Cluttered Inbox?

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I have tonnes of emails in my Yahoo inbox. I used to create folders and filters to organize it but after a while, I became lazy. The number of email grew by the day and looking at it now, I’d rather just leave it as it is. Unless someone else wants to help me organise?

I stumbled upon a cool tool in under Applications in my Yahoo Mail – Automatic Organiser created by OtherInbox – the idea is that it will scan you inbox and segregate emails from similar senders to specific folders.

So I gave it a try.

Once I added the application to my mailbox, I clicked ‘Get Organizer Now’ and it brought me to a separate tab to request permission to my Yahoo.

Once I clicked ‘Agree’, it started scanning my inbox. But I had a problem here – the scanning stopped after going through a couple hundred emails, when in actual fact I had more than 3000 emails (I’ll come back to this later).

Once the scanning was complete, it created folders like OIB Shopping, OIB Social Networking, OIB Finance and OIB Groups, and moved the relevant emails to these folders. E.g. all emails (from the few hundred that it scanned) ending with @linkedin.com was moved to OIB Social Networking folder. I was impressed – it was a great tool.

I could also create my own folder, e.g. OIB Jimmy and put in one email from Jimmy. The tool will automatically recognize the email and all future emails from Jimmy will go into the folder directly. Also, on a daily basis, it sent me a summary of emails that it organised.

About the ‘not scanning all emails’ issue, I wrote to OtherInbox. After a few emails exchange, they finally said the following – “The reason for those messages not being organized is because they are too old. Organizer does not go that far back to sort out those messages.”

Then it dawned on me that this tool wasn’t much different from the filter function available in Yahoo. What made it different was its ability to scan my current emails and organise it accordingly. I was a bit dissapointed – it was a great idea but unfortunately it had limitations.

I hope the people at OtherInbox will rectify this problem because I see the value of this tool. And I hope they add the ability to re-scan the inbox for circumstances where you want to organise emails from a new sender. For now though, I have removed the application from my Yahoo Mail.

Revo Uninstaller

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Have you ever had to wash a coffee mug? – you wash it with normal dishwashing liquid and the stain doesn’t go away. But then you use a special liquid and amazingly it disappears. Revo Uninstaller is like that special liquid – it removes applications better than the built in uninstaller.

Usually when you uninstall a program, you would go to ‘Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs’ (Win XP) to remove it. But sometimes, after you complete the uninstall, you’ll notice some files/folders/registry entries left behind.

This is where Revo comes in – after the normal uninstall is complete, it will scan the drive and registry for tough stains. Although the free version does not remove 100%, it still does a better job compared to the default tool.

Installation – Installation was a breeze – I have installed this application a dozen times – on my own PCs and friends – it was fast and I did not face any glitches.

Start-up – When you start the program (which loads up within a few seconds on an old computer), it gives you an overview of the applications installed. It reminds me of the Sygate Personal Firewall (which sadly, is no longer available) – clear and easy to see icons of installed application.

Running – To uninstall, just click on the desired application and click on ‘Uninstall’ on the top menu. The following options will appear – ‘Built-in’, ‘Safe’, ‘Moderate’ and ‘Advanced’ – different levels of cleaning strength.

I usually use the ‘Advanced’ option which does a deep scan for leftovers.

Once you click ‘Next’, the default uninstaller will run and once complete, the second ‘Next’ click  will scan for leftover files, folders and registries. A list will appear – most of the time, I will click ‘Select All’ and ‘Delete’. And with that the uninstall process is complete – you get a cleaner than usual ‘coffee mug’.

Other Features – Another cool feature that I like about this software is the ‘Autorun Manager’ (found under ‘Tools’ top menu).

This feature allows you to manage the start-up applications. You can disable the process, kill the process temporarily and best of all, you can delete the process completely (which can’t be done via ‘msconfig’).

Summary – It’s a good application to have if you like to play around with software – testing applications, upgrading, downgrading, etc. Best of all, its free. I give a 5 out of 5.