Updated: April 2, 2020
Version 7 for Bells & Whistles is finally here with new features and performance improvements. Upgrading to version 7 is free if your license is within its free-upgrades period. Otherwise, you can upgrade to version 7 for only $14.95.
This article discussed the AMP email integration with Outlook, Outlook.com and other email clients.
The AMP format was introduced by Google in order to provide faster-loading web pages on mobile devices. Basically, AMP is a modified version of HTML and it is currently widely used by web sites. Google is also trying to bring this format to emails as it would offer more flexibility to the email content, especially to marketing oriented emails. AMP emails allow marketers to add dynamic components to emails, such as registration forms, product carousels, polls etc. The AMP email format allows the reader to interact with these email components without leaving the email.
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This article details how to setup Outlook desktop version to start and schedule video conferences with Microsoft Teams and Zoom, the most popular video conferencing apps these days. Even more – during the coronavirus pandemic – video conference is a popular choice while practicing social distancing.
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This article describes how to fix Outlook when it’s working offline: switching from offline to online mode, missing “Work Online” button and the potential reasons why Outlook keeps getting offline.
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This article explains how to redirect emails in Outlook using Auto Reply Manager and shows the differences between redirecting and forwarding emails.
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Have you ever wondered what is the average number of emails received in Outlook per day, per week or per month? This article details how to count the number of emails in Outlook by range, by keyword filters, Outlook email categories or mail folders.
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Updated: March 27, 2020
Outlook allows you to define and add signatures using the built-in Signatures tool. To add a signature in Outlook, simply open the Outlook Options window, then go to the Mail -> Signatures section.
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Updated: March 31, 2020
Outlook allows you to recall an email (or to withdraw or unsend it) only if both you and the recipient are using Office 365 or Microsoft Exchange email accounts within the same organization. This option is available starting with Outlook 2007 and it is not available for Outlook on the web.
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Updated: March 27, 2020
Version 5 for Easy Mail Merge is here with new features, stability and usability improvements. Upgrading to version 5 is free if your license is within its free-upgrades period. Otherwise, you can upgrade to version 5 for only $10.
Auto Follow Up version 3 adds to the features present in the previous version to improve usability.
From time to time, Outlook may mistakenly report recipients as having invalid email addresses, although their email addresses are clearly valid. In this article we try to offer some solutions to this “invalid email address” Outlook error.
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Version 6 of the award winning email productivity add-in for Outlook – Bells & Whistles – is here! Bells & Whistles v6 aims to enhance the functionality of features already implemented in previous versions while adding major improvements to the increasingly popular “My Metrics” section.
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Outlook 2016 includes some new features designed to improve email, contacts and task management. Here is a list of improvements in Outlook 2016. This article explains how to upgrade the DS Development add-ins to Outlook 2016. Read more →
25th of May, 2015. We are proud to announce a new major version of Easy Mail Merge, the most advanced mail merge engine for Outlook. This new version adds several new features and improves the engine of the existing ones.
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Updated: April 6, 2020
Easy Mail Merge allows you to generate email tracking reports (open rates) for your Outlook mail merge campaigns using the Google Analytics platform. In this article we will detail how to enable email tracking for Easy Mail Merge campaigns in Outlook, both as real-time email open reports and as hourly / daily / monthly email tracking stats.
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By default, activating a license for our software products is performed online by connecting to our licensing servers. On rare occasions, this procedure fails with an error, typically with the error code 12002. In this article we will explain how to bypass such failures using an alternative license activation method.
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Updated: March 26, 2020
Many users asked us about allowing Auto Follow Up to be used in conjunction with Easy Mail Merge, in order to attach follow-up actions to a mail merge session in Outlook. As a result, we have updated both products to include this functionality!
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For various reasons, it may happen that Outlook hangs on loading your profile and it stops responding (freezing). In this article we will detail some of the most common solutions for this issue.
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With the release of Auto Follow Up v2, we offer lots of enhancements to the way you can define and manage both follow-up and recurring email messages in Outlook.
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Updated: March 26, 2020
As you probably know, when you forward or reply to an email in Outlook, it preserves the format (plain text or HTML) of the original message. However, for styling reasons, many of us prefer to use the HTML format. This article shows how to always reply or forward emails in HTML format using Outlook 2003 – 2013 and the Bells & Whistles add-in.
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Updated: March 26, 2020
With the newer Outlook versions you can use Outlook rules to create Outlook auto reply email messages without an Exchange server, but the built-in auto reply options are pretty limited if you want to tailor auto replies to various scenarios. In this article we will detail the auto reply features of Auto Reply Manager for Outlook.
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Updated: March 26, 2020
When you’re trying to send a file attachment in Outlook, you have two deal with two file attachment limits: the max limit enforced by your recipient’s mail server and the max attachment limit enforced by Outlook.
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Updated: March 26, 2020
Outlook lets you organize your Contacts into Contact Groups. In fact, a “Contact Group” is the new name for the old “Distribution List”, in the same way as “Contacts” is now replaced with “People”. But managing Contact Groups is a different story…
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Updated: March 31, 2020
Some of us simply need to always attach files in outgoing Outlook emails, especially if we deal with business emails. For example, one may need to automatically attach a business card or a brochure to all business emails. In this article we will explain how to always attach files to Outlook emails using Bells & Whistles for Outlook.
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Updated: March 27, 2020
This article describes how to repair the installation of our Outlook add-ins, so it is intended for the users of Bells & Whistles, Easy Mail Merge, Auto Reply Manager, Auto Follow Up, Weight Diet.
It does not apply to any other / 3rd party add-ins.
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Updated: March 26, 2020
If you are trying to use Outlook rules to create an automatic reply system, you get to a rule configuration step where you have to use the option to “reply using a specific template”. In this article we will detail how to get such a reply template.
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Updated: March 26, 2020
By default, Outlook blocks file attachments that have file extensions considered to be potentially unsafe, such as executable programs or file formats that can include scripts that may contain malware code. Although it isn’t recommended to unblock Outlook attachments marked as unsafe, sometimes you may need to allow such files, especially if they are sent from trusted contacts. This article details how to easily unblock Outlook attachments without having to mess with the Windows registry.
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Updated: March 31, 2020
I bet most Outlook tasks are created as a result of email conversations. However, although there are tricks or macro scripts that can make tasks from emails, Outlook doesn’t offer a straight forward, “single click” method to create a task from email messages. You can flag an email so it gets listed as a To-Do item in your Outlook Tasks -> To-Do List window, but you can’t make a regular task item, with start and due dates, that can be assigned to someone else in your organization.
This article shows how to easily create a task from email in Outlook, using the Bells & Whistles productivity add-in for Outlook.
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Updated: March 31, 2020
When you try to compose an email, it may happen for Outlook to popup a window with the following message: “Contacting the server for information“. While this message is displayed, you can not compose your email or perform other Outlook actions. It can be annoying, so we will try to detail why this message occurs and how to prevent it in the future.
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