Although modern webmail clients such as Gmail offer generous file allocations, there are still limits to the size of attachments you should send when using email. A posting at the Outlook Team Blog provides a useful overview of the reasons why sending big files is a bad idea (in a nutshell: you'll probably ruin your own inbox or someone else's, and it's quite likely the file will never get through). It also offers a bunch of suggestions on how to get around the problem which, while mildly MS-centric, do essentially boil down to a single proposition: "Put your files in a shared location and then send a link." My own approach to this problem has generally been to just FTP files to my own site, but there are plenty of other ways to crack this particular egg (many of which are probably cheaper and more secure). What's your favourite way of pushing a multi-megabyte file to your friends or co-workers? Let us know in the comments.

Windows with Outlook 2007 and an Exchange account only: Email Prioritizer, a new Outlook plugin from Microsoft labs, gives email receivers the tools to both "pause" their email and have it ranked by priority on a scale of one to three stars. Once you've installed the plugin, you'll notice a new toolbar with a "Do Not Disturb" option, which can be set from 10 minutes to 4 hours (or, smartly, until a meeting you've planned expires) and delays the delivery of mail to you on the client side. Not exactly an Inbox Zero approach, but it might work for do-or-die deadlines. More innovative is a ranking system that automatically sorts your mail based on how it was sent and who it's from, derived, in part, from Microsoft employees. Let's take a look at some of the options:

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The Productivity Portfolio blog runs down three common fixes for the unexpected and highly frustrating bug of hyperlinks going non-helpful—meaning your browser doesn't open, goes to a dead page, or some other problem. The post notes that resetting your browser, re-registering DLL files, and resetting file-type handlers in Windows usually fixes the problem without a re-install, and runs down the steps to do so. The fixes mostly involve working with Internet Explorer, but, as pointed out, you can then just switch your default browser back to Firefox (phew!). .

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The basics of how email works hasn't changed much since its invention, but even forty years later, there are still tiny features and enhancements that can make dealing with large volumes of email easier. Your email client already provides message attachments, filtering, HTML email, auto-fill contacts, spell-checking, folders or labels, keyboard shortcuts, search, and an advanced spam filter. What else do you need? Well, as people rely on email as a primary means of communication, and everyday users deal with a mounting level of new messages per day, even more advanced features can help all of us keep our inbox under control. In honour of Mozilla Thunderbird 3's latest alpha release, let's take a look at some email innovations—some concept, some already available in various clients and plug-ins—that you want in your inbox.

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Dear Lifehacker, I want to learn more about using and enhancing the auto-complete feature in Outlook. My company doesn't let me download free software for use on my office computer, but I am computer literate. Any hints? Thanks, Mike

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Windows only: If you need to use both Outlook and Google Calendar, free sync utility KiGoo makes the process completely painless. KiGoo displays your Outlook and Google calendar side by side or overlays them to see all your appointments on a single calendar. Changes you make in either Google Calendar or Outlook appear quickly in both. You can manage your Google Calendar entirely from within Outlook if you desire—creating, modifying, and deleting appointments. The same synchronisation you get with your calendars applies to contact lists, too—KiGoo can move contacts between Outlook and Gmail or create a master list of contacts from both.

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Outlook users, if you find yourself entering the same things into email messages, you should take a look at the Quick Parts feature, which saves snippets of both text and images for easy reuse. While Gina briefly mentioned this feature in her guide to Tweaking Outlook to empty your inbox faster, let's take a closer look at how to use it.

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Image rendering in Outlook messages has always been something of a hit-and-miss affair, depending variously on your security settings, the message format and (it often seems) what Steve Ballmer had for breakfast yesterday. Blogger Omar Shahine offers a useful registry tweak to get rid of a common issue in Outlook 2003: images failing to render in a message but appearing when you create a reply. Hit the link for full details of the fix.[Fixing Outlook Red "X" Problem via Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog]

Windows/Mac OS X only: Online and desktop calendar-syncing application Calgoo Connect—along with all of the other calendar tools available from Calgoo—are now free. Calgoo Connect syncs Outlook on Windows or iCal on OS X with popular online calendars, namely Google Calendar and 30 Boxes. Granted, syncing Gcal with Outlook is pretty well covered with previously mentioned Google Calendar Sync, but Mac users haven't had a free solution for Gcal-to-iCal sync, which makes the free offering from Calgoo a godsend. All Calgoo products are now freeware, Windows and Mac OS X only.

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Standalone Outlook users suffer a little when it comes to getting their calendars and contacts into the cloud. Google offers a synchronisation tool for its Calendar, but the software is (at least in my experience) far too unstable to use. Now Microsoft itself has entered the fray, launching a beta version of release 12.1 of its Outlook Office Connector, which lets you sync information from Outlook into Live (Hotmail). Microsoft has offered this service before, but used to charge for it; now it's on offer for free. Beta is very much the word; we had trouble getting anything to sync at all. If you've had more success, let us know your experiences in the comments. [Microsoft via Official Outlook Team Blog]