Tips Galore for Slaying the E-mail Beast

Tricks and hints for searching and organizing e-mail from a workplace-themed blog.

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Erik Larkin

PC World
Wednesday, April 9, 2008; 9:19 PM

Admit it. Sometime in the last week you've probably wished real harm upon a co-worker for hitting 'reply all' and cluttering up your already overflowing inbox. It's ok, I have too.

So I was happy to run across ablog called Workers' Edgefrom a former (non-spamming) co-worker, Dennis O'Reilly, with three recent posts on managing e-mail in Thunderbird, Gmail and Outlook.   For Thunderbird and Gmail he has advanced search tips for finding the message you need among all the reply-all garbage, and for Outlook he looks at an add-on called Xobni that can help sift and organize your messages - though you have to request an invite to participate in the Xobni beta.

I useThunderbirdmyself, with theLightningcalendar plugin.   Mozilla's open-source   app does everything I want for e-mail, and the Lightning extension adds a to-do list and can also pull in events from a Google calendar.   It can't write events to Google, though.

Since I use Thunderbird to pull   in e-mail from a Yahoo account and Lightning to pull in events from a Google Calendar, it's an ideal (for me) blend of desktop software and online services. When I'm at my office I get all the customization and advanced features offered by my software, but I also have full access to my mail and appointments when I'm out and about.