Inbox Rules

Nearly all modern desktop email clients (including Apple Mail, Thunderbird and Outlook) support inbox rules or filtering. Using these rules you can specify that incoming email that meets certain criteria can be routed to certain folder or even deleted entirely. The easiest way to do it is to just route emails from certain senders to a particular folder, like sending Twitter and Facebook notifications to a “Notifications” folder, for example. Unfortunately, given the variety of bacn that most of us receive, you’ll likely have to set up a large number of rules to deal with all of the bacn, and every time you start getting bacn from a new sender, you’ll probably have to set up a new rule. You could try setting up more generic or complex rules (matching certain strings of text in the body of the message, or using complex conditional rules) to try to avoid having to set up a new rule for each sender, but in my experience it’s very difficult to do this in such a way that filters all of the bacn without also accidentally catching some non-bacn email, too.

Outlook

If you use Outlook, there are a couple of third-party tools you could try: ClearContext Personal and NEO Pro.

ClearContext Personal (see my post about it here) actually works in a similar manner to Smart Labels, filing unimportant emails, like social network notifications, newsletters, e-commerce emails and other bacn into categorized groups, taking it out of your inbox. It’s all done completely automatically, with no need to set up complex inbox rules. ClearContext Personal is available as a free download (.exe) for Windows 7, Vista or XP, and Outlook 2003, 2007 or 2010. Note that it only works with Exchange Mail and POP, not IMAP.

NEO Pro is an email organizing tool. Rather than working as an add-on, it’s actually a separate app that you can use to automatically categorize and organize your email. It’s a very powerful and flexible tool, but it’s rather pricey at $49.95 , which is probably a bit expensive if all you want to do is filter bacn from your inbox. The 60-day free trial can be downloaded here.

Apple Mail

I’m not aware of any apps or plugin for Apple Mail that can automatically filter bacn emails, but Mail Act-On, a plugin from indev.ca, provides a way to apply actions to multiple emails simultaneously, making it easier to keep your inbox organized. It costs $24.95, with a free trial available.

Thunderbird

Again, I’m not aware of any extensions for Thunderbird  that will work in the same way as Smart Labels, but it does incude a built-in Bayesian junk mail filter. You can hit the “Junk” button  and over time you will train Thunderbird, Unfortunately, it’s not as granular as Gmail’s Smart Labels and will result in bacn in the same junk mail folder as regular spam, but if all you really want is to get bacn out of your inbox, . There are some details on how the junk mail filter works on mozillaZine.

Unsubscribe

Of course, rather than setting up rules or plugins to deal with the bacn in your inbox, you can always stop it at the source, by unsubscribing from the various newsletters you’re not reading and changing the settings on your social networking accounts.

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Auto-filed emails can be accessed via a sidebar in Outlook; you can scan through a category, and mark all the emails as read or delete them with a single click. You can also teach ClearContext to file other types of email by dragging them from your inbox to the appropriate category; future emails will then be filed automatically.

To make sure that you don’t miss anything important, once per day you’ll be sent a daily digest email that lists all of the emails auto-filed that day, together with some statistics about your email usage.

ClearContext Personal will also help you pick out the more important emails in your inbox; emails from known senders are highlighted in green, while emails from important senders are highlighted in red. This is a bit like Gmail’s Priority Inbox; ClearContext automatically tries to figure out who your most important contacts are during its setup, and you can also mark senders as important manually using a button on the toolbar.

ClearContext Personal is available as a free download (.exe) for Windows 7, Vista or XP, and Outlook 2003, 2007 or 2010.

Note: Although I had early access to ClearContext Personal, I haven’t been able to test out how effective it is. That’s because it doesn’t support IMAP, only POP and Exchange Mail. When I asked ClearContext about this, the company said that the number of Outlook users using IMAP was very small — in the single digit percentages — and it had to focus its priorities where the users are. While I’d agree that most corporate Outlook users probably connect using Exchange Mail, many tech-savvy users (the kind of people who would probably appreciate this kind of add-on) will use IMAP to connect to their mail servers; they’re not supported by this release, which is disappointing.

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The functionality in the new version should help in three main areas:

• Email organization. ClearContext automatically highlights the most important email in your inbox. It also helps you to empty your inbox by automatically suggesting the right folders to file messages to.
• Task management. Turn emails into tasks, or create new tasks via the task window in the sidebar. A new Task Organizer lets you quickly review and update groups of tasks to change due dates, project assignments, etc.
• Project management. The ClearContext sidebar provides status on your projects, and can automatically organize all the information related to a particular project (tasks, appointments, files, contacts, notes, etc).

Here’s a video showing off the latest features (note: it has no voiceover):

Inevitably, ClearContext is going to end up being compared with Xobni, a popular Outlook plugin that we’ve written about extensively, but really the two products assist in different areas: Xobni excels at helping you to search through your email and better organize your contacts, while ClearContext is useful for organizing email into folders and creating projects around those emails. If you’re the kind of person who’s highly organized and who has a place for everything, ClearContext can help you with that organization by automatically suggesting the correct places to file your email, which is useful if you’re pursuing Inbox Zero, and its task management tools could help you establish a Getting Things Done (GTD) system around your inbox. On the other hand, if you’re the kind of person who relies on search tools to find old email, you’ll probably be better off with Xobni.

ClearContext Pro v5.1 costs $89.95 for new users, while upgrades from ClearContext Pro v4 cost $49.95. A free 30-day trial is available.

Let us know what you think of ClearContext in the comments.

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I know I’m going to sound like a snake oil salesman but I’ve found an answer — a tool for Windows users that when used, really used, will save you time and make you more productive.

ActiveWords is combination program launcher, text replacer, macro recorder, wizard, wonder and an incredible time saver.

At its core, ActiveWords lets you assign actions to trigger words that you type. These words perform a task or series of tasks that you’ve designated, from basic text substitution to complex macros or scripts.

A frequent complaint I hear about many of our favorite web applications is the number of clicks that it takes to accomplish any task. Clicks represent time and we’re busy folks.

We seem to have a different attitude to our desktop environments, though. We’ll click around mindlessly and repetitively to find and launch programs and documents. We’ll type the same text endlessly, keystroke after keystroke on our own PCs.  We’ll do the same actions every day and never complain to ourselves that we haven’t removed those barriers — those extra clicks.  That’s what ActiveWords does.

Think for a minute about the repetitive tasks that you do everyday, perhaps multiple times per day. A basic tenet of productivity is to automate repetitive actions or tasks and this is one way that ActiveWords can really help you. Adding a signature to your email or forum post, responding to an inquiry with a canned response, typing your address or phone number — all of these actions can be automated and triggered with a few keystrokes. These are just basic examples but the possibilities are unlimited — it’s staggering how many trigger words you’ll set up once you get started as you begin to examine your daily process.

ActiveWords also works tremendously well as a program or web launcher. I’ve got trigger words set up for web sites I visit regularly and other common applications, and I can pull them all up with just a few keystrokes. For example, no matter what else I’m working on or in, if I type “new task” followed by two spaces my Toodledo web app opens — poised and ready for me to add that new task.

The integration with Toodledo goes even further though; it’s one of many applications with an add-on pack available that allows easy access to common functions. Additional add-ins are available for Outlook, Clear Context, Mind Manager and others.  These help you get up and running quickly as they add pre-defined options to your ActiveWords setup to hook in to these programs.

There is actually a pretty extensive library of add-ins available to control everything from Windows functions to adding Google hooks. You can even add in-place arithmetic which is insanely useful once you get used to using it.

There is also a very powerful scripting language in ActiveWords that I’ve just recently begun to experiment with. Because it works at the OS level, it can interact with any interface — basically if you can access it via keyboard you can program it via an ActiveWord. ActiveWords works everywhere unlike, say, the macro or auto-complete functionality in a program like Microsoft Word.

There isn’t much of a learning curve to using ActiveWords but it does take some thought about the types of things to automate, how you want to name your trigger words, and how to actually trigger them.

The interface to ActiveWords is sparse, which is good. There is a menu bar available at the top of your screen and a keystroke triggered “Action Pad” can pop up to accept your ActiveWords. The interface appears a little dated, but honestly after a day or so you’ll likely end up turning off or disabling the visible portions.

One of the coolest things about ActiveWords is that you don’t have to  use the Action Pad or anything else to make it work, you can type your ActiveWords anywhere. I’ve got it configured so I just start typing my trigger word followed by two spaces and it does the rest, no matter where I am.

There are some instances where typing my trigger words does interfere with keyboard shortcuts (Gmail is a frequent culprit) so I move to the search box and type my trigger words there. ActiveWords automatically removes the trigger text after processing the request.

I do wish there was some sort of auto-complete functionality available for the active word triggers that I’ve forgotten. I find the lesser-used ones do get forgotten and while there is a search functionality, I liked how in a tool like Launchy it tries to guess the action based on my past usage.

ActiveWords does a decent job of recommending frequently used programs and documents and suggesting that I create a trigger word for them — it only takes a second to add items to the directory with the wizard-like prompts.

ActiveWords is currently for Windows PCs only. A very generous 60-day trial is available, which is plenty of time for you to decide if it’s working for you. My hunch is that when the trial ends you’ll stare blankly at your screen wondering why your triggers aren’t working, they really do become such an integral part of your workflow. And because it works so seamlessly you really don’t even think about the fact that you are using it — it’s just there.

Registration after the 60 days is $49.95 but that covers all the PCs that you use, so you can take advantage of the benefits if you jump between multiple machines like I do. It’s easy to import and export your directories but I’d love to see the ability to make sync easier.

I tend to be skeptical when I read reviews like this one. Could it really be that good? Can it really save me that much time? In this instance, the answer is a resounding yes.

Has ActiveWords boosted your productivity?

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