Email Solutions

With the introduction of e-mail and the ability to send messages across the internet, it was only a matter of time before people wanted to share more. Thus came the e-mail attachment. We can now send pictures, documents, spreadsheets, and many other types of files to our coworkers, friends and family. However, the email attachment came with its own set of challenges. The early challenges included dangerous file types and file sizes that exceeded mail box capacity. We have made progress dealing with the early challenges but our increased reliance on email for both work and personal use have created a new problem: losing those attachments as they’re buried in our inbox.

You’ve probably experienced losing track of an attachment. What options do we have for finding it? Of course there is the classic search. You try the person you received it from, filter through all the messages around the time you thought you received it. Rather inefficient, wouldn’t you say? In the end, the search will probably work and you will find your attachment. But what if you are not sure who sent it? You know it was from someone in a particular organization but you communicate with a variety of people in that organization. Of course you start searching by each potential person who sent the email. Still no luck. You know you received it around a certain time, like October. OK, now you start reading through all the email subject lines in October looking for that little paper clip icon indicating an attachment is in that particular email. After opening nearly 20 emails you finally found the attachment you are looking for.

These scenarios are not uncommon in the workplace. So what options are out there to better help you manage your attachments? Sadly there aren’t many. Most email attachment related add-ons help you avoid sending an email without an attachment that was intended to have one. Hosup Chung discusses a product called Forgotten Attachment Detector on his blog, http://hosup7.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/outlook-add-on-forgotten-attachment-detector/. Useful I suppose, but not solving our problem.

The best solution out there is Encore Suite from KM Sciences. Encore Suite allows you to view all attachments that relate to the conversation (its conversation threading is also amazing) and allows you to view all attachments from a person or organization. You can even forward just the attachment from a message. You no longer have to save the attachment and reattach it to a new email.

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If you’re anything like me, you know how quickly your email inbox can fill with unwanted junk. Unless you are a diligent deleter, before you know it you have an overpopulated inbox. A cluttered inbox causes a couple of frustrating problems. First, it makes finding what you are actually looking for more difficult and consumes a lot of unnecessary and valuable time. Additionally, it takes up space on your email server, as well as on your computer itself. Clutter can consume nearly 75% of your inbox. Whether you are using a web based service like Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail, or email through your employer or internet service provider, server space is always required to save the billions and billions of emails. Most email clutter comes from spam, duplicate and redundant emails, and duplicate and redundant attachments. So the question is: what can we do about it?

Microsoft has added a new feature to its Hotmail to deal with email clutter. Doug Gross at CNN discusses in detail in his article titled “Microsoft revamps Hotmail, takes on Google and Yahoo” (http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/05/18/hotmail.update/index.html?hpt=T2). Gross explains the new “sweep” feature that allows users to clean out their inbox in one fell swoop. With one click of your mouse, the user can select a single email sender, or multiple senders, and automatically delete every message from that sender. Although, Hotmail may be attempting to compete with only Gmail and Yahoo, email clutter is an issue that every email user deals with on a day to day basis.

Joe Kissel from macworld.com offers a few tips for cleaning your inbox in his article, “Empty your Inbox: Three easy steps to taming e-mail clutter once and for all”
(http://www.macworld.com/article/139510/2009/03/empty_your_inbox.html). He highlights both filing your emails and cleaning out old messages as methods to keeping your email relatively empty. These tips are helpful but time-consuming. Pragmatically speaking, folders are not the answer. Putting your emails in folders is like stuffing your drawers and closets with clothes you may not even want. By doing this, you will eventually run out of space and even worse, forget where you put those emails if you need them. Then you would have to search to relocate the email you are looking for . . . it’s all a bit much.

A quick internet search will reveal hundreds of manual tips for removing email clutter. After hours of sorting, filing and deleting you may think to yourself “why can’t my inbox do this automatically?” All the tips in the world won’t replace the ease of letting a program do this work for you.

Outlook users will be happy to know that inbox clutter will be a topic of the past. The latest version of Encore Suite (http://www.encoresuite.com) from KM Sciences has solved your problems. With a similar feature to Hotmail’s “sweep”, you can delete all emails from a particular sender, but that could still be a hassle when it comes to spam mail. No worries. With a quick scan from Encore Analytics, you can quickly identify all of the spam in your inbox, making it easy to delete them. The deletion is not automatic but the identification is. The biggest de-cluttering feature of Encore Suite is the EasyMailTrimmer. Another scan identifies all of the duplicate and redundant emails and attachments. Replying back and forth with someone can create copy after copy of the same content. EasyMailTrimmer can delete all of the duplicates and redundancies while leaving 100% of the unique content intact.

You can keep searching for all of the tips you want to clean out your inbox but in the end automated tools such as Hotmail’s “sweep” feature, Encore Analytics and Encore Suite, are the quickest and most efficient way to a clutter free inbox.

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If you asked an average computer user about email conversations, they would probably imagine that you were referring to the series of email responses that follow an original message, with a subject line stretching out with an infinite number of RE:’s before it. 

In fact, the email conversation, or conversation threading, is becoming more prevalently used by a variety of email providers.  Gmail by Google (www.gmail.com) is one of the first to adopt this conversation format, but there are still some problems with it.  Google essentially sorts conversations by the original subject line, stacking the emails on top of each other.  This can bury your conversations deep in your inbox since all subsequent responses are tied to the original.  Plus, if someone responds with a new subject line, the preexisting conversation is detached.  On his blog, philwilson.org, Phil Wilson talks about some of the flaws with Gmail’s conversation formatting (http://philwilson.org/blog/2005/06/gmail-conversations).  He says, “The machine is overlaying what it thinks is going on to what people are actually doing, and whilst it’s got a nice 80-90% success rate, it doesn’t succeed all the time.”

Microsoft with Outlook 2010 (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/) and an Outlook add-on called Xobni (www.xobni.com) both try its hand at email conversations as well.  Some of the features of the cleverly named add-on (INBOX, spelled backwards) are highlighted on technospot.net by Ashish Mota (http://www.technospot.net/blogs/how-threaded-email-conversations-work-in-outlook-office-2010/).  Xobni and Outlook 2010 have some features that give it a slight edge on Gmail, but it still has the same essential problem: it is grouping email messages by subject line.  Dave Stevenson at pcpro.uk discusses Outlook 2010’s failures in detail in his article “Why Outlook 2010’s conversation view doesn’t work” (http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/08/19/why-outlook-2010s-conversation-view-doesnt-work/).  Just like Gmail, Xobni and Outlook 2010 overlook the fact that sometimes in an email conversation, one of the participants may change the subject line, and this will merely start a completely new and different conversation in these applications. Gmail and Outlook 2010 also share an annoying feature where the resulting emails are grouped and moved, making it difficult to find the older emails. You have to know where the latest email is.

Encore Suite from KM Sciences (www.kmsciences.com), a small start-up company from Orange County, is the brainchild of founder Ed Tse, and is the best of the bunch when it comes to handling email conversations.  Encore Suite builds conversations based on either subject line, or the original starter email.  Tracking conversations in this way, it doesn’t matter if the subject line is changed.  It could be changed in every subsequent response and the conversation will still gel because all responses are sourced to the starter email.  Like Xobni, Encore Suite is an add-on to Microsoft Outlook, but unlike Xobni, Encore Suite can take emails from the same group and builds one complete email conversation. No other product on the market has this functionality.

The email landscape is changing and we are only in the beginning stages of the evolution of this technology.  Thanks to the advances of Google, Microsoft and KM Sciences, email conversations have a promising future.

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