendar Sync to keep Outlook and Google Calendar in sync, however I have been looking for find a suitable synchronization tool for contacts.

Google Contacts Outlook Synchronizer is a handy freeware that synchronizes the contacts between Outlook and your regular Gmail account. This app also supports contact synchronization for Google Apps account.

Once you install the software, choose the direction in which the synchronization should happen. You might want to choose a higher Synchronization interval, as you hardly keep editing contacts every 5 minutes, 6 to 12 hours interval should be good enough.

Download Google Contacts Outlook Synchronizer

[via]

Many phone providers provide user with an option to get a email alert whenever a new voicemail message is left on your phone, however finding information about who exactly left a voicemail message is a bit hard.

If you receive your voicemail email alerts in Microsoft Outlook a handy Outlook add-in called Visual voicemail will come in pretty handy to decipher and view the caller data.

Visual Voicemail is an add-in for Microsoft Outlook 2007 that processes voicemail messages from Vonage, Comcast Digital Voice, YouMail, and many other voicemail systems, to provide key information about the caller using information from your Outlook Contacts.

The information displayed will not be displayed if the user does not exist in your address book, however it is still better than staring at the plain text messages you have been used to seeing.

Download Visual Voicemail Add-in [via Addictive Tips]

If you are already using the technical preview of Office 2010 or are going to use it in future, the older Outlook Connector will not work for you.

Outlook Connector is basically a Outlook Add-in that allows users to access their Windows Live Mail accounts in Microsoft Outlook.

You can download the latest version of Outlook Connector using the links below.

• Outlook Connector for Office 2010 x86 edition (direct download link)
• Outlook Connector for Office 2010 x64 edition (direct download link)

[via Windows Club Forum]

Quite sometime back we had told you about a Microsoft Outlook add-in that would allow you to access you twitter account from Outlook.

The creators of the same softwares Techhit have now released a new twitter add-in for Outlook called TwInbox with much more features than the earlier software.

Also Read: 12 Must Have Useful & Free Microsoft Outlook Add-ins

TwInbox Features

• Update your Twitter status directly from Outlook.
• Receive your friend updates in Outlook.
• Archive, manage, group and search your tweets the same way you manage your email.
• Search, track keywords. TwInbox will automatically download ALL tweets matching the keywords you specify, even if you are not following the tweet sender. This feature is perfect for keeping up to date with the Twitter buzz on your name, brand, interests, etc.
• Group tweets by sender, topic, etc using the Search feature.
• Upload and post picture files and Outlook email attachments.
• Assign custom folder and categories to new messages.
• Use Outlook’s “Reply” and “ReplyAll” commands to send twitter direct messages and @replies.
• Automatically sort new tweets into per-sender folders.
• Shorten URLs with tinyurl.
• See graphs of your Twitter usage statistics.
• Tweets sent to you (@replies and direct) are marked with high importance, so you can see them at a glance.

Download TwInbox [via Cybernet News]

If you use Outlook, you might have noticed that it downloads and sends emails automatically after certain intervals, though that is definitely a good practice, many people may not want to send/receive emails automatically for several reasons.

Here are some simple steps that will stop the automatic send/receive of emails in both Microsoft Outlook.

Disable Automatic Send/Receive In Microsoft Outlook

Step 1: Open Outlook and go to Tools > Options.

Step 2: Click on the Mail Setup tab, if you want to disable automatic sending of messages, just uncheck the box next to Send Immediately when connected, this will disable automatic sending of messages.

Step 3: Click on the Send/Receive button in the same tab, this will open a new options window. To disable automatic send/receive for your account group, just select the group from the list and uncheck the box next to Schedule an automatic send/receive every.

With the automatic send/receive disable you will still have to download emails, just press the F9 key with the Outlook window in focus, whenever you want to manually send/receive email in Outlook.

If you remember we had told you about a utility that would allow you to put pin outlook to your desktop, however if you are only looking to view calendar events and tasks we came across another Freeware called DeskTask.

Also Read: 12 Must Have Outlook Add-ins

DeskTask connects to Microsoft Outlook and displays your calendar and task items on the desktop.

DeskTask Features

• Your tasks will always be visible, saving precious time to launch or switch to Outlook.
• Just minimize every window, and see what are the items due for today or tomorrow.
• DeskTask displays the whole week so you can be prepared to organize your work.
• Besides the calendar items, the Outlook to-do list (Folder Tasks) is also displayed.

DeskTask works with Microsoft Outlook 2000 / XP / 2003 / 2007 on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Download DeskTask

Quite sometime back Gmail Labs had introduced a new feature called as Sender Time Zone, which allowed users to view the timezone of the email sender, a similar add-in is also available for Microsoft Outlook.

After you have installed the Sender’s Time Zone add-in for Outlook, you will see the timezone of the sender in a information tab in the email, this will allow you to the time difference between your location and the location of the sender.

This Outlook Add-in can come in pretty handy for people who usually converse with people in other countries and time zone, and would want to find out if it Ok to converse given the timezone the sender exists in.

Download Sender’s Time Zone Outlook Add-in