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Email Prioritizer Adds 'Pause' Button, Auto-Ranking to Email
Posted by Kevin Purdy at 10:00 PM on August 20, 2008
Windows with Outlook 2007 and an Exchange account only: Email Prioritizer, a new Outlook plugin from Microsoft labs, gives email receivers the tools to both "pause" their email and have it ranked by priority on a scale of one to three stars. Once you've installed the plugin, you'll notice a new toolbar with a "Do Not Disturb" option, which can be set from 10 minutes to 4 hours (or, smartly, until a meeting you've planned expires) and delays the delivery of mail to you on the client side. Not exactly an Inbox Zero approach, but it might work for do-or-die deadlines. More innovative is a ranking system that automatically sorts your mail based on how it was sent and who it's from, derived, in part, from Microsoft employees. Let's take a look at some of the options:
Photo by CNET Networks
There are more specific filters available, like "Mail from people I'm meeting with in the next 2 days," "Mail from my manager" and from "above my manager," and "Mail with these words in the subject line." There's also the option to mark emails from specific people as lower priorities—something those of us on certain PR folks' email lists can truly appreciate.
We couldn't test out Email Prioritizer's ranking system on our inboxes, as there's no Exchange server running at Lifehacker HQ, and free Exchange provider Mail2Web has yet to roll out Outlook client compatibility on its free accounts (the kind that get you free "push" mail and contacts on your iPhone.
While you're empowering your Outlook inbox to stand up up to less-important email, check out these other email innovations you want in your inbox, both in concept and in download-right-now form.
Have you tried out the Email Prioritizer? What do you think of adding a "Do Not Disturb" and auto-prioritizer to your inbox? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
Shawn in RI
Posted 11:02 PM 20/8/08
@Kandy477: The trouble with shutting down Outlook is that you no longer get those all-important (at least for me) reminders about meetings & tasks.
Shawn in RI
Kandy477
Posted 10:53 PM 20/8/08
I can't see how this would help me any. These filters can be easily created within Outook manually, and the "Pause" button adds NO functionality since you can simply shut down Outlook if you don't want to be bothered with Email for a few minutes.
Kandy477
Troy F.
Posted 11:27 PM 20/8/08
The pause button seems useless if you already turned off mail notifications...which you should have done already. If I need to check my e-mail, I'll open the window back up and there it is.
The prioritization sounds interesting, though. I'll give that a whirl.
Troy F.
TorumSie
Posted 11:25 PM 20/8/08
Also, if you shut it down you don't have access to emails that you might need while in the meetings.
I'm downloading now to see if it can help me tame my work inbox, we get multiple company/division wide emails daily that I want to try the prioritizing out on and I can see the pause function being at least semi-useful when doing training that I need to access certain emails during, but don't need all my trainees seeinga bunch of new emails coming in during the class.
TorumSie
mrs_helm
Posted 11:45 PM 20/8/08
Since it has a large portion of the corporate market share, it is worth noting that Lotus Notes R7 & 8 has similar features built in.
Mail preferences allow you to set sortable "Attention indicators" based on the number of message recipients and whether your name is in the To or cc field. It has a feature to highlight messages from certain people (i.e. your boss). You can also set up rules to move those PR people's messages out of your inbox into a folder, or straight to the trash.
New to R8 is the ability to set your Out of Office for short periods of time - such as when you are in meetings. The difference between this and "do not disturb" is that the people emailing you would KNOW you aren't available, instead of thinking you've ignored their message. It's a personal preference which you'd rather do - notify them or just make them wait and wonder.
And of course, you have always been able to disable the new message notifications, or to change how often Notes polls for new messages and notifies you.
mrs_helm
Lifehacked
Posted 12:36 AM 21/8/08
Useful or not, Microsoft once again displays its Satanic side by adding another toolbar to my app. Perhaps a button or two would work, but NO...
Lifehacked
PhilHut
Posted 1:54 AM 21/8/08
Hmmm, let's see: It only works with Outlook 2007, only works with Exchange, and sends my activity back to Microsoft. Oh, yeah, that's reeeeeeal useful. Not.
PhilHut
omegakumar
Posted 3:31 AM 21/8/08
@PhilHut: it might be reeeeeeal useful for the large percent of the working population who DO use Outlook 2007 with MS Exchange. At the very least they may want to see if it's even someeeeeewhat useful. Further, where did you find the 'sends activity back to Microsoft' caveat? If it's usage statistics you are referring to, MS tends to ask you to opt-in, rather than having to opt-out.
omegakumar
KevinEldon
Posted 8:08 AM 21/8/08
For the 'pause' button to work you have to use their custom views. This didn't play very nice w/ the way I want to work.
KevinEldon
SpudDude
Posted 7:56 AM 21/8/08
In addition to turning off those attention-grabbing notifications that can keep you distracted from an important task, simply changing the connection to Work Offline would accomplish this as well.
Once the crisis project is complete, you can once again return to your being overwhelmed by email state.
SpudDude
brad
Posted 9:54 AM 21/8/08
@omegakumar: Because it's a prototype, MS requires that you opt into usage tracking to use the add-in.
It's pretty exciting to see Microsoft take an active interest in the email overload problem. At ClearContext, we've been prioritizing and and organizing email in Outlook for years in both our free and paid products. We've posted our thoughts on Email Prioritizer on our blog at [blog.clearcontext.com]
If you're interested in trying out our latest free beta software that includes email prioritization, do not disturb functionality, automated filing and works on Outlook 2003/2007 and POP or Exchange, sign up at [www.clearcontext.com] and enter invite code lifehacker for priority access.
brad
pitashi
Posted 4:44 AM 22/8/08
Huh, this is interesting. Someone was telling me about a workaround for this same functionality recently too. I use the Xonbi addin and Outlook Track-It to keep track of the emails I send other people.
pitashi