Power Rules Manager (and Other) Bug Fixes

Here at Sperry Software we’re committed to making sure that we provide the very best Outlook add-ins. To that end, we have the following items that have been fixed recently.

The first and most glaring bug was in Power Rules Manager. The symptom was obvious – the grid of rules was blank. At first, I thought that there may have been an update from Microsoft that was at fault but upon further investigation, it was the result of a fix to another bug reported back in late December that had to do with the count of rules. When I finally found the underlying cause, all I could think of was the quote by Peter G Neumann, who once said “Any bug fix has a 50% chance of introducing another bug“. The new version of the Power Rules Manager is now v6.2 and can be found on the Power Rules Manager download page.

The following fixes apply to Auto Print, Auto Print Pro, Save As PDF, Save As PDF Pro, and Print On Demand. All of these add-ins share code and so fixing a bug in one automatically corrects it in others:

1. Improved responsiveness in Outlook when an email arrives and you are composing an email. Some people reported that Outlook would lock up while creating a new email, and this has been addressed.
2. Updated 3rd party components to handle file types better, especially PDF attachments.
3. Redesigned cleaning up temporary files. We now create our own folder under the regular Temp folder so cleanup is quick and easy.
4. Better handling of images and shapes in the body of an email
5. Prevented blocking when going to print read receipts (Auto Print and Auto Print Pro only).
6. Corrected issue with margins (Auto Print and Auto Print Pro only).
7. Allow CSV files to be printed (Auto Print and Auto Print Pro only).

Going forward, we continue to work on Schedule Recurring Email for Office 365. The major feature we’re working on is the ability to have anyone using Office 365 or Outlook.com be able to schedule future emails. Given the popularity of Outlook.com we think that this will be a highly anticipated feature, and we will let you know when it’s ready.

As far as the Outlook desktop add-ins go, the next add-in is the Attachment Save Pro add-in. Similar to Save As PDF Pro or Auto Print Pro, this add-in will allow you to save emails and/or attachments to your Windows folder, in their native formats, except that you’ll be able to save say, emails and/or attachments from this sender to this Windows folder, and emails/attachments from that sender to that Windows folder. This is accomplished by using rules, and these rules can be set to filter based on the sender, subject, keywords in the body of the email and other conditions. It should be ready within the next two weeks and if you’d like to take part early access beta program simply send an email to [email protected] with the subject “Attachment Save Pro Wanted”. And before you ask – yes, we will be offering significant discounts to existing users of the Attachment Save add-in, along with those who take part in the beta program.

Happy emailing!