It might not be as sexy as Xobni, but Outlook users who find that plugin useful should check out ClearContext Personal. It too intends to make email more manageable, albeit with a greater focus on projects than people (you won’t find any attempt to turn email contacts into a social network here).
ClearContext Personal has a number of tricks up its sleeve. First, it analyzes 30-40 characteristics of each message that hits your inbox to determine its priority. Messages deemed important, semi-important, or unimportant are color coded as such, and you can sort by this prioritization so that all your most important emails show up on top.
You can also organize your messages into topics and then view all of the contacts and attachments from messages within these topics. Attachments can be seen in a panel below your messages or viewed in a fullscreen attachment explorer that allows for file previews.
To help users deal with an overload of social network notifications, ClearContext automatically places these notification messages into special folders. It then summarizes the type of notifications you have received so that you don’t have to view them one-by-one. In a panel below your inbox, for example, you can view how many friend requests, messages, confirmations, and invitations you have received on Facebook. If you go into the special Facebook folder, you can choose to view notifications by these types. Similar functionality is available for LinkedIn, and ClearContext can be extended with other services that offer their own filters via a simple XML file.
There’s a handful of other features, such as a panel for keeping track of your threaded conversations, as you would in Gmail. An “unsubscribe” button also lets you opt out of future replies to a thread (for when people get a little too comfortable hitting the “reply all” button).
The first 200 users who sign up with the code “techcrunch” will be invited to download the plugin, which launches in private beta today. A batch of randomly-selected users will also get free licenses to ClearContext’s paid project management plugin, as well as invites to the upcoming professional version of its personal software, which offers some extra bells and whistles.
More manageable? Very questionable!
Thanks Mark..I hope it will not eat much memory as Xobni.
I don’t know that I want algorithms deeming what is important to me. Despite that, I think this would be useful for people who get thousands of emails per week.
For the rest of us, I’d prefer to see emails work better as a group collaboration medium. As an example, email lists with people making good use of subject lines creates email that is easy to triage. If there are good web archives, you can delete most email unread, and use the archive to follow up later, if necessary.
Dan,
The prioritization algorithms in ClearContext Personal can be as automatic or as directed as you like. They can be limited to simple things like just highlighting emails based on whether or not you’ve exchanged emails with the sender before or they can even be skipped completely.
The broad theme of ClearContext is about treating email differently based on the nature of the message/information. I’ll write a blog post about that in more detail later, but using subject lines and keywords to make email triage easy and streamline group email communications is imo a key part of effective email use - and something I think next-generation email tools need to support in new and innovative ways.
Deva (ClearContext CEO/co-founder)
Is there any such plug-in for the Mac and MAIL to improve the management of mails / tasks / projects ?
I’ve used ClearContext for years and find it invaluable for prioritizing and filing my email. I also use it for converting emails to tasks and calendar items - I couldn’t work without it!
I’ve installed Xobni a couple of times, on both occasions I’ve found its interface very pretty, but it is slooooooooow and causes Outlook to crash on occasion. I’m sticking with ClearContext for the foreseeable future!
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I guess the TechCrunch Betas must be used up…..
“Thanks for your interest in the ClearContext Personal Beta. We will be
expanding access to the beta in the coming weeks and will notify you
when an invite is available.”
Oh Well…………..
Above comments on XOBNI seem accurate
Les (and others),
Thanks so much for your interest. The response has been overwhelming. We’ve already sent out over 200 techcrunch invites, and it’s not even morning yet here in San Francisco. We’re rolling out OL 2007 invites first and will add OL 2003 users in the very near future. We’ll also open up more techcrunch invites starting later today, so keep signing up using the techcrunch code and we’ll do our best to get as many invites out as soon as possible.
Great review. Both ClearContext and Xobni are doing really innovative things with email and social networking around your email contact list.
Email contacts are our natural social (work) network. Xobni has done some interesting work in this area.
Workflow and processing rules for email are crude at this point. ClearContext takes it to a new level. Good stuff!
Don Dodge
http://dondodge.typepad.com/th.....xt-fo.html
Thanks for the post. I prefer Xobni - it’s a really powerful thing!
fOR GOODNESS SAKE PEOPLE, JUST USE OUTLOOK!
I’ve purchased and use clearcontext for inbox clean-up, e-mail sorting and filing. I use Xobni for searching for contacts and content. I could not live without either since I’ve adopted them (I’m one of those people who receives 1000s of e-mails / day). I should really explore the deeper functionality of Clearcontext but do not feel, to some degree like the 3rd commenter, that some of this functionality is intuitive. That said, my slow adoption is likely a result of not taking the time to rtfm.
I love my Xobni but the fact that it slows down my outlook and makes it crash every few hours, makes me want to try this clearcontext.
1000s of e-mails / week rather …
Chalk me up as another long-term ClearContext user that can’t function without it. Fantastic program that gets better with every version. I came onto CC through Michael Linenberger’s Outlook productivity solution.
I don’t use the prioritization or categorization. What’s invaluable to me is the task/calendar/email functionality.
The threading within my inbox, as well as the ability to quickly convert an email to task or appointment and then file the entire email thread to my archive folder (all with easy Alt+X keyboard shortcuts, no mouse required) is invaluable. It also files all my sent mail in my email archive folder instead of sent mail, so I have a full record of all my email communication in one folder, and I use the followup and task delegation features constantly.
I process hundreds of emails a day this way, while tracking and working on dozens of tasks (both my own and tasks I’ve delegated). All while consistently zeroing out my inbox, sometimes multiple times a day.
On the subject of innovations in email, our recently launched Email Center Pro service solves a related problem, making it easy for teams and small businesses to manage shared email accounts like info@yourcompany.com.
To learn more or try a free account, go to http://www.emailcenterpro.com.
ClearContext (and therefore Outlook) is the absolute biggest thing I miss since going Mac. In my last role I had to manage anywhere from 750-1000 messages a day and ClearContext helped me keep on top of it with ease. I love the topic assignment and filing mechanisms!
I’ve been able to mimic the color-coded prioritization scheme in Entourage through a whole lot of rules, but it’s not nearly as robust–or automatic!–as ClearContext.
hmm.. i tried Clear Context before. Goal was to keep my inbox healthy and file messages easily.. But i found it pretty heavy with lots complicated functionality. It was fairly intrusive… slowed down Outlook to the point that it actually turned out to be counter productive. Had to uninstall it. Wonder if their new version is any better…!
Neil,
We’re listening. One of the key design goals of ClearContext Personal is to simplify and lighten the product as much as possible so we can provide immediate value to people with the absolute minimum of complexity. We’ll be using feedback from the Beta Program to identify ways to streamline the product even more. The next couple of updates will simplify a few areas of the product that still require a little bit of manual setup.
I dont think we can ever get to manageable email…….can we?