How to improve your Outlook

But like a real foundation, it can be built upon. And thank goodness, many companies have Outlook plug-ins and add-ons that make using this ubiquitous software less frustrating and often almost enjoyable.

Mind you, I still find it annoying that I have to pay for plug-ins to handle tasks that Outlook really should do out of the box. But at least there are solutions to some of Outlook's most vexing faults. Here are the tools I'm using right now…

Vexation No. 1: You can't search Outlook
Solution Lookout

It is stunning to me that I can search the accumulated online knowledge of humanity faster than my own local email in-box. Thank you Google, and shame on you Microsoft. If a user's email archive gets bigger than a few hundred messages, search becomes so slow as to be nearly unusable. Sadly, many people keep gigabytes of archived email on their system. With Microsoft's search tools, it might as well be filed in a black hole instead of on a hard disk.

There are several aftermarket tools that can search Outlook's email boxes. I used X1 Search for a while -- it has the very cool feature of displaying your search results as you type in your query. Even Google can't do that. But with X1, you have to search your email, files and attachments separately, which is a bit of a drag. So currently I'm using Lookout. It's a bit slower than X1 but a million times faster than Outlook's own search, and it integrates with Outlook very nicely, living in the toolbar much as Google's search bar lives in Internet Explorer. It also searches all your email messages, attachments and hard disk files at once. It's incredibly handy, and I find myself using it several times a day.

All the Outlook search tools have to index your messages and files, and this computer-intensive task can slow down your system when you need it the most. So I set my Lookout program to index my files once a day, late at night, when I'm not likely to be sitting in front of my PC.

Vexation No. 2: Outlook can't read newsgroups or RSS feeds
Solution NewsGator

Outlook Express, the free email application that comes with Windows, has a very nice feature: it also works as a reader for newsgroups, the public forums on just about every topic under the sun. Outlook, for some reason, does not read newsgroups.

Outlook also doesn't read RSS, the emerging new format through which blogs and Web sites (such as CNET) publish their headlines. I can't really fault Microsoft for this yet since RSS is a relatively new online publishing protocol. But smaller companies have stepped up to the plate with very good solutions for this need.

In particular, I'm presently using NewsGator to get RSS feeds and newsgroups into a folder in my Outlook system. So instead of surfing the Web every morning to see what's new on the sites I like, I just read the current headlines that are always in my News folder. It's a secret weapon and allows me to keep up with the news much more effectively than people who aren't RSS users.

Some people prefer to read their RSS feeds in a standalone application or in their Web browser. There are tools for that too; here at CNET many people swear by the browser plug-in Pluck. But I live in Outlook, and that's where I like to read my news.

Vexation No. 3: Spam!
Solution Outlook 2003 or MailFrontier

This is my third vexation -- not my first, since Outlook 2003 finally has anti-spam technology that works pretty well. Outlook 2003 is part of Office 2003, which is, for the most part, an incremental upgrade to Office XP. The spam filter in Outlook is a good reason to upgrade, but if that's your only reason for doing so, it makes for a very expensive anti-spam solution.

If you aren't using the latest version of Outlook, there are plug-ins that can help. Until I upgraded, I was using MailFrontier, which does a very good job of filtering spam email to a quarantine folder, where you can later review your junk -- or just delete it outright. Unlike Microsoft's own anti-spam technology, add-ons such as this one are highly configurable. MailFrontier, for example, can respond to senders of messages that look spammish but might not be. You can also adjust sliders to filter out language, gambling come-ons -- you name it.

Vexation No. 4: Decaying contact data
Solution Plaxo

My Outlook contact list has more than 3,000 names in it. Unfortunately, much of the contact information (company affiliation, email addresses and phone numbers) is out of date. Outlook has no simple way to keep your contact list updated. A few start-ups, such as Plaxo and GoodContacts, have clever solutions that allow you to automatically request updates from people in your contact list. Better yet, if one Plaxo member updates his or her contact information, that info will automatically replicate to other Plaxo members, with no manual intervention required.

Plaxo is a highly controversial product since the company keeps a record of your address book and, theoretically, has the capability to sell or otherwise abuse that information. Personally, I don't subscribe to that fear -- partly because I've talked to Plaxo executives, and I believe they realise how deadly the violation of their customers' privacy would be to their business. But the general distrust of this system is making it less effective than it might be: many people who might otherwise use the system refuse to.

Ongoing vexes

I have other ongoing issues with Outlook, such as an inflexible filter system (partly addressed by Auto-Mate), a frequent inability to shut down (try the little utility KnockOut to get a better handle on this), the lack of integration with IM products aside from Microsoft's Messenger (which I don't use), and clunky handling of message threads. I confront Microsoft executives about these and other Outlook crimes whenever I get a chance. The result is usually a rolling of eyes; the Microsoft people know they have a problem child on their hands, but -- due in part to internal politics -- it's a very hard product to fix.

Fortunately, start-up companies such as the ones mentioned above have come a long way in fixing problems that Microsoft hasn't been able to. Many of these products are free, at least for now, which reduces the sting of having to use additional products to fix problems that Microsoft should have addressed long ago. But frankly, cost or no cost, my time is valuable, and I wish Microsoft would use some of its own copious resources to make its core workgroup product function the way it should.

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