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Outlook Email Notifications for Important Messages

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:58:32 +0000

Most email notifiers inform you whenever messages have been received in a connected email account. These programs usually make no distinctions between important messages and unimportant ones, which can be a issue of the account is regularly flooded with spam, newsletters and other non-time-relevant messages.

The free Microsoft Outlook add-in Important Mail Alert changes this by allowing you to specify exactly when you want to be notified. The program installs itself automatically, and Outlook users find its entry in the Outlook interface after installation. The Ablebits tab displays a single button that displays or hides the add-in configuration screen in Outlook.

The program supports keyword based rules and will look in the mail subject and body for selected phrases. This is the core difference to Outlook’s own rule based system which can only be configured to look for keywords in the subject of the email.

Keyword only rules are somewhat limited on the other hand, as it is not possible to link keywords to senders for instance or integrate the system into Outlook’s own rule based system.

Alerts are then displayed as notifications on the screen and in the program’s alert tab.

A click on the configuration icon opens the list of mail accounts that you want the rules to be valid for.

Lets take a closer look at the benefits the add-in provides. We have already mentioned that it will not only search the messages subject but also the body text and the to field. That’s however not the only improvement over Outlook’s rule based system. Important Email Alert in fact runs completely independent, which means that you will receive alerts even if the message is moved by Outlook’s own rules system.

Important Email Alert besides that is compatible with Microsoft’s Exchange Server, and offers to open mails with a single click in its interface. The add-in is easy to setup and use, even though it would be great to have additional filtering options available.

Outlook users who want to be notified when email subjects, bodies or recipients are mentioned can download and install the Outlook add-on from the developer website.

The add-on is compatible with Outlook 2003, 2007 and Outlook 2010, provided they run on a 32-bit or 64-bit edition of Microsoft Windows. The add-in furthermore requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 to be installed on the system. (via Nirmal TV)

MailTriage For Outlook, Manage Email More Efficiently

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 17:02:26 +0000

Microsoft’s desktop email client Outlook offers a conversations view which users can activate under the View ribbon toolbar. What it does is that it groups emails from the same sender or group of senders together so that it becomes easier to access all of them at once. Very handy if you need to read a previous email of a conversation.

Still, it does nothing more than that which may not be enough for some users. That’s where MailTriage for Outlook 2010 steps in. The add-is is currently freely available for home and business users. It is not clear if it will remain free or if the developers will start to charge for it.

The add-in is compatible with Microsoft Outlook 2010 and requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 to be installed on the system. You can download the Outlook add-in from the developer website. It is supplied as a setup file that you need to execute on your local system. The setup will install the add-in automatically. It requires an Internet connection during installation.

It adds a new conversation view pane to Outlook. This pane, which you see above in action, displays all conversations of the active folder in list view. You see the number of emails, the sender, subject, last received email and size of all emails in the interface. It is possible to sort the columns, for instance by size which can be handy for deleting or archiving large email conversations that are no longer needed.

A status report with a preview of each message is displayed on the right of the conversation view which can provide a quick overview of the conversation.

The add-in comes with a rule manager that offers to create basic or complex custom rules for grouping conversations. A basic example would be to group incoming emails based on a selected keyword. This rule manager is available under the right-click context menu. You can use the context menu to delete email conversations right from the MailTriage view which is usually a lot faster than deleting the emails in the selected Outlook folder.

Outlook 2010 users who are interested in MailTriage can download the add-in free of charge from the developer website. I was not able to get the program running on a 64-bit system. It worked fine on a 32-bit system though.

Update: The MailTriage website is no longer available. The add-in can still be downloaded from third party websites such as Softpedia. It is however very likely that it will eventually stop working as it is no longer being updated.

Microsoft Outlook Data Export Add-In

Martin Brinkmann — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:39:34 +0000

Microsoft Outlook is a desktop email client that is part of the Microsoft Office software suite. The email client does not come with a lot of options to export data like emails, notes, appointments or contacts into other formats or applications. That’s where the Microsoft Outlook Data Export Add-In comes into play. The free add-in provides the means to export data from Outlook into various other formats so that they can be imported into other applications or processed directly.

The add-in is compatible with Microsoft Outlook 2007 and will install a new toolbar into the application after installation. It will also install various runtimes that are needed to run the Outlook add-in.

The options to export the data from Microsoft Outlook is then available from the new toolbar. It is here possible to export Outlook emails, notes, appointments, contacts or tasks into the following formats: MSG, unicode MSG, RTF, TXT, CSV, ICS, vCard, HTML, XML

The user can either select an Outlook folder or single items for the export of the data. Outlook Data Export can be downloaded from the program’s page over at the Codeplex website. It is only compatible with Microsoft Office 2007.

Microsoft Research ESL Assistant

Martin Brinkmann — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:48:53 +0000

People who learned English as their second language usually make different mistakes than English natives. This can be attributed to a number of factors with the differences between their native language and English being a major one. Computer programs that correct spelling errors are nowadays provided for most operating systems. They usually use a dictionary and compare the words written by a user against the words in the dictionary. Only a few programs can check for grammatical errors and those that do are usually not sophisticated enough to be of great help.

Microsoft Research has created an online tool called the ESL Assistant which aims to correct errors that are typical for ESL (English as a Second Language) users. The tool is provided as a web form and as a plugin for Microsoft Outlook.

Microsoft Research ESL Assistant has been developed in Silverlight which needs to be installed to access the website. The website itself uses a basic layout. The top form is used to copy English text into it. The online tool will then check the text for errors and display these with suggestions on how to fix them in the lower form. Errors are underlined in the first form and it is possible to use the controls to go forward or backward. It is also possible to click on an underlined word or phrase to go directly to its suggestions.

Not every suggestion offered by ESL Assistant is correct. A check on Microsoft’s Bing search engine displays a percentage ratio for all suggested terms which could be an indicator aiding in picking the right phrase. The final decision has to be made by the user.

The Microsoft Outlook add-in is compatible with Microsoft Outlook 2007. It will place a new button in the Outlook taskbar which will open the ESL Assistant website when it is clicked. The email message is automatically analyzed and corrections are displayed.

The ESL Assistant website contains the web form and the Microsoft Outlook add-in download.

Microsoft Outlook SMS Add-in

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 15:16:45 +0000

The Microsoft Outlook SMS Add-in adds SMS sending functionality to Microsoft Outlook 2003 and Microsoft Outlook 2007. Before you begin to rejoice thinking of all the money that you can save you should notice that the add-in only works with a cell phone connected to the computer system. That is a bit of a turn off for many users but it might still appeal to some who prefer to use a real keyboard when writing SMS.

The process of sending SMS in Microsoft Outlook has been designed to resemble that of sending emails in the email client. This means that SMS can be saved as drafts and printed as well as send out to the recipient. The sent items are extended by a SMS subfolder that contains all the SMS messages that have been sent out from Microsoft Outlook.

The major advantage of the Microsoft Outlook SMS Add-in is the use of a computer keyboard to type the message. Other factors include the ability to copy and paste text, the use of proof reading tools in Outlook and to lookup and resolve phone numbers to existing Microsoft Outlook contacts.

The Microsoft Outlook SMS Add-in will be automatically available in its own toolbar after installation. It does have a few restrictions though, the most notable are that it can only send out normal SMS message, and that it cannot receive messages.