I currently use MS Outlook and NEO (Nelson Email Organizer) to sort my email. NEO is nice, but it doesn’t do everything that I want it to.
What is the best software to organize my email? I recieve several hundred emails a day, of which maybe 20 are important. I would like a system that:
– Allows me to access a number of POP accounts
– Allows me to respond “from” a variety of accounts
– Automatically sorts emails based on a variety of custom rules (email from certain people gets treated differently)
– Allows me to categorize emails into different categories and easily access those categories (like Gmail)
– Is a client-side application or plugin (Gmail is great, but I need to be able to work offline)
– Allows fast access to a by-contact view of my mail — I need to be able to very quickly sort by sender regardless of where the email is stored. (NEO is great at this).
I don’t care if I stick with the “folder” metaphor or not. Thunderbird?
One especially-important feature would be the ability to tag a single email with multiple categories. Outlook (as I currently use it) allows categories, but I have to manually type them in each time. That’s not acceptable. I’d like to just be able to click and add an email to “personal” “to-do” and “finance” all at once, without having to type each category name out or do a lot of right-clicking around.
Mozilla Thunderbird 2’s tag feature is close but not quite there. Is there any system that has a tag toolbar that just allows clicking straight onto tags to mark messages, or to find all messages with that tag? In Thunderbird one has to open the tag button before applying a tag, and then actually search by tag later. I’d love a system that got away from the folder metaphor. I know that I’m being picky about extra clicks here and there, but they add up with hundreds of messages a day.
The save-search-as-folder thing in Thunderbird 2 is cool — that acutally solves all but 2 problems:
1 — Still takes too many clicks to tag something.
2 — Still no fast “find all messages by a person, regardless of the folder” feature like NEO.
Thanks for the good answer re: Thunderbird, it’s very much appreciated.