ClearContext Corporate Blog

CNN ran an article today on email horror stories:

“With some 55 billion e-mails being sent daily (not including spam), according to e-mail archiving company The Radicati Group, misdirected e-mails have become the online equivalent of a wrong number. They’re unavoidable, annoying — and often embarrassing.”

There are a few tips for avoiding the problem, but they miss the easiest and most effective way to mitigate the issue – use technology to delay sending.  See my earlier post on setting up Outlook to hold messages in the Outbox for a minute or two before pushing them out into the world.  This continues to be a lifesaver.

BTW, Gmail Labs tackles a similar problem in a way that is either brilliant or really dumb depending on how much drinking and mailing you are prone to do.

In the latest release we implemented notification managers – a tool for handling emails that regularly clog up your Inbox.  You know the ones – notifications from online services, automated log and email alerts from IT applications, receipts and status from e-commerce sites, etc..  Notification Managers are designed to get these out of the Inbox and categorize them in a way that makes it easy to review when you’re ready.

We ship with two Notification Managers by default – one for LinkedIn and one for Facebook.  Enable these by clicking on them in the Notifications tab of FolderContext.  You can also create your own Notification Manager and share it with friends and colleagues.  Here are step by step instructions for doing that:

1. Open the Notifications tab in FolderContext.
2. Select Actions > Create New Notification Manager.
3. Select a folder that you will move these messages to – this can be an existing folder or a new folder – and click OK.
4. The selected folder will be opened and the Notification Manager builder will appear.
5. Give your Notification Manager a name. This is the name that will appear in the Notifications Summary.
6. Click Add Rule to add a condition that will cause messages to be moved into this folder. For example, create a rule to move all messages from domain facebookmail.com to this folder. Please note that you can only add one rule for moving messages into this folder.
7. If you would like, click Add Icon to add a 16×16 icon to display for this Dashboard.
8. Click Add Category. This is how you will identify and track various classes of messages that are moved into this folder.
9. Give the Category a Display name and a Category Name. The latter is an Outlook category that is assigned to incoming messages that meet the criteria you set.
10. Add rules(s) that will cause this category to be assigned to an incoming message in this folder. Extending the example above, create a subject rule that assigns category Friend Request to all messages from facebookmail.com that arrive with the word friend in the subject. Please note that an OR condition is applied when multiple rules are entered – if an email arrives that meets any one of the rules you have set, the category will be assigned.
11. Add a link to this category by clicking the Add Link button. This link will appear in the category’s action menu. For example, you might add a direct link to your Facebook friends approval page here.
12. Change the appearance of this tab or add a 16×16 icon as desired.
13. Repeat steps 8 through 12 to add as many categories as you would like.
14. When you have completed building the dashboard, press Save and restart Outlook.

Once the dashboard is complete and Outlook has been restarted, incoming messages that meet the criteria you set up will be automatically moved into your dashboard topic folder:

• When you click on the folder, your categories will appear as tabs across the top of the preview pane along with counts of unread messages that appear in the folder for each category.
• Click on each category tab to mark items read, filter the folder to show messages from that category only, or open a link that you have set up for the category.
• Click Show Read Items to show counts of all items by category rather than unread.
• Select Options > Edit This Notification Manager to change the parameters you have set.
• Select Options > Jump to Project Dashboard to open a Dashboard tab for this Topic.
• Select Options > Send this Notification Manager to share with friends and colleagues.

We envision that you will come up with many creative ways to use the functionality. Please tell us how you use the Notification Managers and give us feedback on how you would like to see the functionality grow.

At the risk of hurting my arm while patting my own back, I have to say that FolderContext has become an indispensable component of my working environment.  Here are some examples of how I use it:

Contact List Creation    
We asked potential beta testers to send an email to a beta account. Using AutoAssign, I pushed all of these requests into a beta Topic folder. When the time came to contact the group, creating a distribution list was insanely simple:

1. Open the beta folder in Outlook.
2. Click the Contact tab in FolderContext.
3. Highlight all contacts in the list.
4. Select Actions > Create Distribution List.

Voila! I now have a beta distribution list for future correspondence with the beta group.

We anticipate that, much like the Contact Exporter, individuals will find this feature to be a great way to communicate with your project team, invites friends to an event, and upload contacts to various social networking sites.

Attachments by Topic    
We recently released a TWC powered build of IMS. One new feature in the release is customized TWC tutorial emails. Several iterations of these emails were sent back and forth as Word Documents. When it was time to convert the Word documents to tutorial emails, I was able to quickly find the latest version of each document:

1. Click on my TWC Topic folder.
2. Click on the Attachments tab of the FolderContext.
3. Highlight the attachments I wanted.
4. Select Actions > Save Attachments.

This automatically saved the most recent version of the attachments from email onto my hard drive.

Easy, right?

One of the new features in the latest ClearContext release is the implementation of suggested Topics.  ClearContext analyzes your email patterns and suggests Topics based the message sender.  Change the number of suggestions made via ClearContext > Options > Preferences > Topic Options.

If upgrading from a previous version of ClearContext, go to ClearContext > Options > Analyze Contacts and re-scan your email history. This will help ClearContext give accurate Topic suggestions when filing.

Lifehacker has posted a list of email innovations they would like to see become commonplace in email applications.  Between the items listed and wishes in the comments of the post, it looks like ClearContext has pretty much got Outlook users covered.  Let’s take a closer look.

From the post:

Snooze This Message

   

Sometimes you just don’t need to deal with an email message this very second, but you don’t want it cluttering up your inbox or lost in a folder somewhere. Adding a "Snooze button" to your inbox could solve the problem: You hit "Snooze" on a message and it disappears from view—until a day later, when it reappears again, unread and in your inbox, ready for processing.

ClearContext’s Defer feature pulls a message out of the Inbox until you have time to deal with it.

Faceted Search/Related Messages

   

Your email inbox and sent mail archive is basically a huge personal database of communication over time, and smart search can help you slice and dice it by topic and sender.

ClearContext Pro and Personal have been showing message threads grouped together in the Inbox since v1 of the product.  In addition, the ClearContext RelatedView displays all messages, tasks and appointments in the current conversation as an integrated window within each item, giving a clear context for the current message you are working with.

From the post’s comments:

Notify me if no reply in X days.

   

Am I the only one who sees a need for this? How many times have you sent an e-mail that requires a reply and the jerk…I mean colleague…at the other end ignores it? Better yet if you could send an automated nag after a given period of time.

Use ClearContext Pro’s follow-up feature to notify you if you don’t receive a timely reply from an important email.

MUTE THREAD.

   

I get so much traffic at work from threads that I don’t need to see. When it first becomes irrelevant, I would like to be able to click a button and mute the thread, whereby all further messages in that thread go straight to a folder without cluttering my inbox.

Yep, got that too.  Unsubscribe – available in both Pro and Personal.

ClearContext also adds message prioritization, automatic filing, and advanced attachment viewing and management.  What else would you like to see?  Reply to All protection?  Attachment alerts?  Send your ideas to info at clearcontext dot com.

Kelly Forrister has a great tip on the Simply GTD Blogs:

“Feel like you’ve gone numb to the Reminder windows that pop up on your Calendar? (Hint: answer yes if you find yourself clicking snooze or dismiss most of the time when you see that window.) Don’t feel bad. Most programs are built to help you to go numb to those Reminder because they set them on everything that is timed.

I’m not saying don’t use reminders–just use them sparingly so that when they go off, they actually mean something.“

She describes in detail how to disable reminders by default in Outlook and other tools.  Excellent advice if you haven’t already done it.

Over at Macworld.com, Joe Kissell recommends getting control of your Inbox by following a three step process; volume reduction, filing and message processing.  Though I’m not a big fan of Joe’s simplified filing system, it’s a good read regardless of which email client you use.

Additional reading – take a look at post Intelligently Empty Your Inbox if you are serious about getting your Inbox under control.

Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped asked several web luminaries a simple question:

“What are your top tips for dealing with information overflow?”

The result is a pretty interesting collection of tips from folks who consume a LOT of information.  Check it out.

I may sound like a broken record at times, but the first thing you should do when you encounter quirky Outlook performance issues – including slowness, startup issues and instability – is perform some mail maintenance.  This is particularly useful if you have recently installed/uninstalled some Outlook add-ins.

If you haven’t done so lately, I highly recommend that you review my post on Outlook Performance and Mail File Maintenance and take action to archive messages, compact your mail file and run SCANPST against it.  A little proactive maintenance here will go a long way towards keeping Outlook snappy.  In fact, go ahead and put it as a recurring task on your task list and run through the process every few months.  You’ll be glad that you did.

The Useful Technology Blog has posted an ingenious way to dissuade you from accidentally using Reply to All:

“Are you a victim of an inadvertent ‘Reply to All’ gaffe? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Every day, thousands of people unwittingly share their most intimate thoughts with complete strangers. And it’s all thanks to that pesky ‘Reply to All’ button in Microsoft Outlook.

Thankfully, there is a cure. The NEW “UsefulTechnology Gaffe Destroyer™ (Patent-Pending)” solution works by reducing the temptation* to hit the ‘Reply to All’ button.”

Read on for a pretty novel trick to save you a little embarrassment.