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May 21, 2005
The Dream: A Email System For High-Volume Email Management | Realized TODAY ...
The Dream: A Email System For High-Volume Email Management
- Spend Less Time
- Respond Promptly
- Never Lose Correspondence
- Never Lose Track of Conversation Threads
- Prioritize Messages
- Never Feel Overwhelmed
- Feel in Control
- Always Know “What to Do Next”
For low-volume email management, almost any email client will do. But, as email correspondence has become more prevalent, SPAM more ubiquitous, online social networking more routine, narrowcasted digital newsletter more prevalent, etc — the deluge can become overhwelming so we are faced with having to re-invent how we process our email inboxes.
Esther Dyson has written extensively on the future of email (see Release 1.0 May 2004 Issue) and has personally reviewed many of the next-generation prototypes which are highly suggestive of things to come. However, Esther and I share a common problem — We both need something TODAY. We both process THOUSANDS of emails ROUTINELY. Just like canaries in the coal-mines, we are succumbing first to the toxic fumes of this impending disaster.
Using todays email clients, these loads render email almost useless as a means to reliably communicate in a timely fashion. Yes, we have both seen future potential cures, but we are both dying of the future pandemic NOW. Hence our mutual vested interest in email applications and other communication technologies (SMS, IM, VoIP, etc).
So, I couldn’t wait any longer. I dreaded even looking at my email — it always meant “hours of work”, “apologies for not getting back” and looking like “a flake” (Well, maybe I am a flake, but I don’t like to seem too obvious) — and the chronic email needles lost among the hay-stacks of “farm animal sex”. Enough is enough.
So, after over 6 months of disasterous work, with lots of false starts and hours of thankless testing, we finally got our email system undercontrol and manageable for high-volume email loads. We now spend less than 20% of the time we used to devote to our email and we are processing 10 times the email we used to. That’s right — a 50X increase in personal messaging productivity.
Here what we finally came up with using today’s “off-the-shelf” technologies --
Server-side:
- First, Postini set to "lightly" filter out the most blattant spam without losing significant messages (do NOT use default setting … this is only Part 1 of a 2part SPAM solution — if you try to make it get rid of all spam with server-side only, YOU WILL LOSE MAIL!!!)
- Then use a regular generic POP3 mail server (OpenSource is fine — Don’t even think about installing an Exchange Server — and if you have, get rid of it RIGHT NOW!)
Client-side:
- Outlook (I know, I know ... sounds like a non-starter - but just bear with me a second ...)
- Ella for Spam Control (This is Part 2 of your SPAM solution. Basically you train Ella on your actual emails to sort your mail using “Bayesian Filtering ie "highly sensitive" "highly specific" and "in between" to do a first level "rough cut" of "wheat from chafe" into INBOX (the real deal messages), READ LATER (newsletter, bulkmail, etc), and SPAM (email to delete for sure) (I’ve discussed Bayesian Filtering elsewhere — while is works for low volume as a single solution, you need to add some server-side filtering to take of some of the load — hence the optimized 2 part solution)
- Getting Things Done (GTD) Toolbar (basically a set of features which enables outlook to be used using an organizational methodology espoused by David xxx and which has strongly influenced the future design of Chandler ... eg each email can be acted on, defered, delegated, categorized, etc in a way that it can never be lost to follow up ...)
- Anagram (basically allows you to select free-form email text and it "intelligently" converts it to structure data ie contact entries, appointments, etc in outlook or palm or both)
- KeySuite (basically enables Outlook to synch properly with my Treo 600/650 while maintaining key outlook features which the palm desktop does not support (yet))
- Also consider adding a ROBUST desktop search engine (in addition to the google desktop) (I strongly recommend the X1 Desktop)
Options I use:
- SpokeSync Client (even if you don’t “use” Spoke, the client software adds some great functionality to your email processing)
- LinkedIn Toolbar (also has some features you might find useful — they are also rolling out new features which may be worth exploring)
- An email address extractor (even though this functionality is included above, I find a standalone application does the job better. I used to use Advanced Email Extractor (AEE) but it hasn’t been updated in awhile and doesn’t seem very stable in a Windows XP environment so I switched to Email Address Collector which is quite stable although the user-interface could use a redo)
and finally, the crowning glory: the whole game came together with —
Neo Pro 3.0
Neo Pro indexes outlook's MAPI message store — but rather than just being a search engine, it instead provides an alternative interface to outlook's MAPI message store so that you nolonger need to use outlook for email processing ... what make this interface so great is that it provides what heavy email user's need the most: a "correspondent-centric" interface ... basically, since the message store is fully indexed it can easily present view of you email in a variety of customized ways but from a work flow point of view, each email can "call up" you history of correspondence with that individual (or topic or whatever) so that you can easily maintain the conversational thread ... Also, NEO Pro makes no few assumptions as to how you process your email. Once you’ve used it a bit, you begin to evolve the interface into exactly what you need — nothing more, nothing less.
I’ve written elsewhere about the future of search engines. Since the mid-1980’s, I have been predicting the emergence of a new class of networked applications built on the foundation of search engine technology and indexing across disparate data sources coupled with user specific preferences and authentication. I believe search engine technologies will morph into the background and become a universal glue which ties together disparate data elements, allowing a new calss of applications to be built. We are all familiar with the simple search interface: I’m looking for something, I search, I find. But that’s just one application. What if your applications have already indexed all of these combinations for your and your needs and you nolonger see a search interface but an application that doesn’t even seem to have anything to do with searching?
Enter NEO Pro.
Neo Pro is the first good example of this next generation platform that will seemlessly tie multiple disparate data stores distributed across you desktop, local network, internet, and secure authenticated networks to enable you to do what you need to do without any preconcieved notions by the product developers as to how you do what you do.
In other words, search engines are evolving into the universal foundation upon which “user-centric personal-workflow oriented applications” will be built. Instead of “one interface for everyone” (eg Google, X1 Desktop, etc) you have a “personal interface for each of us” (eg NEO Pro).
Very cool … look for more of these “personalized networked applications” from the multiple converging trends in search engines, communication portals, network edge devices, social networking, and transaction processing.
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Related Posts
- StanShinn.com » Email Processing Tips
- Nelson Email Organizer (NEO) Pro v3 - review
- NEO Pro 3.0 Full Review at ZDNet UK Reviews
Posted by cmayaud at 02:48 PM | Permalink| Comments (4)
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Comments
A combination of Greylisting and Spamassassin on the server is the most effective spam control I've found at the server level.
That should be POP3S and SMTPS so that you can use it from insecure locations such as WiFi hotspots.
Can you now do exactly the same list but with Thunderbird and extensions?
Three things make me mad as hell about Outlook.
- The defaults mean that nobody knows how to quote properly. Old school netiquette (quote, snip, reply at bottom) has been destroyed by Outlooks dumb quoting. This is very sad.
- Message sorting into folders and threading sucks and nobody knows how to use it. Which re-inforces stupid quoting and encourages the mass CC email.
- It's a major part of an extremely insecure architecture. The exploits in Outlook as the front end to windows are directly responsible for the huge population of trojans and the consequent current tsunami of spam and viruses.
Posted by: julian.bond ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.sacredcowdung.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at May 22, 2005 04:30 AM
"It's a major part of an extremely insecure architecture. The exploits in Outlook as the front end to windows are directly responsible for the huge population of trojans and the consequent current tsunami of spam and viruses"
I'm still waiting for arguments to prove this stupid assertion. Ok, you have none. It's just a bunch of anti-MS crap
And btw thunderbird threading sucks: it threads things that should *not* be together if their topics are the same, even though they have completely different message-id and reply-to headers. It is so dumb.
Posted by: bot at July 5, 2005 06:33 AM
Since getting NEO a couple of years ago I have not looked at my email in Outlook. NEO has been indispensable. I was looking for some unrelated info on Outlook, read your post and now I'm going about implementing the Getting Things Done system.
Since GTD is based on handling email through Outlook how do you use NEO anymore? I assume it is not your primary email tool but more of an indexed reference to your email. It's primary use is to quickly dig up all of a particular clients correspondence. Or to use GTD to send bulk mail to one Outlook folder and then let NEO sort the bulk mail into the categories assigned in NEO.
Posted by: Weberphoto at December 7, 2005 09:03 AM
the "Getting Things Done" plug-in complements NEO Pro nicely. NEO Pro focuses on you email management whereas the GTD plug-in focuses on when an email results in actions which require other parts of outlook (like TO DO list and particularly scheduling in the Calendar) ... they work great together and there is really no overlap in function
Posted by: Christian Mayaud at December 8, 2005 12:32 PM
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