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Nelson Email
Organizer (NEO) Pro v3
Reviewed
by: Mark
Goldstein, August 2004, send
e-mail
Published
by: Caelo
Software Inc., go
to the web site
Requires: Microsoft
Outlook 97, 98, 2000, 2002(XP) or 2003, using Windows
95, 98, Me, NT, 2000 or XP, with or without Exchange
Server (v5.5 SP3 and above, Exchange 2000 Server SP2
and above and Exchange 2003 Server)
MSRP: US$69.95
(single new license), $20.00-$50.00 (upgrade, depending
on your current version)
Nelson
Email Organizer (NEO Pro) is designed for people who deal
with lots and lots of e-mail. Are you running a busy SOHO,
small business, or a department at a school? Are you a
corporate e-mail loon, deluged by messages from hundreds
of correspondents? Do you need instant access to all of
your message stores and Outlook archives at the same time?
If so, NEO Pro is an efficient, well-integrated tool which
runs on top of Outlook and automatically & intuitively
organizes your e-mail into clear and logical groupings
and views, while providing all the usual Outlook send/receive,
compose, reply, forward, address book and tools functions.
Many
people prefer to keep their all of their messages, just
in case. In fact, with enormous, inexpensive hard drives
available for so long now, storage space for archived messages
is easy to come by, so there's no reason to delete everything.
Many companies actually now require employees to back up
and store their e-mail. Finding messages quickly is paramount
therefore in any environment in which huge volumes of e-mail
actually prevent fast searches and access within Outlook
or Exchange Server. At home and in business, time is money
and effective e-mail management should ideally play a crucial
role in creating more time for productivity rather than
eating into productive time.
Anything
that replaces Outlook (or in the case of NEO, integrates
with Outlook data), had better resolve some of Outlook's
inherent problems. One of the main problems with the ubiquitous
Outlook is that finding an e-mail that came in as recently
as last week can be a painful and time-consuming task.
Finding a message from 2 years ago may be frustratingly
impossible. Outlook 2003 is certainly better than previous
versions, but the laborious task of hand sorting mail into
manually created individual category folders, limited indexing
(and resulting slow searches), limited views of the message
store, lack of transparent access to archived e-mail and
a dozen other problems make Outlook an inefficient choice
for dealing with large volumes of e-mail.
NEO on the other
hand, places controls up front—particularly
those for calling up different views of your message store—rather
than following Outlook's example of burying these controls
inside nested dialogs. NEO's various message views are
available from the main toolbar with a single click. While
Outlook's biggest problem is that it only lets you look
at your messages one way at a time, NEO counters that bottleneck
with something called Unified Message Stores which allows
you to transparently search across categories and views
at breakneck speed, categorize and view any messages, at
any time. On top of that, NEO automatically presents your
mail organized for you according to the different ways
in which you need to see your messages: Hot view (which
contains the newest mail; you can actually make anything
you want visible in Hot); Correspondents view (automatically
displays all available e-mail according to correspondent
and included both sent and received items); Bulk Mail view
(can include newsletters, info circulars or anything else);
Category view (all your e-mail sorted according to preset
categories and/or categories you customize); Status view;
Date view; Attachment view. The unique thing about NEO
is that any message can appear in dozens of different categories
and any or all of the views without having to copy it to
various folders. You can't do that with Outlook!
As mentioned
above, doing searches in Outlook can be laborious and
frustrating. Finding a particular message within a
category folder containing a thousand items takes a long
time. It's certainly okay to create more category folders
of course in order to reduce search times, but there are
two problems with that: a) you have to physically create
all those individual folders and remember to manually sort
your mail into them (unless you manually create new Outlook
message Rules, which are guaranteed to work all the time),
and b) you still have to search each folder individually.
NEO solves the problem again by being designed to look
at your entire message store (Outlook archives included!)
which means that searches always respect only the filters
you use rather than being blocked by the boundaries of
a folder. The search power in NEO Pro is quite amazing—we
were able to find archived messages from 1997 in just a
few seconds from a store of over 40,000 items. Once again
Outlook falls down because the moment you create a message
folder, you essentially cut off all the messages in that
folder from access to searches until you actually go into
the folder. You can search all folders at once in Outlook
of course, but before doing so you have to manually select
and check every folder, a ridiculous bit of labor in a
dialog that doesn't even have a Select All function! What
on earth is Microsoft thinking about? As well in Outlook
you can't view your message in any other context unless
you go to the View menu and dig around to select from one
of the many choices. It's an ungainly way to deal with
the mountains of e-mail many of us receive. Outlook 2003
(the best version so far) goes some way toward emulating
NEO's approach to e-mail organization and searching, but
NEO is by far the champ.
Lest you think that Outlook and NEO are mutually exclusive,
let's correct the relationship between the two. First and
foremost, Outlook is more than just an e-mail and contact
management program. Outlook's underlying technologies are
extremely powerful and are fully accessible to members
of the Microsoft's Independent Software Vendor program.
Caelo Software is a full member of the program and as such
takes full advantage of the ability to integrate deeply
with Outlook. NEO hooks into Outlook to extend the depth
and functionality of both pieces of software. At the end
of the day, it's all good because end users benefit from
NEO's brilliant approach to information organization. On
top of all that, if you choose to use it you'll find Outlook
continues to work normally and remains up to date with
messages and addresses. The bottom line is that once you
become familiar with NEO, you'll never need to launch Outlook
again. Even if you preview and cull your e-mail (with MailWasher
for example) prior to downloading it, launch NEO afterward
instead of Outlook to send/receive, reply, forward and
so on. NEO uses all of Outlook's underlying basic e-mail
functions to understand your accounts, existing messages
and so on.
NEO installed without problems on a busy workstation in
our office. We ran Mailwasher Pro to filter out the garbage
in the nine e-mail accounts we check from that workstation,
then ran NEO. The program automatically sorted the message
store according to the default views and I then went about
customizing the configuration. Installing NEO, customizing
and adding master categories and sub-categories, sorting
my current message store of approximately 3,500 items,
and viewing eight of the NEO tutorials took a total of
one hour. At the end of that hour, I was confident enough
to use the new version of NEO full time and I haven't looked
back since.
Cons: Minor
gripes only. The program is best used only after you've
viewed some or all of the excellent online,
narrated, video capture-style tutorials. The help system
built into the software is, surprisingly, only so-so which
makes it doubly important to avoid frustration by thoroughly
check out the tutorials first. You won't be sorry. NEO
performs accurate, lightning fast searches because of its
automatic indexing functionality so it's probably wise
(especially if you live inside your e-mail) to lower the
indexing interval to something other than the default 240
minutes. One of the NEO users in our office—a person
who handles upwards of 80 legitimate e-mails per day—recommends
60 minutes as the indexing interval.
Pros: We love
NEO's Active Mail area because you can remove messages
from Active Mail after you've dealt with them,
but without having to manually move or delete them. Neatly
handles any spam and bulk mail which manages to sneak past
Mailwasher (or whatever other antispam software you're
using) in addition to distinguishing it from regular bulk
mail subscriptions. Conversations/threads are treated logically
and freely and, unlike Outlook's Related Messages feature,
shows a conversation directly in the list pane of the user
interface. NEO's greatest strength for high volume e-mail
is its views, categories, filtering and searches. Even
in message stores containing tens of thousands of items
and multiple Outlook archives, filtering and searches take
only seconds to complete. You can also narrow searches
progressively—start with a wide net and gradually
narrow your focus without having to re-search—simply
by adding or removing search criteria or changing filter
details. NEO's greatest assets for day-to-day e-mail handling
are the Hot View mode and Active Mail feature. Being able
to assign any message to multiple categories or see it
in multiple views without having to physically copy it
to individual folders is a stunning breath of fresh air.
NEO's Hot View is brilliant because it provides you with
the means to keep any number of different things front
and center no matter how old, how new or how different
(messages, attachments, To-Do's and so on). Caelo Software
has created an excellent set of well-written, clearly narrated
video capture tutorials which are clear, concise and cover
every major area of NEO. We can't say enough about NEO.
Highly recommended.
Letters to the Editor are welcome and occasionally abused in public. Send e-mail to: whine@kickstartnews.com
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