Tips, tricks, tools, and techniques for Microsoft Office

The biggest concern I have with The Office Letter is keeping on top of the e-mail deluge. Fortunately, I've found two tools that help reduce the load. One works inside Outlook directly, while the other is a service to filter unwanted messages.

ClearContext Inbox Manager ($29.95; http://www.clearcontext.com) works inside Outlook like a rule engine on steroids. It allows me to prioritize and/or sort messages by sender, for example, give junk messages a low priority while those from regular newsletter contributors go to the top of the list.

After installation, the program scans your contacts and existing e-mails, figuring out who's important in your life. There's no training needed, because ClearContext is analyzing not only the number of messages but also threads and message content. If a contact is initially mis-analyzed (or later their importance in your life changes), you can adjust the priority. The five priority levels of messages are indicated by the color (red for very high, light gray for very low) of the subject line (in my view). New recipients (a new contact asking about advertising, for example) get "normal" priority by default.

Now, with high-priority messages (which ClearContext identified from our frequent e-mail exchanges) going to the top of my inbox, I can focus on a second useful feature: I can assign a topic to a message (Advertising, for example) and with the click of my mouse file the message (or the entire thread) into a separate topic folder, arranging the messages by topic if I wish. As an added bonus, sent messages can be filed in the same topic folder rather than the Sent Mail folder -- keeping an entire communication sequence in one place. You can also assign a topic to a new outgoing message, and all replies will automatically be assigned that topic. Very nice.

For more complex processing, you can set up rules -- such as filing any message from a domain, e-mail address, to a specified e-mail address, or message subject or body word (or phrase) to a particular folder (see illustration). The rules feature is serviceable but crude -- there is no "or" feature, so if I want to look for "Advertising" in the subject line or the message body, I have to set up two rules. By default, rules you define are applied to future messages, but I preferred to use the option that re-scanned my messages and applied the new rule to my inbox immediately.

There are several ways to view your inbox -- by priority or by topic, for example -- and additional defined views are available on the company's Web site for download and integration. For example, one is designed for colorblind users, substituting font properties for color to indicate priority (high-priority messages are underlined and medium priority are italicized).

ClearContext is easy to set up, and its analysis of 1000 messages in my inbox took less than two minutes. It took some time to get used to having prioritized messages -- I'm accustomed to visually scanning my inbox each and every time I retrieve mail. It turned out to be an easy habit to break.

ClearContext assumes you won't make mistakes, which is a mistake itself. The program has no ability to "undo" an action -- if I choose the wrong topic, for example, I must go into the topic folder and individually reassign the message to the new topic (or drag any and all back to the inbox if I didn't want them filed).

The program works with Office 2000 and above and Microsoft Exchange 5.5 and above. There's a 30 day, fully functional free trial available on the company's Web site.

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The second tool I've started using is an e-mail filtering service called OnlyMyEmail (http://www.onlymyemail.com). For $3/month, I can direct the service to examine all incoming messages in up to 3 POP3 accounts. It weeds out the deceptive, fraudulent, or advertising messages and sends the rest to you using your OnlyMyEmail account. Thus, while I was once checking three officeletter.com accounts manually, I can now tell the service to scan all three, then send me just the "good" messages.

I tested OnlyMyEmail with three officeletter e-mail accounts I prefer to read using Outlook Express rather than Outlook. I removed the three officeletter e-mail accounts from Outlook Express and replaced them with a single OnlyMyEmail account. Unfortunately, messages from all three officeletter accounts are mixed together when I retrieve messages from the OnlyMyEmail account. If knowing which account your message was original sent to is important, this isn't the service for you.

The service's Web interface also lets you read messages from the individual accounts (both the "good" and "bad" e-mail). You can review what e-mail was rejected (each filtered message is coded with a reason, such as FD for fraud). If a message was filtered by mistake, click the "Resend" button and the message will be allowed through. You can also click a button to add the sender to your approved list (a "white" list). In addition to filtering by sender, you can specify what types of messages you want blocked from a list of pre-defined categories, such as those from foreign domains or Yahoo groups.

I spent about a week building the approved list (newsletters are especially vulnerable to being filtered -- The Office Letter was caught in the filter, for example). However, after setting a few e-mail accounts to "permit" status, I (and the program) soon got to working well together -- to the point that perhaps 1 in 200 messages was misidentified. In one week the service filtered an average of 600 messages from one account and 200 each from the remaining two I set up.

Because OnlyMyEmail processes your account at regular intervals, you don't have the luxury of having a sender click "send" and receiving their message instantly. The delay was typically no more than five to ten minutes, and you can always retrieve messages from the original account (directly from the officeletter server, in my case) if a message is urgent. (Note: there's no such delay if you use their Corporate MX-Defender service, which we did not test.)

For the last couple of years I've been using Spam Bully with Outlook Express, which places suspicious mail in a separate folder within Outlook Express itself, and I've been satisfied with its performance. OnlyMyEmail catches the e-mail one step further up the line, so I never download junk messages in the first place.

The down side is that you give a service permission to store (or at least examine) all your e-mail. If privacy is a concern, a program such as Spam Bully that works inside your e-mail client is a better choice. If you're not concerned about who has access to your e-mail accounts, OnlyMyEmail works well for very little money.

-- James E. Powell

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