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This review is about managing e-mails, which involves... umm... the management of e-mails. If you're like me, managing e-mails is what you spend far too much of your day doing already. So I'm not about to tell you how to create new directories in your favourite e-mail clients, go through the intricacies of selecting messages, and the finer points of dragging and dropping them into the newly created directories, or go into the subject of creating and tweaking e-mail client rules. Instead, what we are looking at here is software applications that specifically aid in the management of e-mails, particularly the advanced search and cataloguing features.
Before you jump to conclusions and ask "Isn't that the task of my e-mail client software?" the answer is yes and no. While most popular e-mail clients perform some limited e-mail management tasks, many basic functions are definitely lacking.
Personally, the unarchived inboxes for my several active e-mail accounts amount to tens of thousands of messages that I regularly need to refer back to and search for information. Short of creating many complex custom rules to apply to my inboxes -- which I am sure would set a world record of some sort in rule-based application, certainly to rival the largest firewalls and router configurations out there these days -- I'm stuck trying to search and manage them as best I can.
The software packages in this review are all Windows-based client side applications; none of them are server based. Each of them assists with either the sorting, searching, or archiving of e-mail messages.
What are the important things to look out for in a package like this?
- Depth of searching including the ability to string several search items together as well as include wildcards in searches.
- Speed of searching, along with depth of searching, is a very important feature to look for; time is money, after all.
- The ability to archive and to search archives.
