Inbox management?

[Bongo]

Hello

I am looking for an inbox management tool for Outlook 2003. I'm looking to
file items from my 13,000-item Inbox 9,000-item Sent Messages folder.

What would be useful is a tool that allows you to collect related e-mails in
a window or pane (something like the advanced search box, or like the sidebar
in xobni) and then delete or move.

Features that would be particularly useful would be:

* ability to "seed" the search with an e-mail or a subject or keywords
* ability to combine results from Inbox and Sent Items
* heuristic searching for messages of a related topic based on content, word
frequency, people in the to/from/cc fields, rather than subject-only search
* easy to broaden an existing search based on identifying other messges that
are relevant to an existing search
* easy to re-sort / browse / inspect content of search results
* easy to include / exclude items in search results
* once the selected items from a search are identified, easy to delete or
file those items

While it doesn't do many of the above wish-list, xobni does do a decent job
of pulling together threads, but it doesn't allow you to move or delete items
(or combine across Inbox and Sent Items, I think). ClearContext was
recommended, but it seems to automatic and uses its own Topic / Thread
attribution rather than the include / exclude functionality that would really
be helpful.

Has anyone come across a tool like this? Any recommendations?

Tx & rgds
Bongo

 

[Gordon]

Hello

I am looking for an inbox management tool for Outlook 2003. I'm looking to
file items from my 13,000-item Inbox 9,000-item Sent Messages folder.

May I ask why you haven't managed your Inbox and Sent items WELL before they
got to this ridiculous level?

 

[Bongo]

May I ask why you haven't managed your Inbox and Sent items WELL before they
got to this ridiculous level?

I've had this account for a number of years, and have filed or deleted more
than 90% of the e-mail I've sent or deleted, but the cruft has grown.

May *I* ask how this bears on whether there are tools available to perform
the described functions?

 

[Brian Tillman]

What would be useful is a tool that allows you to collect related
e-mails in a window or pane (something like the advanced search box,
or like the sidebar in xobni) and then delete or move.

Features that would be particularly useful would be:

* ability to "seed" the search with an e-mail or a subject or keywords
* ability to combine results from Inbox and Sent Items

A search folder should be able to do this.

* heuristic searching for messages of a related topic based on
content, word frequency, people in the to/from/cc fields, rather than
subject-only search * easy to broaden an existing search based on
identifying other messges that are relevant to an existing search

Search folders should be able to do some if this, but not the word
frequency.

* easy to re-sort / browse / inspect content of search results
* easy to include / exclude items in search results
* once the selected items from a search are identified, easy to
delete or file those items

Search folders seem to this fairly well also.

 

[Bongo]

Thanks Brian

Good suggestion. However, what I'm looking for is a search tool that uses
heuristics rather than an explicit search. When I suggested that it could
find e-mails with the to / from / cc fields relating to a specified group of
messages, I meant that it should automatically determine (from the specified
messages) which other messages were *liklely* to be related to the same
topic--based on similarity of words in the body, quoted text (even if the
subject changes), words in the subject line, titles of attachments, senders,
and recipients.

Maybe too niche a product to exist.

Tx
Bongo

 

[Brian Tillman]

Good suggestion. However, what I'm looking for is a search tool that
uses heuristics rather than an explicit search. When I suggested that
it could find e-mails with the to / from / cc fields relating to a
specified group of messages, I meant that it should automatically
determine (from the specified messages) which other messages were
*liklely* to be related to the same topic--based on similarity of
words in the body, quoted text (even if the subject changes), words
in the subject line, titles of attachments, senders, and recipients.

I can't imagine anyone wanting to write such a tool. I doubt any exist.

 

[Bongo]

I can't imagine anyone wanting to write such a tool. I doubt any exist.

I’m surprised by your comment.

There are numerous products on the market that purport to have adaptive
methods to assist in the filing of incoming / outgoing mail. Presumably the
creators of such tools would work to create the best predictive algorithms
for determining likely destination folders. I would have thought (I’m not a
programmer myself) that the methodologies described above would be pretty
good at improving predictions, as more simplistic rule-based approaches would
be likely not to work in many contexts (i.e., several project with similar
personnel attached, etc.).

Once the logic exists, applying to an existing (seed) folder and then
looking for likely matches in the Inbox / Sent Items wouldn’t seem
particularly challenging.