Postbox is a powerful email client based on Mozilla's Thunderbird, and, like Thunderbird, it now supports extensions. The selection of add-ons is limited right now, but it includes some useful ones: ReminderFox handles reminders and to-do items. Minimize to Tray is just what it sounds like, allowing Windows users to put Postbox in the system tray. Nostalgy adds keyboard shortcuts, and MozBackup backs up your messages and settings. This is a good start, but it'll interesting to see what other useful extensions pop up now that the door is open.

The latest build of Postbox also adds a long list of other useful features. If you're switching from Mail.app, you can now easily migrate your settings to Postbox. Postbox will now also pull photos for your contacts from OS X's address book or from Twitter. Several performance upgrades and fixes of annoying issues from earlier versions are also in place now, so it looks like a good time to consider giving Postbox a try.

It's been a while since we first looked at ToodleDo, an excellent web-based task manager. But as cool as ToodleDo is as standalone web page, it's the integration with other services like Google Calendar that make it a task manager like this really useful. Recently ToodleDo launched a gadget for Gmail that makes it easy to view, create, or sort your tasks from Gmail, which is a killer feature for anyone who leaves Gmail open all day as they go about their other tasks.

In order to use the ToodleDo Gmail gadget you'll need to enable the Gadgets feature in your Gmail Labs settings. Google also offers its own Tasks application which you can also view in the Gmail sidebar. But while you can easily create tasks from email messages with Google Tasks, you don't have as many options for sorting and filtering apps as you get with ToodleDo.

[via WebWorkerDaily]

If you have the ability to install software on your work computer, by far the easiest way to move files back and forth between your home and work computer would be a file synchronizing product like DropBox. But if you don't, what's the best way to move a relatively large file between two remote computers? For small files, email is usually the answer, and for users of Gmail that expands to files of up to 25 MB in size. But with what can often be a big catch: Gmail won't allow you to transfer executable files, even if they are inside a zip archive.

However, if you're simply wanting to move a file between computers, you can exploit the fact that Gmail doesn't actually scan a file to see if it is an executable until you actually try to send the email containing the file. This means that you are free to attach any file up to 25 MB in size to an email in Gmail, as long as you don't send it. You can then log into your Gmail on another computer, and download the attached file, without ever running into the executable file restriction.

Of course, the other easy way around Gmail's limitation is to change the file extension of the file you are sending. If you have an executable file inside a Zip archive, and you change the archive's file extension from .zip to .zzz, for example, Gmail doesn't know what a .zzz file is and does not scan it. Voila, you can now easily send executable files through Gmail.

One feature of the Windows 7 taskbar I don't quite agree with is the inability to pin folders somewhere other than Windows Explorer. I have two or three key folders that I'd like to access from my taskbar - and I'd rather not have create new toolbars to do it.

Alastria software's 7stacks has the solution. It's a small (about 800Kb) program that creates OsX-like stacks as standalone shortcuts. Unlike your native Windows 7 folders, each 7stacks shortcut behaves like a separate executable - so you can pin as many as you like to your taskbar.

Apart from the stack view, you can also display folder contents as a menu (plain old lists) and grid (pictured).

To see 7stacks in action, you can watch a brief demo I captured after the break.

[via Into Windows]

I hate packing for trips. I will put it off until the last possible moment, and even then some. Part of the reason I hate it is that I'm never quite sure exactly what I need to pack.

If you're in the same boat, you might find the Universal Packing List site as interesting as I do. Basically, the site is a very compact user interface that asks you a set of questions about your upcoming trip, ranging from your gender, to whether you will be washing your own clothes, if you wear glasses, and where in the world you'll be traveling to.

Once you've completed the questionnaire, it spits out a very comprehensive list of things to pack, as well as a to-do list to take care of before you leave. When I say the list is comprehensive, that's a bit of an understatement. For a hypothetical 3 day trip with my kids, here are just the headings it came up with:

Jake is a cross-platform collaborative file-sharing client that lets you create a folder and keep it synced for everyone you invite. It's built on open-source tools like Jabber, and seems to have a lot of features going for it. You can't really beat it for ease of use: setup is just adding a folder and inviting people, with no server-side fiddling to do. Even better, you can set Jake up on your intranet if you want to use it for work-related purposes.

The main difference between Jake and similar solutions like Dropbox is that Jake doesn't store files on a central server in the cloud. It just uses Jabber, XMPP and other open-source tools to sync the folder for users when they're online. Although Jake saves a log of the changes users make to the folder, it doesn't back up old versions of the data - again, no central server. This makes it slightly less powerful than some other, similar file-sharing services, but it makes setup a lot easier.

There's a lot of great financial tracking software out there now. Sites like Mint and Rudder that link up to your bank account and track your spending automatically are great, but what if you don't want to give your account information to a finance site? Texthog is a lot like old-school DIY checkbook balancing, except replacing pen and paper with SMS, email and Twitter.

You can send a transaction to Texthog through one of the aforementioned mobile methods, or just log into the site and add one later. Logging in is also good for changing dates and such if you text a transaction to Texthog after the fact. You can also tag and organize your expenses, and generate spending reports. It might be more work than letting some automated service track your account, but it's also more accurate, because you're recording expenses as you charge them, rather than when they eventually clear your account.

Google wants to help you become a Gmail ninja, and has created a site called Gmail Tips for the purpose. What is a Gmail ninja? It's someone who knows all the ins and outs of the productivity tools that Gmail offers, and can process their email very quickly and efficiently.

Rather than just asking Gmail's team for a list of all of the features Gmail has, the Google Tips page is made up of tips from Google employees working in all different parts of the company. It's a hit list of the best email productivity ideas from the bright minds at Google.

The page is divided up into four sections: White belt, Green belt, Black belt, and Gmail master. Each of these sections describes a level of productivity tip, White belt being the most basic, and Gmail master being the guru-level tips.

Helpfully, the Gmail Tips page also includes a handy printable PDF that gives you one double-sided page full of all of the tips listed on the page.

Now, to be fair, none of the tips are going to be much of a surprise to heavy Gmail users, even the Gmail master level tips. But it's a great resource to point friends and co-workers to if they are struggling to really get the most out of Gmail, or if you're looking for a way to convince someone that Gmail is probably a better solution for them than what they are currently using.

If your job has you tasked with monitoring your company's online presence, you're probably dealing with Twitter in some way. Running occasional manual searches for your company's name is one way to go, but a better way would be to sign up with a service like TweetBeep.

TweetBeep is a free service that will email you as frequently as once per hour with any Twitter mentions of the search terms of your choice. The service is ad-supported, but if you find that you need it, TweetBeep also offers a premium option for $20US/month that allows you to receive updates as frequently as every 15 minutes, up to 200 different alert searches, and no advertising.

While TweetBeep allows you to set a number of criteria for your alerts, one of the most interesting is the ability to set an "Attitude" criteria. You can choose from three:

• Positive attitude
• Negative attitude
• Asking a question

This appears to be a fantastic way to stay on top of how people are perceiving your company or brand, and gives you the ability to very quickly react to your customers or users. It can also be useful for heavy Twitter users to ensure they don't miss any mentions. I should note that as of the time of this writing I had some difficulty with the email confirmation process - it took multiple requests and over an hour before my email confirmation arrived in my inbox.

[via Stay N' Alive]

Yesterday I wrote up a little list of things I wished people would quit installing on their PCs. Today, I've put together a selection of handy programs those same people can use to take care of some of the annoyances I mentioned - and more.

Here are six (seventeen, really, but some are grouped) simple applications that will help - and they're all free for personal use!

1. PC Decrapifier - A lot of people that drop their systems off for repair say "take out any programs that don't need to be there." Well, that's exactly the kind of crud Decrapifier is designed to get rid of. It compares the programs on your system to a list of known bloatware (Wikipedia definition) and simplifies the removal process.

2. Malware Bytes - Those annoying popups you're getting? The weird pages you see when you try to search for something in your browser? Malware Bytes does a great job at removing the pests that cause those problems. It's usually the first program I run on horribly bogged-down computers. After a scan, clean, and reboot, they're usually much more cooperative.

3. Glary Utilities - The one-click maintenance mode in Glary is a wonderfully simple way for even non-technical users to keep their systems tuned. It tackles all kinds of tasks, from removing temporary file garbage and broken shortcuts to tuning up your registry.

One note: download the slim version to avoid the Ask Toolbar. You can opt out of it during the regular install, but slim removes it altogether.

Mozilla's Ubiquity dazzlingly cool preview release promises to make commands a great deal easier to remember and use by removing those annoying hyphens. With a totally updated parser -- unimaginatively referred to as "Parser 2" Ubiquity also promises support for a ton of new languages.

"[The old parser] was based on a lot of assumptions about English that are not necessarily true in other languages", explains the preview release announcement. Spaces between words, or noun-verb ordering are more flexible under the new parser, opening Ubiquity to a non-English speaking audience and getting rid of those picky little hyphens for Anglophones.

Unfortunately, that also means a great many commands you might be used to are currently incompatible. The new version greeted me with a warning, notifying me that some commands -- known in Ubiquity parlance as "verbs" -- didn't load because of incompatibility with Parser 2. A quick look shows old verbs like "flip-page" and "desaturate-image" are in need of an upgrade.

Still, for fans of Ubiquity's slick hands-never-leave-the-keyboard workflow, this is an upgrade that's been a long time coming.

Venerable New York Times technology columnist David Pogue recently posted a list of his productivity tips and tricks that allow him to be uber productive. The list is good in that he tries to generalize and talk about ways of doing things instead of specific software or hardware. For example, Pogue talks about using macro utilities instead of specifically naming utilities like Quicksilver for the Mac or Launchy for Windows.

While some of his tools seem somewhat outdated, it's not a surprise given the time investment he has in them. And really, although we all to a greater or lesser extent have a case of "shiny object syndrome" and need to try the latest and greatest of everything, the truth is that if a tool is working, the most productive thing to do is to just leave it alone.

Of particular note (at least for me) is Pogue's first tip that he uses text expansion software. It's not so much that he uses it, but how he uses it that intrigues me; Pogue has expansion words configured for even the smallest word. For example, to type the word "the" he needs only type the letter "t". That's some serious configuration, but I can definitely see how it could be very useful once in the mindset of always using abbreviations.

What do you think of Pogue's tips, and what is your best productivity tip?

There are plenty of complex, feature-rich collaboration systems out there, but the web developers at Tgethr found that they weren't using all those extras. When it came down to it, all of their collaboration was happening over email, and Tgethr is just a way to make that email system work better. Start a new group with its own @tgethr.com email address, and Tgethr can encrypt and archive all the messages sent to that address online for easy reading.

The cool thing about Tgethr is that it's not really another service to use and commit to. You can respond quickly to the group by using your email client, and all the messages wind up in your inbox. Attachments get saved and linked, so you can download them from the web instead of having them sit in the individual inboxes of people in the group. If you're looking for a simple, sensible way to do email groups, Tgethr is a good bet.

Fever is a new feed reader that calculates the "temperature" of your feeds by asking you to group them into essential and occasional categories, and looking at how they relate to one another to create a "hot" category. It's like your own personalized, automated Digg. It's the brainchild of Shaun Inman, one of the most respected designers around, and the UI looks great and seems intuitive.

Here's the catch, though: Fever's not a desktop app. It's a PHP/MySQL app that you host on your own server. This offers several advantages: you can access it from anywhere, you can filter ads by blacklisting advertising domains, it updates itself automatically, and you can use cron to make your feeds automatically refresh whenever you choose. Fever is powerful, but I'm sure some people are going to balk at installing it, despite the very nice video walkthrough on the site.

If you don't mind running Fever on your server, but you're the kind of person who really needs an icon in the dock, you can run Fever on the desktop using Fluid, which turns web apps into standalone browsers. Fever also has a very, very nicely-done iPhone-optimized design, so if you're checking your feeds from an iPhone, you're in for a treat (without having to download an iPhone app, even).

While some modern browsers include built-in spell checkers, and some operating systems include built-in spelling and grammar checkers, there are people out there using operating systems and browsers that do not have these features.

If you're looking for some help with your writing and don't have access to Microsoft Word or a similarly-powered word processor, there is a solution available on the web called After the Deadline. The site (at the memorable URL polishmywriting.com) offers spelling and grammar help, and even writing style suggestions.