Friday, May 30, 2008
Take Control of Your Outlook Inbox

Binge and purge, binge and purge. Until recently, that's been my approach to managing my Outlook inbox. I'd realize the clutter had reached several thousand messages, then spend time over days, even weeks, weeding and filing to get it back down to manageable size. Then I installed three Outlook add-ons from a San Francisco company, TechHit: SimplyFile, EZDetach and MessageSave. Within a day, I'd pared my inbox down from more than 2,000 messages to around 400. Not perfect by organizational-purist standards, but a huge accomplishment for me. More importantly, my newly lean inbox has remained that way and I generally know precisely where to find saved e-mails.

Of the three add-ons, the real miracle worker is SimplyFile. The company describes it as an "intelligent filing assistant" for Outlook that will "learn and adapt to your filing habits." What this means is that it "predicts" the folder in which to file a message and lets you do it with one click. It is a fast learner -- no sooner had I installed it than it was suggesting the correct folder more often than not.

Filing options are presented through a toolbar it adds to Outlook. As you read your e-mail, a window in the toolbar suggests the folder in which to file it. If the suggestion is correct, click the "File Message" button and you are done. If not, click the window to bring up a drop-down menu of its next closest suggestions. Pick one and the message is filed there. Alternatively, a second button, labeled "QuickPick," brings up a list of all your folders and lets you scroll through them or search by name. As soon as you begin typing a name, the list begins to shorten to names that match.


Two other buttons on the SimplyFile toolbar, "Task It" and "Schedule It," make short work of following up on an e-mail by assigning it to your to-do list or adding it to your calendar. So if you receive an e-mail regarding a matter that needs follow-up in a week, click Task It to open a new task and the e-mail will be inserted into it. Rather than save e-mails in your inbox as reminders, add them to your task list or calendar and you'll actually remember them.

SimplyFile also manages the e-mail you send. Click the "send" button, and a dialogue box appears suggesting a folder in which to file the sent message. That keeps your messages sent to someone or about something in the same folders as the messages you've received. You can also choose to save it in your sent items folder or not to save it at all. If you'd rather not have SimplyFile ask about your sent messages, you can turn off this option.

The other two add-ons I mentioned, EZDetach and MessageSave, are additional tools for managing e-mail. EZDetach, as its name suggests, is a utility for saving and categorizing e-mail attachments. The two main reasons for using this are to better manage attachments and to reduce the size of your Outlook .pst file. With just a mouse-click or two, you can remove attachments from a single message or from all messages in a folder and file them elsewhere on your computer. You can create rules wizards for filing and naming attachments or set preferences each time. Naming options allow you, for example, to append the date you received the message and the sender's name. You can even reattach a file later if, for example, you want to forward the e-mail with the original attachment.

MessageSave is a simple utility that makes it easy to back-up, save and file e-mail messages, tasks and contacts outside of Outlook. This could be useful for saving messages in the same folders as other client documents, for storing messages for legal compliance, or for keeping an audit trail. It also helps manages the size of your .pst file. As with EZDetach, you can customize the rules for saving files in a number of ways. Files can be saved as text or in .msg, .eml, mbox and vCard formats.

The price for these add-ons is $39.95 per user for SimplyFile, $39.97 per user for EZDetach, and $49.95 per user for MessageSave. You can buy a bundle of all three for $99.95 per user. Each allows you to download a 30-day free trial. They work with Outlook versions beginning with 2000, but not with Outlook Express. If you are looking for a leaner, better-organized Outlook, start with SimplyFile. The other add-ons work well, but their usefulness to you will depend on your own filing and archiving routines.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 9:10 AM, , links to this post

Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Free Tool Recovers Deleted Files

Pandora Corp. has launched the latest beta version of Pandora Recovery, its software for finding and recovering deleted files on your PC. The program scans your hard drive and builds an index of existing and deleted files and directories. Once the scanning is complete, you have several options for managing deleted files. It works only on NTFS-formatted drives -- which you have if you're running Windows XP or Vista.

The best feature about this program may be its price -- free. Download the program for free at this page.

The second best feature is its ease of use. The program is quick to install and quick to learn. A "wizard" took only moments to index my hard drive. You are given the option of searching for a particular file or browsing all deleted files. I had no success with the search option, because the deleted files' names were altered. The browse feature seemed easier to use. The index shows all files on your computer, with deleted files tagged with a red X. But with a click of a button, you can change the display to show deleted files only.

As you browse the deleted files, you have the option to "preview" certain types of files before recovering them. This works only with text and image files. If the file is corrupt, the preview will not work. To recover a file, simply highlight it and select that option. The program prompts you for a location to store the recovered file, suggesting that it be on a separate drive from that containing the deleted file.

OK so far. But my attempts to recover deleted files met with mixed results. I was able to recover several text and image files. But every time I tried to recover a Microsoft Word file, I got only a jumbled portion of metadata. I do not know whether the problem is with Pandora or with Word. I even tried creating new Word files, deleting them and immediately recovering them, with no success. I did not attempt to recover executable files.

The problem with file recovery is that deleted files are quickly corrupted. The file remains on your computer, but the disk space it occupies becomes available to be written over by other files. As new files are created or new software installed, the deleted file becomes partially or completely overwritten. If the deleted file has not been overwritten, it should be recoverable. In some cases, partially or fully overwritten files can be recovered, but they most likely will be partially or completely corrupted.

Which leads to another nice feature in Pandora: Right click on a file to view its properties. This will tell you whether and to what extent the file has been overwritten.

Bottom line: If you need to recover a deleted file, try Pandora Recovery. Although my results were mixed, the program is fast, easy to use and, best of all, free.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 5:54 PM, , links to this post