Make sense of e-mail madness
By Basheera Khan
How it works
Getting results
The bottom line
Information overload is a state of being with which people are increasingly becoming all too familiar. With businesses becoming more reliant on e-mail to transmit important and even not-so-important
information, e-mail inboxes are bursting at the seams. And although mail filtering techniques allow users to keep a fairly organised inbox, finding individual mails can be a punishing task.
Almost all mail clients come with search functions built-in - but if, like me, you maintain a large and ever-expanding inbox, you might find that your particular e-mail application just doesn't cut the
mustard when it comes to delivering search results in double quick time.
Cue
ISYS:email.search, a new personal search tool for Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express. Developed by ISYS/Odyssey Development, a Sydney-based supplier of search software for
businesses and public sector organisations, ISYS:email.search is touted as a fast and reliable method for searching and retrieving information contained in e-mails.
ISYS:email.search is part of the ISYS range of search software for either network or Internet based enterprise and personal systems. ISYS/Odyssey's
customers include Boeing, the United Nations, the US Department of Justice, Ernst & Young and QANTAS.
The secret behind the speedy results delivered is that ISYS:email.search actually searches an index of your e-mail
inbox, not the inbox itself. The first time you run the
application, it builds an index of your inbox which is essentially a file containing all the words in all of your messages. This is then rebuilt either automatically, at a predetermined time and day which you
can select, or manually whenever you choose to do so.
Depending on the size of your inbox, this can take anything from 2 minutes to half an hour. In my case, the first indexing of 7,164 e-mails took about 6 minutes. Subsequent rebuilding of the index takes
between 2 and 4 minutes.
The software is distributed via the ISYS/Odyssey website, and can be freely downloaded for 30-day trial. The standard installation sees shortcuts placed in the system tray and in the utilities section of
the Windows Start menu. It allows for single or multiple user installations, although you will need administrator permissions to facilitate the latter.
Based on ISYS' sixth-generation search technology, the product searches the entire e-mail, returning search results in seconds, and offers a range of tools that enables the user to easily view and
navigate between search results.
ISYS:email.search finds keywords, phrases, names and dates in seconds or less, regardless of how many e-mails a
user has. The product's features include hit highlighting for easily pinpointing the
information users are seeking; hit-to-hit navigation for jumping between results; three user-selectable search styles; and the ability to sort results and view recent searches.
It takes a bit of getting used to, but once you've used ISYS:email.search once or twice, it's entirely impossible to remember how you got along without it.
The user interface is based on the classic two-pane view, with a preview pane available when you're viewing search results. The start-up screen features a primary pane which keeps a cache of your
most recent query history, and notices from ISYS/Odyssey which are automatically downloaded from ISYSemail.com.
The latter feature can be disabled if you don't want the software to poll its parent website every time you run the program. However, this does mean that you will have to remember to go back to the
parent website from time to time to check for software updates, whereas if you keep the feature enabled, you'll be notified whenever there are new components available.
The start-up screen also keeps an up-to-date view of the number of e-mails it has indexed in Outlook or Outlook Express, although the only value I can see in this feature is novelty; depending on your
social circles, the mammoth dimensions of your inbox could be quite the conversation topic.
It's possible to search by word variants, by using the Automatic Query Assistant which phrases search terms using ISYS
search syntax (this can also be disabled), or
just plain web-style search terms. Of great disappointment to me was the lack of support for grouped search terms. While it's possible to group search terms using Boolean operators - eg. IT AND Wales
AND Editor BUT NOT Matt - it's not possible to search for a phrase in quotes, as one can and frequently does when Googling.
One of the most useful features of ISYS:email.search is the option for hit-highlighting. You have control over the font, colour and size in which to display hit highlight colour and you can print your results
with the hits highlighted.
Once you've found the particular e-mail you're after, you can simply click a button in the ISYS:email.search window to open it in Outlook - no need to go hunting after it in the location specified by the
search result.
ISYS:email.search is a very useful little tool which remains discreetly out of mind until the moment that you desperately need it. It has some limitations, the most notable of which is that it works only with
Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express.
That said, applications like ISYS:email.search find a willing and receptive audience mainly because of Microsoft's unwieldy built-in search tools. Anyone who's used Mozilla Thunderbird or various other
alternatives to Microsoft products will know that it's not always a pain in the 'RSS' to find what you're after without the intervention of a third-party application.
ISYS:email.search retails at $30, which by today's exchange rate works out to less than £20 for a once-off licence purchase and free updates for the lifetime of the product. Corporate licensing can be
negotiated with ISYS. At that value, it's well worth having - in the time you'll save on searching your inbox for that elusive gem of information, the software will have paid for itself.
Contacts
ISYS/Odyssey
Tel: +61 (02) 9439 5800
Web:
http://www.isysemail.com
E-mail:
info@isys.com.au
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