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

There are several times when you have discussions through emails, if the conversation is interesting you may have several replies coming through, however there is a problem when this happens, the emails you receive as replies may contain the original conversation.

Most of the times the original conversation is of no use, and it would be good if you could remove them and save space.

Doing that manually can turn out to be quite a bit of pain, however a tool called Thread Compressor for Outlook could be of immense help, it’s an Free Outlook add-in to Outlook which removes unnecessary emails, on the assumption that most people reply to mail and leave the original intact, so you could keep the last mail in each branch of a thread, and remove all the others.

Using Thread Compressor you can optimize Outlook by freeing up a lot of disk space, this add-in works in Microsoft Outlook 2007 and other older versions.

Download Thread Compressor for Outlook [via TechNet]