Outlook users, have hope. SenderOK can help you dig your way out from your e-mail avalanche. This free add-in integrates directly into Outlook 2003 and 2007, and gives you a variety of tools for cutting through e-mail clutter. Spend just a little time with it, and you’ll likely get a productivity boost.
When you first install SenderOK, it analyzes all of your sent and received e-mail. Based on the patterns of what it finds, it determines who are those most important people with whom you communicate, and what types of messages are most important to you. Based on that, it sorts incoming email into different folders depending on their level of importance: Routine, Important, and VIP. That way, you can see at a glance what e-mail you need to pay attention to. You can also give it specific instructions, such as to always put e-mail from your boss in the VIP folder. The program continues to learn from your behavior what is important and what isn’t, so that the longer you use it, the more effective it becomes.
SenderOK does much more as well. It shows you a history of all of your e-mail exchanges–both by thread and by person–including attachments sent and received. It also alerts you to incoming mail, both with balloon tips, and with voice notification. You’ll likely want to turn off the voice notification, because it quickly gets annoying. The voice itself is fine, but you use this add-in because your e-mail is already overwhelming.
Any Outlook users suffering from e-mail overload will want to give SenderOK a try–and that means most of us.