How-To: Save and Reuse Newsgroup posts as personal email

This question comes up from time to time in the Outlook Express newsgroup. "The newsgroup posts are so pretty! How can I save them and use them for personal email?" Is something that we have all heard many times and is answered quite frequently in the newsgroup.

This page is designed to help you with this issue and was written by Ohmster.

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You should create a folder to store your cool stationary posts and emails in. Open "My Documents", right click in the white area, not on any particular file and then choose "New/Folder". The words "New Folder" will be highlighted when you do this, at this time type in a name for this folder such as "Cool Email". Whenever you save stationary posts, save them to the "Cool Email" folder so you will know where to find them. Makes sense, right?

Highlight the post that you want to save in the message window. Go to the File menu. Choose "Save As", it will want to save it as a news file (*.nws), this is good. You can keep the name already in the save window or type in a more descriptive name if you like, e.g.: snow on mountain. After you save this news file on your hard disk, you will have to rename the last three letters of the file, the nws part, in order to make it a mail message and not a news post.

Right click on the filename and choose "Rename". The name is now highlighted and ready to be renamed. You can type in it right now and change the whole name or just hit the "End" key on your keyboard to move the cursor to the end of the filename. Back up three times with the backspace key and type in "eml". Press enter once or click elswhere with the mouse. Your original file (Black Butterfly.nws) is now called "Black Butterfly.eml". This is good, you are almost done.

Note: What we are going to do here is to change the "used" stationary to a "new one" that we can edit and send The next step can be done by hand as this was originally written or you can use Bill's wonderful, new X-Unsent utility to do this for you.. Either method works well but X-Unsent sure makes this a snap and is probably a nicer choice if you plan to do this a lot.

Manual Method:

Open the file with a text editor, Windows Notepad is very good for this. An easy way to edit files like this is to open notepad and then just drag the file on top of it and let go. It will open in notepad or if it is too large for notepad, you will be offered the choice to use Wordpad instead. This is good, go ahead and do that if you are asked.

You need to add one small line to this email to be finished:
X-Unsent: 1
Put it on a line by itself near the top of the email, a good place to do this is after this line:

X-MSMail-Priority: Normal

So now it looks like this in there:

X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Unsent: 1

Great. Save the file and you are done.

Use X-Usent instead: Click here to open the X-Unsent page for the small application and instructions.

Just click on the new saved email file to use it and change the To and Subject lines to suit your needs. Change the text in the edit pane to put your own personal message in there. Test it by clicking on the Preview pane, it should work and look good. Go back to the Edit pane and hit the send button.

That's it. Saved, edited, opened, used, sent, and you are off!

~Ohmster

P.S. The reason we go through all this hassle to save email is like Jim said in his post that you will lose a lot of "the good stuff" if you save it differently. Good stuff = scripts, sound files, image files, etc. These things will all be lost if you save the post "As Stationary". You must use Save As... from the File menu in order to retain all of the objects that are in the original stationary news post.