Outlook Woes – What To Do?

Well, I’ve decided to give ClearContext another go, after being reminded about it when Scoble mentioned he might give it a try. Robert, I recommend you do; ClearContext is a quality product, as I previously wrote about here.

For the past three weeks I’ve been using NEOPro, and I really like it. It has some killer features, and I truly hope the Outlook team takes a long hard look at what NEOPro does really well that Outlook does not do well. Here are the highlights, in my opinion:

Hotkeys that make sense – the space bar marks a message as read; the backspace key does the equivalent of automatically filing the message. Neat; efficient.

Very smart automatic search folders – instead of having to file a message in one folder, messages are tagged with certain properties. So if I want to see all messages to and from my wife, I click on the Correspondents tab and choose her name from the list. And there’s a search field at the top of the list that searches as you type.

Powerful filter bar – show only folders with unread messages, show only unread messages, show only messages going out or in, show only messages that have you in the To: line alone, etc. Quickly see your messages in many ways.

Built-in searching – I still think X1 / Yahoo Desktop Search and even Copernic do better email searching overall, but there’s one feature in NEOPro that I would call a KILLER feature: right click and choose Search For Conversation. This jumps you to the Search tab with the subject of the current message as the search criteria, and the entire thread comes up instantly. Outlook’s built-in ability to search for messages in a thread is as pathetic as the infamous XP search. The little dog is there to represent how dog-slow it is.

This next list is a short one, but they’re ultimately important items… What I don’t like (why I’m not continuing to use NEOPro):

Runs in a separate window from Outlook – I suppose this is a pro and a con. Realistically, it needs it’s own window because Outlook’s UI would just get in the way of all of the useful functions provided by NEOPro. The toolbars are more useful and infinitely more intuitive than Outlook. But the problem lies in the fact that although NEOPro is a wonderful email tool, Outlook is a comprehensive Personal Information Management tool. And although NEOPro is linked tightly with Outlook (there are multiple ways to jump to Outlook when necessary), it really creates a disconnect between email and other information such as tasks or appointments. I can probably live with this due to all that NEOPro offers with respect to managing my mail, but…

Price is the other issue. – I just can’t justify $69.95 USD for what amounts to a replacement for the Mail screens in Outlook. To be fair, there is a more reasonable $39.95 USD non-Pro offering, but it doesn’t contain the filter toolbar, or the ability to search for a conversation, making that option worthless in my opinion.

So, as I said above, I’ve decided to give ClearContext another go. I own a license for it (from a promotion they were doing), and it offers some of the features I like. For example, although I found it possible to not worry about filing messages by project using NEOPro, ClearContext allows me to use a single keystroke to file messages in the appropriate folder for their project. One-click filing is crucial for me.

ClearContext also does some really nice manipulations to the way your messages are displayed in your inbox, taking a bunch of different criteria and deciding on a priority level for each message. Personally I prefer to sort by date, but allow ClearContext to colour my messages based on their priority. The best feature of ClearContext, for my money, is that it groups messages in the same message thread together in your inbox. Although I’m a proponent of the “Getting to Zero” ideal in the Getting Things Done methodology, there are times when multiple messages in the same thread start to pile up in my inbox. ClearContext makes it a simple matter for me to see them all for what they are, and it even has a button to file all messages in a thread, or even all messages for a given topic (for me that means project) with a single click. Nice!

One last thing: how am I going to handle the lack of the ability to search for a conversation? I believe the ultimate solution will be a combination of Yahoo Desktop Search and ActiveWords. I haven’t started to try to build this yet, but I’m going to (try to) build an ActiveWord that will take my text selection (which will be the subject of the email, without any “RE:” or “FW:”, and do an email subject search for that string in Yahoo Desktop Search. Definitely not as elegant, but in the end a fully functional solution. Really, I don’t understand why X1 / Yahoo don’t already have a button that will do just that.

With that, I’m done with my Outlook meddling for now.

I hope.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 19th, 2005 and is filed under Email. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

#1 by Rob at July 6th, 2005

I have had some issues with clearcontext..which is probably due to my lack of knowledge about how the program works. I was interested in getting the program to do Topic/subject threadding for a list serve(s) iam involved in.. I’m talking over 17K messages in my one folder.. But I really can’t getthat to work.. And now all I see is the annoying first 3 lines of HTML code in the Inbox. I wonder how I can Remove Clearcontext? Any IDeas?

Thanks!

Quote

#2 by Jason at July 6th, 2005

Hi Rob,

ClearContext plays by all the typical Windows rules very well, so it should be a simple matter of shutting down Outlook, navigating to the Add or Remove Programs Control Panel option, and removing ClearContext.

Good luck!