ClearContext Corporate Blog

Email overload is becoming an increasing fact of life in today’s corporate world. The average user spends two hours a day in email, but is becoming increasingly less effective as the inbox overflows with spam, unopened messages, and overdue action items. Utilize the inbox management tips below to help manage this flood of information.

1. Prioritize messages to insure that important email is addressed first.
Use automated tools to order by priority. Identify important people or key words and use rules to organize messages.

2. Respond in a timely fashion.
Don’t let important emails fester in the inbox. Attempt to respond to email within a set time frame (say, 8 hours). Send a short note with estimated response time if a delay is anticipated. Send automated replies if out of the office or overwhelmed on a project.

3. Use the inbox as a “to do” list.
Try to touch an email message one time only. Where possible, respond on first read and file away in an appropriate folder. If the message requires further attention, validate assigned priority (point #1). Flag messages for future response and/or convert to a calendar event for a future appointment.

4. Read the entire thread before responding.
There are often several responses to an email thread during the course of a day. Read all items in the thread before crafting a response. Sort the inbox by title when addressing a message with a lot of responses.

5. Don’t become a slave to email.
Set aside times to manage email (say, 9 AM, Noon, and 4 PM) and stay away the rest of the day. Using the email management principles above, you will get through your inbox quicker, address all issues within a given thread and your colleagues will still be impressed with your response time.

Version 1.0.2b of ClearContext Inbox Manager is now available. See the link at the bottom of http://www.clearcontext.com/download.html to download. When run, the installer will detect your previous installation and perform an upgrade.

This maintenance release includes the following updates to v1.0.1:

1. Sub-domain Enhancement to AutoAssign: Handles sub-domains for a given sender domain (i.e. ebay.co.uk will catch w1.ebay.co.uk, w2.ebay.co.uk, etc.)

2. Apply Rules to All Button: AutoAssign Management now has a button that applies all AutoAssign rules to the messages in the inbox.

3. Exchange Performance Enhancements: Message processing modifications to support increased Exchange performance.

4. Statistics Menu Item: Statistics shows the total number of messages ClearContext has prioritized along with various other cumulative stats. FYI – the statistics do not reflect priority assignment and topic handling prior to v1.0.2 install.

5. Calendar and Task Item Handling: Allows the assignment of priorities and topics to calendar and task items that appear in the inbox.

If you are running an earlier version, we recommend that you install v1.0.2b to take advantage of these enhancements.  Watch this blog for information on future releases.

Welcome to the ClearContext Corporate Weblog.  We’re entering the blogging community to share information about the company, our products, email productivity tips, and anything else that captures our attention, particularly if it’s related to email or productivity technology.

For a little background, we were founded with the goal of
building applications to help individuals work more effectively with
email. Our first product is ClearContext™ Inbox Manager for
Microsoft Outlook®, an email prioritization add-in that automatically
organizes the inbox and automates the message filing process. Our software is based on proprietary patent-pending algorithms
for contact analysis and email prioritization.  We’re based in San Francisco, CA, USA.

We are looking forward to sharing more information with you in the coming months.  Comments are always welcome and if there’s any information that you would like to see posted here, feel free to contact us at blog(at)clearcontext.com.