Have you been in the situation where you sent an email and then immediately went (in cinematographic drama slow motion) "Nooooooooo...! I did not mean to send that!"? I'm sure you have. I have.

If you use Gmail, there's a wonderful setting, Enable Undo Send. Set it to ten or twenty seconds, which will leave the message in the outbox instead of delivering it rightaway. Ten-ish seconds should be enough for you to get the oh-no -reaction and press Z to effectively unsend your message.

There's a similar trick for Microsoft Outlook. Create a Rule. Start with a blank rule applied when messages are sent (last on the list). Check no conditions unless you really want to tweak things. Defer the delivery by one minute (again, the last setting). No exceptions necessary (unless, again, you really want to tweak things). Give your rule a nifty name ("Delay sending by one minute") and that's it!

Outlook has a feature to "Recall a message". What it in all practice does is send a second message to the original recipient telling that you wanted to recall the message. That if anything would make the recipient want to go wow, what's he written now?. The funny thing is that your Outlook will just look smug and say that it's recalled the message (or at least attempted to). Oh yeah. Or you can buy an Exchange module to have the server delay the message deliveries, but all in all this is the cheaper option :)

Your job: Install a new computer for a client and transfer all the documents. The old box is a Windows XP, the new one runs Windows 7.

The tool: Windows File and Settings Transfer Wizard.

The caveats: Many.

It's a well known story. Your client has a new computer to install. She's used the old one for quite a while and it's full of documents (in weird places), although you've suggested storing them on the server, "just in case". But old habits die hard.

Thankfully, Microsoft has a pretty good tool for this case, namely the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. This baby does most of what you'd believe it show and it's been bundled with Windows since the XP times. 

Step one: get an external hard disk or a fairly large USB flash fob (thumb drive, "minnepinne"). While you could do this over the net, it's probably faster over the USB. Nothing will be deleted from the external device so don't worry about that bit. 

Step two: Start the process from the new computer. Plug in the external memory device and fire up the F&STW. While the old one probably has the equivalent software installed, the file format has most likely changed between your brand spanking Win7 and the old XP box. This was learned The Traditional Way.

You do not need to be logged in as the user whose data is to be transferred but you will need admin rights on both the source and the target box.

Now tell the Wiz that you are on your new computer and that you haven't done the transferring bit just yet. FSTW will create an installer on the external disk, after which it'll close (given a button-push or two). 

Step three: Eject the external disk and plug it into the old computer. Run the installer created above. Start it and press the appropriate Next buttons. The transfer will commence. Have tea, this'll take a while.

Step four: Again, eject the external hard disk, plug it into the new computer. Navigate to where you created the transfer files (which probably is where you left the installer a few steps back) and open up the .MIG file there. This will awaken the FSTW anew, to let you drop the files and settings on the target computer.

Let it churn. Have more tea.

Step five: Check trough the transfer logs. Save the log for transferred files. Resist the urge to check trough the list of applications missing, and even more so, resist the urge to install the missing programs on the target machine. This, too was learned The Traditional Way.

Reboot the target computer. This will not be evident until you continue stepping through the logs. This, also, was learned The Traditional Way.

Step six: Surprise surprise, FSTW has not transferred the Outlook .PST Data Files from the source computer. Eject the external disk from the new computer, plug it into the old. Open the Control Panel from the old computer, open the Mail applet, check which Data Files are in use, click each one and the button to show the actual folder in which the .pst file is in. Outlook must not be running while doing this. Exit it, completely. Old Outlooks will leave a thread hanging to check for new mail.

Manually copy the .pst files to the external medium. Eject disk. Plug it into new computer. Create a directory c:\Users\%username%\Outlook and manually copy the .pst files from the external disk into it.

Only now, start Outlook on the new computer.

At this stage, i have no idea if Outlook will have its settings transferred or incorporate the .pst files on the previous computer, as this too was learned The Traditional Way (or more so, Obscured in The Traditional Way) so you're on your own here. The only thing to add is that you can use the Mail applet from the Control Panel to add the .pst files to the new account if they aren't there from before.

Apart from that, Good Luck. You're a sysadmin, and you need it.

A tool i spend a lot of time with at work is Microsoft Outlook, as i guess it is with many of you as well. Often, i get mails that translate to initiating tasks. For that, Outlook can be used to create a Task, based on that mail, or set a follow-up flag on the mail, denoting that it's something to do. The vital difference here is that the flagged mail is the task, whereas a Task created from a mail is a copy of that mail. Finishing the Task will not have any input on the mail that was the source of the Task (before you get all weirded up, a Task is the Outlook-specific representation/implementation of a task, a Contact is a contact entity in Outlook. And so on).

Often, however, a single mail does not constitute the full communication and involvement of a task. The GTD school of thought calls any task with more than one action a project, which is fine by me. A project will usually include a minimum of two persons -- the requestor and i -- but more often have other stakeholders included. These stakeholders can be represented as Contacts in Outlook.

What i would really appreciate is to quickly and painlessly whip up a Project, which, if created from a mail, is tightly bound to the mail that the Project came from. A Project can have many tasks (or Tasks, if you will) and many Contacts. All communication, mail mostly, but could be IM as well, would be part of that Project.

I'm sure this could be done with existing tools -- OneNote or Groove perhaps -- but i don't know how. Do you? How do you manage your projects.. eh, Projects?