Tips Galore for Slaying the E-mail Beast

April 10, 2008 — -- 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 a blog called Workers' Edge from 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 use Thunderbird myself, with the Lightning calendar 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.