I’ve been putting off blogging about my experience with ClearContext because I didn’t want to paint it in a bad light, even though I’ve decided not to continue using it. The developer is exceptional, and the product is as well. It just doesn’t meet my needs.

The Good
For me, my favourite feature is how messages in the same thread are grouped together under the latest message from that thread (and by grouped I don’t mean in the traditional Outlook sense, but more in an “ordered” sense). That makes filing the thread a cinch when it’s time to do so. I also like the one-click filing and one-click thread filing buttons.

The Not-So-Good (for me, anyway)
The main feature of ClearContext, colour coding and reordering of the inbox based on calculated priority, just doesn’t work for me. It’s probably due to the kind of work I do; I’m a project manager and I have 8-12 active projects at any given time. Unfortunately, priorities for me are dictated more by the “sensitivity” of any given project than by anything that could be reliably calculated automatically by a computer. One of my mandates is that I be able to respond quickly to even the lower-priority messages I receive (sometimes that ability is what defines my job), and I found that I was not noticing new messages that came in at a lower priority because they’d come in somewhere in the middle of the 20 or so emails I seem to consistently have in my inbox. Message “freshness” is too important to me to allow my inbox to be reordered.

I can see how the ClearContext method might work very well for someone that works on one to three projects at any given time, like a developer, engineer or support technician. I just couldn’t get it to bend enough to support my way of doing things - by the time I was done customizing my inbox view, I was back where I was with MailFiler. Given that, and the fact that MailFiler has a single button “View Thread” feature that allows me to see a tree view of all messages in a given thread, I couldn’t justify switching.

ClearContext is a wonderful tool, and if you’re struggling with your Outlook inbox, I highly suggest you try it out.

It feels so hypocritical to recommend software that I’ve decided not to use, but that’s what I’m doing.