Gavin Smyth at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, has created a neat utility for Microsoft Outlook that prevents people from replying to all the recipients of a message or forwarding it. The add-in uses a facility built into Outlook and Exchange that is more lightweight than information-rights management but is not exposed as a feature in the existing UI.

Interestingly, the email recipient does not need to have this add-in installed to have Reply All disabled. The application uses the flags that are handled by Outlook and Exchange, as long as the sender and recipient are on the same Exchange Server. This lightweight utility is designed for accidental replies or forwarding, and is not a robust security solution. The recipient could of course, use the add-in to re-enable Reply All. If you are looking for security, you’ll have to go with IRM.

The add-in also includes a couple of other features to check for common email errors. It warns you if you send an email with a blank subject line. Although this feature is built into Outlook 2010, Outlook 2007 users would like it. It also includes a detector for missing attachments when you send an email. Apart from looking for keywords like attached’ or attachment’ in the body of the email, the add-in has another list intended to be contexts in which the keywords should be ignored (such as legalese in an email signature). The add-in also attempts to distinguish between embedded images and other attachments so an email signature with an image shouldn’t trick the tool into thinking an attachment is already present.

The setup is just 0.63 MB in size and the application works well with Outlook 2007 and 2010. When you launch setup.exe to install, the following components are also installed, if they are not already present, before the  NoReplyAll add-in is installed:

• Windows Installer 3.1
• Microsoft.NET Framework 3.5 SP1
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime

Download

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]

We have told you about several tools in the past that will let you easily backup the data from Microsoft Outlook, most of these tools were however third party add-ins.

Microsoft have now officially made available a Outlook backup tool, that will allow you to backup the PST files at regular intervals.

The Personal Folders Backup tool is a Outlook Add-in for Outlook 2007/2003/2002, that creates backup copies of your .PST files at regular intervals, in Outlook 2002 and later versions, making it easy to keep all of your Outlook folders safely backed up.

With Personal Folders Backup, you can choose which of your .PST files you wish to back up, and how often you wish to back them up. Each .PST file contains all of your Outlook folders, including the Inbox, Calendar, and Contacts.

Once you have downloaded and installed the add-in, restart Outlook, Open File > Backup, to launch the Personal Folders Backup tool.

You can also choose how often a backup is done and which folders are included in the backup by choosing the Options button in the main backup window, if you want to store the backups in a different location or folder you can do that in the options window.

Download Personal Folders Backup for Outlook [via]

I use a combination of Microsoft Outlook 2007 for office email, Windows Mail and Outlook Express to manage several email accounts for different blogs, the one problem users face while using Outlook express is the ability to resend email messages that they have already sent.

The resend mail add-in provides users with an option to resend a email to another user without adding those extra > characters, usually inserted when replying or forwarding to emails.

The resend message add-in will come in particularly handy if you entered a wrong email address, or want to send the same message to another person, or if some error occurred during the message delivery, you will have to compose the message again. There is no easy way of resending email messages in Outlook Express.

Download Resent Email Add-in [via]

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]

If you are a heavy Microsoft Outlook user, you may have accumulated tons of emails with attachments in it, the attachment make use of critical space in the Outlook PST files, and the higher the size of your PST file, the slower Outlook will perform.

Scanning and downloading individual attachments from the emails can turn out to be quite a hassle, also there is no easy way to just delete the attachments and keep the email message intact.

However a Free Outlook Add-in called Save All Attachments will allow you to save all attachments from emails in Outlook and delete them from the actual message, reducing the storage space used by the PST file and speeding up Outlook in the process.

The software will also add a link to the file in the original message so that you can open the attachment from your hard drive.

To save all attachments, use the File > Save All Attachments option or click on the Save All Attachments toolbar icon, you should see a new dialog message which will allow you to save the attachments and delete them.

Save All Attachments will only work with Outlook 2007, you will also have to install Microsoft .Net framework 3.5 and Visual Studio Tools for office system runtime 3.0, if these softwares are missing, the installer will prompt you to install them first.

Download Save All Attachments for Outlook 2007

Microsoft Outlook 2007 has a handy preview tool that will allow you to preview documents (Word, spreadsheets, PowerPoint) from within the mail message, however it lacks the inbuilt ability to preview several popular file formats such as zip files, PDF files, programming source code files and so on.

The lack of previewers for some of the most popular file types was something I could not live with long, with the help of two Outlook add-ins I can now preview Zip files, PDF files and many other file formats from within Outlook.

The Vista and Office 2007 Preview Handler Pack is a must have add-in for programmers, it allows users to preview several popular programming source files from within outlook. This preview pack includes support for ActionScript (.as), ASPX (.aspx), C# (.cs), CSS (.css), Diff (.diff, .patch), DOS (.bat, .cmd), JavaScript (.js), Ruby (.rb, .rhtml, .rjs), SQL (.sql) and VB (.vb) files.

Another add-in that may interest all users is the sample previewers from MSDN, it adds support for several popular files formats including ZIP, PDF, XML, MSI, BIN, CSV, XPS, and XAML files. Download sample previewers from MSDN.

Hope these add-ins help solve a major problem for many of Outlook 2007 users. If you use any other preview tools, don’t forget to tell us about them.

We have been using TweetDeck for quite sometime now and love the interface quite a lot, on the other hand we feel that Microsoft Outlook is the best tool for emails.

OutlookDeck is a interesting new application that will allow you to view and search Outlook emails in a TweetDeckish interface.

You can view all emails, view your replies, or search your emails using OutlookDeck, it will create a new tab for each of your actions, so clicking on All Friends will create a new tab, every search will create a new tab and son on.

We find OutlookDeck a fun way of searching emails, and having been using TweetDeck for quite sometime now, we love the refreshing way in which we can search our emails.

Download OutlookDeck [via tweet from Scobleizer]

There may several oops moments in your email sending history, where you send out a email stating that you have attached some files, however in a hurry you completely forget to attach files to the email.

Such moments lead to embarrassments when you receive a reply saying that the attachments were not included in the message.

A free Microsoft Outlook add-in called Missing Attachment PowerToy can save you some embarrassment by alerting you that no files have been attached to the email, before you send out the email.

When the Missing Attachment PowerToy detects outbound email messages containing words which you typically use when including attachments, it will offer you an opportunity to revise the email before Outlook sends it on its way! Works only with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007.

If you are looking for more free Outlook add-ins take a look at our earlier post: 12 Must Have Useful and Free Microsoft Outlook Add-ins.

You will have to enter your email address where for receiving the link to the download.

Download Missing Attachments PowerToy for Outlook 

Are you keen to keep an eye on what your friends are doing on Facebook without having to waste a lot of time? If you do, Webware has come up with a list of 20 desktop apps you can try out on your Windows desktop and Mac.

The list includes the usual suspects and some new ones which you may not even have heard of, we have covered some of the tools from the list, including FBLook, a Outlook add-in that helps you stay updated from Microsoft Outlook, TweetDeck a Adobe Air which recently integrated Facebook allowing users to update status and view friends updates, Facebook Photo Uploader a utility to upload photos to your Facebook account from your desktop.

Other than that you can also checkout the Facebook Gadget for Gmail or browse through the entire list of 20 Facebook apps to try on your desktop.