ClearContext Corporate Blog

As we’ve posted about before, it seems like everyone has problems keeping up with their email.  Robert Scoble is the latest blogger to write about this – and it’s not the first time he’s mentioned his issues with email overload:

"Trying to (and failing) catch up on email."
"I’ve got about 1,100 emails waiting."
"Yeah, I’m overloaded on email."

We know many of you share the frustration with email.  We’ve written about the importance of an email management strategy, which is clearly the right long term solution.  But how do you get started? 

Let ClearContext perform triage on your inbox so that you can get it under control. 

Ed Bott did it:

"…yesterday, my inbox was overflowing with 4500 messages. Today, it contains 29 messages…"

Omar Shahine did it:

"… When I returned to work … I was greeted with > 300 unread messages in my inbox. …ClearContext allowed me to work through my messages from most important to least important. …I’m down to 28 items right now."

You can do it.

From our January post Holiday Email Avalanche, here are the three most popular ClearContext features people take advantage of to rapidly clear out a backlog of messages:

1. ClearContext’s core message prioritization functionality automatically identifies your most important email and places it right at the top of the inbox. This lets you quickly deal with all of your personal and important correspondence and then rapidly file all the remaining stuff like bulk email that has been moved to the bottom of your inbox.
2. ClearContext groups all emails in a conversation together in the inbox. This lets you quickly look at the most recent message in the thread and file/delete the entire set of messages.
3. Inbox Manager AutoAssign rules file incoming newsletters, mailing lists, etc. into separate folders for future viewing. Create these rules and use the "Apply rule to existing Inbox messages now" checkbox to file messages that you have already received.

Try us out.

We had a post in our forum a few weeks ago questioning the value that ClearContext provides over built in Outlook features.  On the surface, this is perfectly understandable.  After all, Outlook provides the ability to prioritize and color code the inbox, a method for the categorization of messages, and a very robust rules engine for identifying and processing messages.  That said, ClearContext’s value is in the way we simultaneously enhance these native Outlook features and simplify the setup process to make revolutionary changes in the efficiency of the Outlook interface.

Complex Prioritization

Through the creation of rules, Outlook can provide simple categorization and prioritization of email by a single message characteristic (i.e. sender, directness of email, etc.).  ClearContext enhances this capability by analyzing each incoming message on several weighted characteristics (including sender, message priority, directness of the address, and whether or not the user is participating in the message conversation) to create a composite score for the message and order and color code appropriately.  This is automatically setup on installation of ClearContext and weighting of each factor can be easily adjusted, giving the user a far more complex prioritization system that is much easier to implement and maintain.  For more detail on the patent pending ClearContext prioritization process, see ClearContext Design: Message Prioritization.

Threads, Not Messages

One very important distinction – everything ClearContext does applies to message threads (or “conversations”), not individual messages.  On the surface, our topic assignment behaves a lot like category assignment in Microsoft Outlook.  However, when a ClearContext topic is assigned to a message, all current and future email messages in that thread are assigned that topic.   This saves the user the time and effort of assigning a category to every message that is received.  Additionally, topics are automatically assigned to sent mail associated within a conversation and, optionally, sent mail is automatically moved from the Outlook Sent Mail folder to the appropriate ClearContext Topic folder.

ClearContext AutoAssign vs. Outlook Rules

As the post cited at the beginning of the article mentions, ClearContext AutoAssign appears to duplicate some of Outlook Rules’ features.  We believe that the Outlook Rules engine is a very robust and useful tool and our intent in developing AutoAssign was not to replicate all of its functionality. Rather, it was to support ClearContext specific features such as topic and priority assignment, and provide a simpler and easier to use interface for the most common rules scenarios. Ed Bott highlighted this in his review of our product:

"I had done some of this stuff with Outlook message rules, but the ClearContext Auto-Assign rules are much easier to create. Likewise, it’s possible to file messages into Outlook folders, but this add-in makes it much easier."

We have plans to provide integration for ClearContext functionality within the native Outlook rules interface in the near future. We believe this will provide the best of both worlds – our AutoAssign interface for ease of use, and access to the Outlook rules engine for creating more complicated rules that take advantage of ClearContext features.

What Else?

Those are the main points we’d like to make, but to highlight a few other enhancements ClearContext makes to Outlook:

1.    ClearContext default views group prioritized messages by conversation.  Outlook can show a prioritized view.  Outlook can display a Group By Conversation view.  Outlook can’t display a Prioritized, Group By Conversation view. 
2.    Once a topic has been assigned, ClearContext provides File Message, File Thread, and File Topic functionality for quick manual filing of Inbox messages into the associated topic folder.  Outlook requires the user to take several steps to file a message into the appropriate folder and, outside of Group By views, does not provide an easy way to file all messages in a thread or category.
3.    When setting up prioritization rules, the most important factor to many users is sender.  ClearContext automatically ranks senders on setup via a patent pending algorithm that analyzes email history.  To duplicate in Outlook rules, the user would need to manually create this information for each contact.
4.    ClearContext allows the user to adjust the priority of email, which changes the placement of the entire email thread within the prioritized inbox.  Native Outlook allows a priority change, but this doesn’t affect placement and it doesn’t apply to the entire message thread.

ClearContext not only provides functionality that can’t be duplicated in native Outlook, but our setup process, customized views, and toolbar buttons often makes it simpler to take advantage of these advanced features than the associated techniques in Outlook.

We’d welcome your feedback – if any of you Outlook Power Users out there feel that we have mis-stated Outlook’s capabilities, please send your feedback our way via comments on this site or direct email to info (at) clearcontext.com.

Why keep a corporate weblog?  For us, it’s all about developing a relationship with our customers.  We created the ClearContext Corporate Weblog to provide our users with detailed information about our product, share information with those customers in areas that we are passionate about, and make connections with potential customers.  In the four months since we started the blog, we have seen a dramatic increase in customer interest and loyalty.  As relative newcomers to the blogging community, we want to share our thoughts behind the decision to start a corporate blog, the way we use it to connect with customers, and our advice for starting one for your company.

In late 2004 we released the first production version of ClearContext Inbox Manager for Microsoft Outlook, an email prioritization add-in that automatically organizes the inbox and automates the message filing process.  While developing the application, we quickly became regular readers of several weblogs, including Office Weblog, Office Zealot, Ed Bott, Omar Shahine – basically anybody who had something to say about Office productivity, email issues, or Outlook.  It became very clear to us that the people who wrote and read these blogs were exactly the type of people that we wanted to give feedback on the product.  So, on December 15th we put up the first entry in the ClearContext Corporate Weblog with our public purpose, “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.”

Internally we hoped to do more than that.  We hoped to develop a closer relationship with our customers by putting a face to the company.  We hoped to build a customer base of like minded people.  We hoped to develop our brand and spread the word on ClearContext Inbox Manager.  We hoped to get our customers to participate in the direction of the product.  We hoped to establish ourselves as knowledgeable in our field.  In four months of blogging, we feel we have already made great progress towards these goals.

Here’s what we use the weblog for:

• We share information in areas that we are passionate about that we think our customers want to hear about.
• We gather feedback on how customers are using email and email tools to refine our long-term product direction.
• We build product awareness and buzz.
• We provide potential customers more data on the product and our competitors so that they can make a software decision that is right for them.
• We answer questions users have on the best way to utilize our product and suggest ways to get the most out of ClearContext Inbox Manager. 
• We provide detailed information about our future product plans to ensure that our development priorities are aligned with our customer’s needs.
• We write about issues posted on our Features & Support Forum that likely apply to a broader group of our users.

How’s it working?  The corporate weblog has been an extremely good investment of our time and effort.  In just four months of use, we feel that we have already seen some great results:

• The weblog has been an excellent source to date for finding new customers.  We consistently introduce new customers to ClearContext Inbox Manager via our interaction with other bloggers.
• We have very quickly put the word out on new product developments.  Within days of our blog post on our new release, most of our customers had upgraded and tried out our new features.
• We have clearly communicated project direction and received direct feedback from our users.  It was this feedback that defined many of the features implemented in our v1.1 release.
• We have used the weblog to provide our customers with a variety of information about email productivity.  We’ve posted email tips and techniques, email productivity information from around the web, and hosted a comprehensive email usage survey with help from a number of other bloggers.

So are you thinking about starting a corporate weblog and wondering if it’s worth it?  As far as we’re concerned the answer is clear – you can’t afford not to.  The dollar cost to run the weblog is relatively low, so that is not an issue.  As a resource constrained software startup, our hours are precious and the time required to post relevant, fresh material on the weblog is daunting, but it’s a small price to pay in exchange for a direct connection with many of our most knowledgeable (and demanding) customers.   Are you worried that you might not be able to come up with content once you start a site?  We had the same fear, but now have a backlog of posts we want to write.  Are you passionate about your area of expertise and want to talk about it?  Do you come across an article a few times a week that you find interesting?  Are you constantly thinking of new ways to utilize your product or service?  Those are the very things your customers will find interesting as well.  Blog it.

For more detail on starting a corporate weblog, we suggest you look to the following resources:

Robert Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto – a passionate list of 20 items to consider before starting a corporate weblog.

CorporateBlogging.info – the Business Blogging Basics section of this site is an excellent place to kickstart your thinking about a corporate blog.

The Red Couch – Robert Scoble and Shel Israel (with Marc Orchant
editing) are writing a book on Corporate Blogging and have posted
advance drafts of individual chapters.  Definitely worth a read,
particularly their corporate blog tips. 

How to Start a Blog – Michael Hyatt at Thomas Nelson Publishers has outlined basic steps for starting a blog.  He has also posted a draft of his company’s corporate policy for bloggers.

Corporate Blogging – Richard Giles has posted a detailed examination of the advent of corporate blogs along with reasons to start a blog and tips on how to do it.

“I’m drowning in email.”
                    – ClearContext 2005 Email Usage Survey Repondent

Email is taking over many people’s business lives and there is no simple solution to the problem.  Results from the ClearContext 2005 Email Usage Survey show that the volume of email individuals are facing on a daily basis, particularly the level of business email they deal with, is staggering – and the impact on productivity is profound.  The sheer number of messages that people constantly receive requires them to use a variety of tools and techniques to make email a productivity tool rather than a productivity drain.  “It’s a chore to have to manually manage the tool I use to help me manage my productivity.”

The data used in this report comes from a survey of 300 people.  About a quarter of these people were technologists, while the rest were evenly spread across a variety of industries and careers.  There was greater uniformity when it came to technologies in use – the large majority of respondents were Windows XP and Outlook 2003 users.

Most respondents have between 2 to 6 email accounts.  Some use over 10 email accounts.  The majority of these people use POP and Webmail accounts for personal email, while Exchange-based email is the type most commonly utilized for business email.  About half of the respondents receive from 50 to 250 emails daily.  Almost 15% of survey respondents get over 250 emails every day. 

Where are all of these emails coming from?  For the most part, the workplace.  60% of users report the majority of their email is work-related.  Spam also continues to fill up people’s inboxes – 30% of respondents report over half of their email is spam.  All of this email obviously takes a lot of time to deal with.  About half of our survey respondents spend over 2 hours daily in email – and 14% spend over 4 hours in email every day.  Especially noteworthy is the degree to which people’s work revolves around email: 60% of users check email multiple times per hour – and 40% of survey respondents describe themselves as checking email “constantly.”

80% of the survey respondents report major issues with email.  These users suffer from three major problems: spam, email organization, and simply too many email messages.  A third of the survey respondents describe themselves as feeling overwhelmed by email.  “I feel like if I spend enough time to keep on top of my e-mail,
I don’t have enough time to focus on the things the e-mail messages
initiate!”

So how can users make email work?  What are the specific problems with the way email is used in the business world today, and what tools and techniques are people using to make email work for them as opposed to drain their productivity?  What are ways email usage could be improved for everyone?  There is no “silver bullet” to solve the challenges of email, but our survey respondents had many great suggestions that they use to help make email really work for them.

Spam remains the biggest problem for email users and a majority of users have installed anti-spam software.  “One of my personal accounts that I don’t want to give up receives 65+ spam per hour.”  Even with these tools in use, people continue to receive large volumes of spam.  Beyond using anti-spam tools, it is critical that people protect their email addresses and utilize secondary email addresses anytime they need to give out their email address outside their contact network or make contact information available in a public forum. 

Keeping email organized is the second biggest problem people face.   “My inbox is a disaster and I feel I need a better way to organize it.”  Almost all users utilize folders to file their messages, but many end up with far too many folders to easily manage.   About half the respondents have over 25 folders; a quarter of the respondents have between 50 and 500 email folders.  Most users have over 10,000 messages stored in their folders – some over 100,000.  Two-thirds of users utilize an external search tool such as Lookout or Google Desktop Search to help them find emails.

Simply receiving too many messages is the third major problem.  In addition to all of the important email communications throughout the day, this problem is exacerbated by a habit many people have – “I’m bcc’d on too many things by people that I can’t get to stop doing that.” Another user states the problem more directly:  “Email is the most misused and abused form of communication in the workplace.”  Newsletters and mailing lists also account for a significant portion of excess email – however, these emails are easier to manage using automated filing rules.

This flood of emails every day results in too many emails piling up in people’s inboxes.   Only a quarter of users keep their inboxes near empty with 10 or fewer messages.  On the other side of the spectrum, about a quarter of respondents keep over 200 messages in their inbox, with 10% of users keeping over 1000 messages in their inbox.  Why?  “Too many messages to deal with in a day and then end up not deleting them so they build up.”  50% of survey respondents use followup and priority flags in their inbox to help them mark which emails are important.  Many others use rules or add-in tools “mostly for sorting mail sent to various aliases at work” or to “send mail to various folders based on who from or what mailing list.”

How individuals interact with the incoming emails is also a major factor when it comes to email productivity.  Constantly checking email is a major problem for many users.  It is “too easy to be distracted by the constant inbound flow of messages.”  Productivity methodologies such as Getting Things Done help people focus on identifying and creating actionable tasks from email rather than letting email pile up and spending multiple passes re-reading the same emails.  Tools such as ClearContext Inbox Manager help “triage” the email by identifying high priority email and automatically categorizing emails into topics. 

“The fact is that email is the conduit for virtually all business work product in the 21st century.  Learning to manage it appropriately becomes everyone’s personal responsibility.”

It is critical that people adopt some of these tools and techniques to make email an effective business communication tool.  The volume of email exchanged nowadays is such that many users just give up.  “I never manage to catch-up and there is always a substantial number of emails that will not be processed.  I rely upon the fact that important and urgent matters will reappear.” That type of response defeats the very purpose of email – quick, efficient communication. 

It is clear from our survey that email is a critical element of people’s work lives, but it is fundamentally broken for many users who end up spending more time managing and reacting to email than using it to help them achieve their goals.  While many people use various tools and techniques to cope with the flood of email, it is clear that most are doing just enough to stay afloat.  Our advice: get yourself an email management strategy.  If you don’t have a plan for dealing with email you are not being fair to your customers, your co-workers, or yourself.    Below you will find links to some ideas and articles that we think will help you find the method that works best for your particular environment.  By utilizing these resources, individuals can effectively respond to and organize large volumes of email and truly make email work for them.

The Tyranny of Email (Ole Eichhorn)
If Your Inbox Has More Than a Screenful of Messages In It, You’re Rude (Jason Clarke)
In Praise of Full Inboxes (Slacker Manager)
ClearContext to deal with E-mail (Omar Shahine)
My equation for serious productivity – 2005 (Marc Orchant)
If you use Outlook, you need Lookout (Ed Bott)
How do you manage your mail? (KC Lemson)
Top Five Ways to Manage the Inbox Effectively (ClearContext)
Top Five Ways to Reduce Email Traffic (ClearContext)
Carbon Copy Bloat (ClearContext)

We have posted graphs of survey results here, here, and here.

By default, ClearContext Inbox Manager installs three views in Microsoft Outlook: Prioritized, Prioritized By Day, and Prioritized By Week.  All three views behave basically the same way; they present the inbox organized and color coded by message priority with the most important email appearing at the top of the inbox in red or blue and junk mail appearing at the bottom in grey.  These default views allow the user to take advantage of Inbox Manager’s full complement of prioritization and organization functionality.

We realize that these views don’t work for all users.  Part of the advantage of using Outlook as a platform is that all user interface settings, including the way messages are presented, are highly customizable.  You can change the priority colors ClearContext assigns in the Inbox, enhance the views to take advantage of native Outlook grouping, use a view that presents messages in date order but continues to color-code, or show only unread, prioritized messages.  Users can make these modifications on their own or download sample views from our Downloadable Views page.

The latest view that we have created looks nearly identical to the default Outlook Messages view and is intended for those who wish to utilize ClearContext topic assignment and filing buttons but do not require inbox prioritization and color-coding.  Messages are presented in the inbox in black and ordered by Received By date.  We have added the ClearContext Topic field to the view, where the user can see topics assigned to the message thread.  The view can be downloaded here.

Post 3 in our 2005 Email Usage Survey Series. (Post 2: What Are All These Emails We’re Getting?)

In our last post, we discussed the type and volume of email people are receiving.  Users are adopting a variety of measures to efficiently deal with this email volume and the ever-increasing amount of knowledge that ends up locked in email datastores.  In this post we’ll discuss some of the tools being used to help manage all this information.

Given the large number of users who mentioned spam as a problem (almost half of the respondents receive 25% or more spam email), we were a little surprised to see that only about 60% of respondents have installed anti-spam software.  We had expected this number to be higher, especially among our fairly tech-savvy respondent group.  We imagine there may be a number of users who do not use a client-side anti-spam product, but work at a company that has server-side anti-spam tools installed.  As for the anti-spam tools themselves, no product emerged as a clear favorite.  Cloudmark, MailWasher, McAfee SpamKiller, Norton Anti-Spam, Postini, and SpamAssassin were among the more popular products.

Search functionality within native email clients is clearly lacking, as almost two-thirds of survey respondents use a search tool in conjunction with their email.  The two most popular by far were Lookout, an Outlook-specific search tool purchased by Microsoft last year, and Google’s desktop search; both used by 27% of those using search tools.  Copernic, MSN, Yahoo!, and X1 were other tools with over 5% share (13%, 9%, 8%, and 6% respectively).

When it comes to email tools, users are definitely focused primarily on optimizing their email management, rather than their communications with others.  Automated contact and address management tools/services were not very popular, used by only 12% of our respondents.  The most popular tool, used by two-thirds of that group, was Plaxo.

Over a third of respondents use other types of tools in conjunction with their email client.  The two most popular email add-ins were Newsgator (to manage RSS feeds in Outlook) and Netcentric’s GTD plug-in (an implementation of the Getting Things Done productivity methodology).  Other popular add-ins included ClearContext (email productivity, inbox management), Anagram (automated data entry), Onfolio (RSS, content management) and You Perform (email utilities).

We have posted graphs of these results here.

Users are clearly looking beyond the email client for solutions to help them manage their email and developers are definitely embracing Outlook as a platform.  In our full report next week we’ll discuss how users are taking advantage of these tools and a variety of techniques to help efficiently face the challenge of keeping up with email.

We are pleased to announce the formal release of ClearContext Inbox Manager v1.1.  We have updated all the requisite documentation on our main site, including our User Guide and Product Data Sheet, which can be found on the Additional Information page.  Thanks to those of you who downloaded and tried out v1.1 in early access.  There have been no changes to the code since that release.

At the suggestion of several users (see this forum post), v1.1 adds new fields that allow you to take advantage of native Outlook date grouping functionality.  To install these views, you can download them from our Downloadable Views page.  Alternatively, for those of you who have already customized your views and/or would rather make the changes yourself, here are step by step instructions to implement grouping:

1.  Select the ClearContext view you would like to change (i.e. By Day or By Week).
2.  Go to the Customize Current View dialog via the View menu item in Outlook (View > Arrange By > Current View > Customize Current View in Outlook 2003).
3.  Select the Group By… button.
4.  Uncheck "Automatically group according to arrangement" if it is checked.
5.  At the bottom of the window, change "Select available fields from:" to ClearContext.
6.  Set "Group Items by" to CC-DisplayDay or CC-DisplayWeek (for the By Day or By Week view, respectively).
7.  Select Ascending or Descending, depending on which order you would like dates to be displayed in.
8.  Click OK.

Once you have made these changes, save the view from the ClearContext Options menu (Tools > Options > ClearContext > Views > Save).

Please note that these views only work on v1.1 or better.  If you have recently upgraded from a previous version, you must force a re-score of all messages (via Tools > Options > ClearContext > Scoring and adjusting a slider) to utilize this functionality.

If you have questions about these views and/or additional suggestion for future releases, please see our Features & Support Forum.

Edited to include a screen print of the Group By Week view.

Post 2 in our 2005 Email Usage Survey Series. (Post 1: 2005 Email Usage Survey Overview)

Email overload is something we are all keenly aware of, so it was no surprise to see the numbers of emails people are dealing with on a daily basis.  About 50% of the 300 survey respondents receive between 50 to 250 messages per day.  Almost 15% of the respondents receive over 250 messages per day.  But what are all these emails we’re receiving?

One of the most startling facts was that spam continues to account for over 50% of the email received by over 30% of those surveyed.  Even with users, companies, and service providers adopting anti-spam measures, this clearly continues to be a very serious problem and a major time and resource sink.

For the majority (62%), it’s the workplace that is filling their inboxes with mail.  For 35% of users, work-related email accounts for over 75% of their email.  However, there is clearly a glut of unnecessary email being sent.  38% of users describe the majority of this email as non-critical.  And being cc’d on emails accounts for a significant (25% or more) portion of the email received by 30% of respondents.  In fact, 13% of email users report that over half the email they receive consists just of messages they are copied on! 

While many people have told us that the personal email they receive is very important to them, it constitutes a relatively small portion of the email volume people have to deal with – for 50% of respondents, less than 10% of their email is personal correspondence.  Only 17% of users have over 50% personal email.

The remainder of people’s inbox is filled up with newsletters and mailing lists.  These emails don’t usually account for a large portion of email people receive, and these are also the emails that people find to be some of the easiest to deal with using rules and other filing systems.

We have posted graphs of these results here.

We’ll finish up this series with another post this week on email tools people are using and next week we’ll publish a full report discussing our thoughts on the survey, the challenges people are facing with email, and techniques to help manage those challenges effectively.

Jason Clarke has written a thorough review of ClearContext Inbox Manager.  Ultimately he recommended us, but uninstalled the application.  Seems strange?  His reasoning is sound and shows that he put a lot of thought into the decision.  We greatly appreciate the time and effort that he put into looking at our product.

We suspect that, much like Jason, there are users out there who like the idea of ClearContext’s prioritization and topic management capabilities, but need to see their messages in received order like Outlook’s native Messages view.  To do so, we suggest modifying the ClearContext Prioritized View to sort by Received date.  ClearContext will continue to color code messages and topic assignment and filing functionality will remain intact, but the most recent messages will appear at the top of the inbox just as they did pre-ClearContext.

You can download this view from our views page or make the modifications yourself.  In the ClearContext Prioritized view simply click on the Received tab at the top of the Inbox.  If you are using the Outlook 2003 Side Reading Pane, move it to the bottom (View > Reading Pane > Bottom), click on the Received Tab, and then move the Reading Pane back to the side.  Save the view at Tools > Options > ClearContext > Views.  If, at any time, you would like to return to the factory installed view, select Restore Original on the ClearContext Options tab.

We have just started analyzing the responses from our Email Usage Survey.  The 300 respondents consisted of a pretty evenly divided split from each of the sponsor bloggers and ClearContext’s existing user base.  We’ll be posting our detailed analysis of the survey results in the coming weeks.

As a first step, we would like to share an overview of the technology people are using, the volume of email they receive, and the time they devote to dealing with email.  We have posted graphs of the results here.  Among the interesting facts we’d like to highlight:

• 33% of our tech-savvy respondents have Gmail accounts, edging out Hotmail and Yahoo!
• Having just one email address is quite uncommon; most have 2-6.
• Over 60% of the respondents get over 50 emails/ day.  15% receive more than 250!
• While spam remains the single biggest email problem, 40% of users are most challenged by email organization or overload issues.

In our next post we’ll delve into detail regarding the breakdown of different types of emails that contribute to the huge volumes of email that people face.  After that, we’ll discuss the strategies people are using to handle this email and the tools / technologies they are using to help them.