If you are going to create an email message of any length greater than a few sentences, or, if it just happens to be an email message with great importance, you may want to use a word processor for this purpose. Specifically, one with an auto-save feature will be the best choice. MS Word has this feature, so let’s discuss that.
Many people use online services, such as Gmail, Yahoo, or AOL for their email. This is good in many ways, except for the possibility of losing your work. Using an online service for email will preserve much of your content, simply because your message database is not on your computer. So if your computer crashes, you won’t lose your address book and all of the email you’ve sent and received over the years. That’s the upside.
On the downside, if you are typing away at a message and suddenly find that your Internet connection is no longer viable, that message may simply be a thing of the recent past! And, it isn’t just your connection to the Internet that can spoil your efforts. If your computer hangs, or you accidentally close a window or do any number of other things that may remove your attention from your work, that email message may simply not be there long enough for you to click the “Send” button. That’s a serious downside; would you agree?
Enter auto-save - a feature of MS Word (and, by the way, of the service I’m using to create this blog entry). This one feature is reason enough to use Word to create any long-winded message for email. Word will automatically save your work every few minutes. So, if you’ve typed a few paragraphs and your computer suddenly hangs, you’ll be able to recover your work the next time you launch Word.
There are a few more details to this, but I think the point is made. Create your email message in Word, then copy and paste the text into your online email message. It’s just that simple. Other benefits include having a local copy of your message stored on your computer, along with spell checker and many other features included in one of Microsoft’s flagship products.
Enjoy!