inluminent

I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook 2000 for about 19 months now. I use it everyday as an email client and organizer at the office. I’d consider myself a ‘power-email’ user, in that I get 200+ emails on a daily basis. I get email from clients, prospective clients, vendors, friends, newsletter publishers and spammers. My employer uses SpamAssassin at the server level so not a lot of spam gets through, but, some does on a daily basis, at least one or two email messages are spam.

In that 19 months, I’ve slowly learned how to use Outlook better than when I first started using it, but, I still have a ways to go. Outlook doesn’t do a lot of things I’d like it to: things I’m used to like ‘labeling’ of email messages or ‘coloring’ of subject lines, based on custom criteria. The built in ‘rules’ manager is horrendous, in that its only accessible through the damned MS built ‘wizard’ and that wizard is horribly complex, in my opinion.

To be fair, I think a lot of the problems I have with Outlook 2000 have been solved with Outlook 2002, or with a more advanced version of Exchange Server, but my company is so short sighted and cheap that we’re using a version of Exhange that’s at least 3 releases old and there’s no upgrade path in sight (in fact the last upgrade proposal was shot down by the owner of the company).

About a month ago, I read about Inbox Buddy on Scott’s FuzzyBlog!. Inbox Buddy looked promising.

I downloaded it and installed it on my desktop PC at work. After working out a few bugs with Scott and his developers related to our Exchange server based installation (and effectively helping beta test our particular type of set up for them) we got it working perfectly.

Inbox Buddy is a tremendous upgrade to the default Microsoft Outlook 2000 installation. It does a lot of things I wanted Outlook to do, and a lot that I didn’t even know I’d like Outlook to do, but now wonder how I got along without these features.

A few things that it does particularly well include:

• Color codes my email
• Manages email for me based on relationships
• Notifies me when I receive email from particularly important clients or contacts
• Kills the last little bit of Spam that makes it through to my email client

After a quick training session (took less than 15 minutes) upon the first installation, Inbox Buddy started working, and the coolest thing about it was that it just worked.

I can’t really explain how much I like having Inbox Buddy working for me in the background, scanning new email for spam and organizing my email, filing away old email, pushing the important email up to the top of my Inbox and unimportant stuff to the bottom… but I can tell you that I like it.

I like it a lot.

I’m hooked and I’m ready to pay for it once it’s a shipping product.

It’s still beta, but its truly once of the most advanced pieces of beta software I’ve ever used. If you’re interested, download it now to get a feel for what its like. When it actually ships, I’ll mention it again so that you know its ready for prime-time.

This message has been brought to you by an extremely happy beta tester.