Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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A few days ago I downloaded and installed SpeedFiler.
SpeedFiler is an add-in for Outlook that “turbocharges” a core aspect of email triage: Filing Messages.
I figure that I file about 30% of the email I receive. I probably reply and delete 50% and defer/create tasks out of the remainder.
I also have a few hundred folders in Outlook. Many of these folders are for Distribution Lists, and I never file to those. However, I have a Project Hierarchy detailed here and I file things there a few times a day. Doing so via Drag and Drop is inconvenient (because I usually keep the folder list collapsed) and the Outlook Move To drop down is to small and the dialog too limited (not all the folders are expanded and I can’t figure out what rules it uses for persisting state).
Anyway, SpeedFiler is a beauty of a program because it makes filing fast. Basically, SpeedFiler will override Outlook’s Move To Shortcut Keys and pop open it’s own dialog. Once open you just fire off a few characters in the folder name and it collapses the list of folders to any matches. This works great when you also have collisions (more than one folder with the same name) as it shows you all the matches with their full paths.
I happen to use SpeedFiler in conjunction with ClearContext. They actually compliment each other quite well. You see, when I file something into one of my Topic folders, CC automatically assigns a topic to that item. Since many of my topic names are things like “Hotmail/Kahuna” etc, I have to type the full path in CC’s Assign Topic button. This requires that I type most of the topic name, but with SpeedFiler I just type “Kah” and get a match. I can also file messages to any folders in Outlook (including those in my Hotmail account from Outlook Connector).
SpeedFiler has a another nifty feature which allows you to navigate to a folder quickly in the same way that you might file a message to a folder. This is also a big timesaver.
SpeedFiler is simple, well written, and saves me a few minutes a day as well as makes Filing emails fun.
Here is a quick example. I get an email that belongs in the “Reference” folders.
in step 2 you get this dialog.
Doesn’t get easier than that.
I have a few feature requests for SpeedFiler, namely that I can turn off the toolbars in Outlook (I just use the shortcut keys) and the other is that the Outlook boot scan get faster.
Oh, I also recommend subscribing to the author, Itzy Sabo’s blog, Email Overloaded.