Clean up your email with E-Cleaner

Clean Up Your Email Act!
With E-Cleaner

This page is dedicated to trying to help those of you who simply cannot resist from forwarding emails to your friends and family. You know who you are. Trust me, the rest of us know who you are too.

THE PROBLEM
Everyone has seen those annoying UNIX reply marks at the beginning of every line of a forwarded or replied email. They look like this >>>>>>>> depending on how many times the email has been replied to or forwarded on. Not only is it annoying, but it makes it pretty difficult to read an email that is broken up by tons of arrows and multiple line breaks.

Sending an email like that is a sure-fire way to make yourself look like an Internet Gomer! Please! Spare your friends the agony and yourself the embarrassment. Clean up your emails before you send them. This free program can help you do just that!

THE SOLUTION
ECleaner v. 2.02 is a free little program that was designed to help people remove the crap from their emails before they send them off to others. It's only common courtesy to take a few seconds to make your emails more acceptable for your friends and family. The following tutorial is an attempt to explain how to use this painfully simple program to improve your email image. Just follow along and we will have you looking like an email expert in no time. Or, you can leave now and continue to look like a Gomer if you prefer. It's up to you.

First, I've grabbed a random email as an example. I had to find one with the Unix >>> marks to give you a better idea how ECleaner works. So I have this email, with a lots of arrows and lots of line breaks. I mean this email is so broken up that it's difficult to even read it. Check out the image below to see what I'm talking about.

As you can see, there are more line breaks than there are arrows. Only a Gomer would forward an email like this on to their friends or family (by the way Marcia didn't actually send this email like this, I made it worse so I could use it as an example. Trust me, Marcia is no Gomer!)

THE HIGHLIGHT OF YOUR DAY!
So what we want to do with an email like this is to copy all of this text, or at least the text that we want to send along. To copy it, first you'll need to place your mouse cursor at the beginning of the text you want to keep. Now click and hold the mouse button. While holding the mouse button, drag the mouse cursor to the end of the text you want to keep. This will cause the text to become highlighted.

When you have dragged the cursor to the end of the text that you want to keep, only then should you let go of the mouse button. The text should remain highlighted. If it doesn't, or if you didn't get all the text that you wanted, go back and do it all over again until you have all the text you want to keep.

If you want to save all of the text, you can use a little cheater move by right-clicking anywhere on the text and choosing SELECT ALL from the resulting menu (you almost ALWAYS get a drop menu when you right click in Windows, regardless of the program). Once you click on SELECT ALL, every bit of text within the email should be highlighted.

Now that you have the text highlighted, you want to copy this text by placing the mouse cursor anywhere within the highlighted area and RIGHT-clicking (be sure to right-click or the text will lose the highlights). Now choose COPY from the resulting menu choices.

Once you've done this, you've copied the text to the "clipboard". The clipboard is an area of memory reserved for using the Copy & Paste or Cut & Paste procedures. You can go here to learn more about Copy & Paste or Cut & Paste if needed.

Now we need to open the ECleaner program. Assuming that you have already installed it onto your computer, there should be an icon on your desktop or you can go through the START / PROGRAMS method. Once ECleaner is open, you'll see the large open white area where your text will need to go. Just right-click in this large white area and select PASTE from the menu. See below for an example.

Once you click on the PASTE option, you should see the contents of the email inside this window of the ECleaner program like the image below. The arrows and line breaks are still there, but not for long!

ALL IN ONE
Now you can choose what you want ECleaner to do with this particular email. You can remove HTML code or you can remove the arrows or you can even remove those annoying headers that so many emails have. Or, you can do what I do. I always just click on the little smiley button and let ECleaner remove everything. I've found that it is quicker and simpler, for me, to just go ahead and "do it all". What you end up with is an email without HTML, without the dreaded arrows or headers, and most, if not all, of the line breaks have been corrected. The image below shows you what the corrected email text looks like.

NOBODY's PERFECT
OK, so it isn't perfect. There are still some line breaks and the paragraphs aren't laid out exactly as they should be. But when you consider how difficult it would have been to try to remove all of that crap manually, you have to admit that it's worth the effort. So you may have to tweak the email a little bit, so!? Even if you sent it exactly as it looks right now, it's still a 100% better than it was when we started.

WAIT! THERE'S MORE!
OK, now you have to get this stuff back onto an email so you can send it out. But ECleaner has already done the hard part for you. It has already copied the corrected text back onto the clipboard. What this means is that you don't have to do the whole "highlight and COPY" thing. Just open your new email message, right click in the text area and choose PASTE. Walla! You're almost ready to send it out. All you need to do is to type in the recipient's name and email address, fill in the subject line, and send it off.

BEFORE AND AFTER
The two images below will allow you to compare the email BEFORE and AFTER ECleaner has worked it's magic. OK, granted, clicking on the FORWARD button and sending it off would have been a bit faster. But just look at the difference it makes to use this program. Which email would YOU want to receive? The email on top is after using ECleaner and the image below it is the original email.

Well there you have it. Who would have believed it could be that simple to clean up a sloppy email? And once you get the hang of it, cleaning your emails will only take a few seconds of your time. Your friends and family will all thank you for it and you'll be glad to know that your emails don't look like they are coming from a Gomer.

In case you don't already have this little gem of a program, you can go here to download the program and tinker with it yourself.

The author, Steve Chin has assured me that there is no ad-ware or spyware included in this utility program. He has also given me permission to offer it to you, our visitors. Be sure to let us know if you have any comments about E-Cleaner by sending us an email. (And it better not have any of those >>>>>> either!) LOL.

From the author Steve Chin:
This is for those of you who distribute a lot of jokes. I got tired of cleaning up all of the Unix reply marks ('>') and the lines that got chopped up by multiple word-wrapping. So, I decided to write up a really quick application that does all of this for you.

Notes:
* This program is freeware.
* This is a Windows95/98/NT (Win32)(XP) only application.
* Some cleanup will probably still be required, but it should simplify things by quite a bit.
* The text cannot be larger than 32,000 characters, but that shouldn't really be a problem...
* This application was written using Borland C++'s ObjectWindows Library.

Well, enjoy! If you have any suggestions, just let me know (e-mail address is in the read-me file).
--Steve Chin