ClipCache Plus Review

If you have an e-mail address, you probably also have at least one 'forwarding friend' to e-mail every joke, urban myth, and karma-building novelty message in circulation. If you don't have a forwarding friend, chances are, you are the forwarding friend.

Don't get me wrong -- there's no shame in forwarding jokes, stories, and other bits of textual entertainment. There are, however, 3 Golden Email Etiquette Rules one must follow when forwarding messages, and they are:

1. Remove all '>' or '|' tags before sending the message. They make jokes hard to read and they bloat the message size, making less space for more jokes in your Hotmail account.
    
2. Remove the list of email addresses who already received the message. Friends don't need to know that john@somwhere.com and 500 of his closest associates have already read the joke.
    
3. And finally, you should always send the message to a list of recipients using the BCC field option. BCC stands for "blind carbon copy" and it hides the addresses of recipients listed in its field. This gives the email message a more personal appearance.

Speaking of those forwarding tags, have you ever tried to remove forwarding tags by hand?

Not unless you have a lot of spare time. One alternative is to copy the message text into text editor like Notepad and use the Find and Replace to remove the forwarding brackets, but that doesn't always do the trick.

Is there an easier way?

The answer, of course, is to use software which is specially designed for the task. I happen to like ClipCache Plus, because it also includes a convenient tool to quickly and easily paste frequently used text.

ClipCache Plus: Features

ClipCache includes three distinct functions: Windows clipboard management; text cleanup; and a keyboard macro* designed to quickly paste frequently used text and images.

Side Note: A macro is set of keystrokes or instructions which are assigned to a short key. When a shortcut key is pressed, the keystrokes and instructions are performed.

ClipCache Plus: How Text Cleanup Works

ClipCache Plus lets the user choose what type of character to remove, whether HTML is to be stripped from messages or not, and if the case of a message should be modified.

In addition to finding the forwarding bracket ('>' characters) to be a distraction when reading, several studies have determined that TEXT WRITTEN IN ALL CAPITALS is difficult for visually impaired users to read -- not to mention it also has the 'typed' equivalent of shouting.

To clean a section of text using ClipCache Plus, all that is needed is to select the text, copy it into ClipCache (which also launches the ClipCache application) and then choose the cleaning options. For ultra convenience, ClipCache automatically pastes the cleaned text back into an e-mail message for you. ClipCache plus also works to cleanup HTML formatting.

Side note: HTML stands for "Hyper Text Markup Language". HTML is used as a way to format text and images viewed on a web site / web page. For example: font size = 12, image align = right, bold type, etc.

ClipCache Plus: Screen Shots

Click here to see a what an email looks like before using ClipCache Plus, and after using ClipCache Plus.

Text management keyboard macro

In addition to cleaning text, ClipCache also makes handling of frequently used text messages a breeze. For instance, if you run a small business or provide support for a product, many of the same questions get asked by different people. ClipCache makes responding to similar questions easy because you can preload the most common answers, hit the reply button in your e-mail client, and then type a key combination [I.E.: macro] to insert the stock response. This saves you from extra typing, while insuring customers get a timely response to inquiries.

Conclusion

Forwarding messages is easy and often entertaining, both in the work place and at home. Using tools like ClipCache Plus to clean emails before forwarding improves readability of e-mail and makes reading emails a heck of a lot easier.

Download ClipCache Plus

ClipCache plus is trialware and costs $19.95 to register. You can download and try a free copy of ClipCache from the infopackets web site:

http://www.infopackets.com/articles/clipcacheplus.htm