Suite Smartz: Cleaning Up Dirty Email Messages

by Peggy Duncan

Dirty email messages are the ones that are miserable to read because they’re packed with those annoying carets >>>>>>; lists of email addresses that go on forever because the sender didn’t use the blind copy feature to hide them; and hard paragraph breaks at the end of every line that make it time consuming to reformat it.

If you need to reuse the information in an email message, I have two solutions that make it simple and easy to clean it up before you send it on to others or publish it.

First, we’ll get rid of all the email addresses.

If you use Outlook, click Edit, Edit Message (if you use some other email client, you may have to click Reply to be able to make changes, or check your software’s Help section to see if it’s a way to edit a message you’ve received).
Click in front of the first email address you need to delete.
Scroll to the last email address, hold down the Shift key, and click behind the last letter of the last email address. Everything in between the two clicks will be selected
Press the Delete key on your keyboard.

Now let’s get rid of the carets and hard paragraph returns at the end of each line. If you work in an environment where you can download software onto your computer, a free utility, The Cleaner, works like magic. (Later in this article, I’ll show you how to do this if you can’t download software.) In addition to getting rid of carets and paragraph marks, The Cleaner also ensures only one space is between words and two spaces after each period (I’ve written the programmer to let him know that since the advent of computers, it should only be one space after periods…don’t know if he’ll change his code or not).

Visit www.worldstart.com/cleaner.htm, and download the software.
Copy the dirty email message, and paste it into the text area of The Cleaner.
Click Clean.

Now replace all periods that have two spaces after each (if the programmer has not adjusted the software to do this automatically). From inside The Cleaner software, click Search, Replace.

In the Find What box, type a period, and press the spacebar twice to create two blank spaces after the period.
In the Replace With box, type a period, and press the spacebar once to create one blank space after the period. Click Replace All.
Copy and paste the cleaned text back into your new document or email message.

If you’re in an environment where you cannot download software, here is a way you can accomplish the same task. The first thing you’ll do is find all periods that have two spaces after each and replace them with a period that has only one space after it.

Select and copy the dirty email message, and paste it into a Word document.
Press and hold down the Ctrl key as you type H (or Ctrl+H).
In the Find What box, type a period, and press the spacebar twice to create two blank spaces after the period.
In the Replace With box, type a period, and press the spacebar once to create one blank space after the period. Click Replace All.

Now, you’ll have to get rid of the paragraph breaks at the end of every line.

Select the text you want to change. (If you want to get rid of all the paragraph marks in the document, press Ctrl+A to select the entire document.)
Press and hold down the Ctrl key as you type H (or Ctrl+H).
In the Find What box, type ^p. (The ^ is over the 6 on the keyboard so hold down the Shift key to type it.)
Leave the Replace With box blank, and click Replace All.

You have cleaned up your dirty email message. If this is something you have to do a lot, research how to record a macro to do it with one click.

Peggy Duncan is a personal productivity expert, a combination professional organizer, project manager, and computer trainer. She travels nationally teaching busy people how to work smarter, and is the author of three books: "Just Show Me Which Button to Click!," and her latest, Conquer Email Overload with "Better Habits, Etiquette, and Outlook Tips and Tricks." For more information, visit www.peggyduncan.com or call 770-907-8868.