Colleagues and friends constantly send me fascinating items by email, which I of course feel compelled to post to this blog or to one or more email distribution lists.  However, if I hit "forward" or "reply" to the incoming messages, the result is usually a tangled skein of unjustified lines and superfluous quote marks.  What to do?

Well, the solution is simple and free, thanks to the wonderful folks at the Organizers Collaborative.  They have come up with a tool called eWrapper - and it should take you no more than 15 minutes to download it, install it on your desktop, and learn to use it.  It will justify the lines of and remove the quote marks from the block of text, and then you will be good to go.

It's important to remember that pretty much anyone who receives your email is is only going to take about two seconds to decide whether to make the effort to read it.  And now for an important bulletin for any nonprofit or philanthropic organization that wants to use email to enhance relationships with stakeholders:
A jumble of ragged lines and superfluous characters is a serious deterrent to reading incoming email.

It's one of those existential ironies of the human condition that everyone who reads email knows intuitively that this is absolutely true - while those same people, as email senders, are completely oblivious of this reality.

So eWrapper is really a two-for:  you get to try out an easy-to-use example of free/open source software, and you get to contribute to the fight against human obliviousness.  What's not to like?