Inbox Zero with Inlook

Let’s see how Inlook can help you implement Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero”. The concept is simple: for every email that comes to your inbox you need to make a choice:

·         Delegate

·         Defer

·         Do

·         Delete or Archive

·         Respond

1 Click Email Handling

Inlook helps you implement this very easily by leveraging the 1 click email handling tool bar and menu

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Defer It - remove the email from your inbox and return it when the due date arrives Schedule It - Allocate time to handle the email and remove email from inbox Task It- Create a task in your to-do list and remove email from inbox Delegate it- Assign a task to someone and remove email from inbox Clean It - Inlook will immediately archive the email for you based on your preferences

Lets look at each one in more depth

Smart email archiving

Inlook helps reduce time spent on manual email archiving. Inlook provides two options:

• Based on predefined rules. Archive by sender name, organization, time or a combination of these.
• Smart suggestion – Inlook will recommend based on historical analysis where to archive this email to.

Inlook also features an automated “inbox cleaner” process which can automatically archive for you those emails which have been sitting in your inbox for a long time

Our next post will focus on how to make the best of the archiving capavilities. stay tuned!

Do you ever keep emails in your inbox just as a reminder to handle them at a later time? Instead of keeping all these emails in your inbox you can now defer them and have them temporarily removed from your inbox until you are ready to deal with them. When the due date arrives Inlook will automatically place them back in your inbox for your handling

Delegating emails

Inlook helps you automate this process in one of two ways:

• Clicking on the “Delegate It” button will automatically open an Outlook task with the email contents embedded. Just select the person who will perform the task and send. Inlook will now automatically remove this email from your inbox After you forward the email – Inlook can automatically archive the original email for you.
    

When you reach the time to work on your emails it is crucial to handle the emails in order of priority. InLook prioritizes your emails by automatically. Powered by advanced analytics and based on your preferences, Inlook will automatically flag your emails.

This prioritization will ensure that when you allocate the time to handle your emails - you always address your high priority emails first. Inlook automatically creates search folders to make sure you work according to priorities

We will post tips and tricks on how to configure the priorities in later posts

Responding to an email is done using the regular Outlook methodology. When you are done – just click the “Clean It” button to archive the original email

Whats new in version 2.1.0.18

Inlook version 2.1.0.18 is due to be released on Monday September 12^th .

This version is focused on enhancing the smart archiving features to enable maximum flexibility in defining the archiving rules.

New features:

• Archive based on subject (Available in Inlook Pro and trial versions)
• Automatically create a folder for each conversation

• Custom Expressions (Available in Inlook Pro and trial versions) which leverage regex syntax to provide maximum flexibility for advanced users. Some typical use cases:
• Case management – archive per case
• Project management – archive per project
• Purchase orders
• Marketing campaign

           Please see below for instructions on how to define custom expressions

• Smart Archiving Simulation
• Before actually telling Inlook to automatically archive emails based on the defined settings, you may now simulate how the folder structure will look like without making any actual changes.

Enhancements

• Increased scale to support thousands of emails daily
• Globalization – support for  international date time formats

 Links

Upgrade Inlook for Outlook 2007

Upgrade Inlook for Outlook 2010








Defining custom archiving expressions

Open the "Quick Configuration Screen" and click on configure (Image #1)

Select "Advanced" and click the button on the 2nd step of the wizard 

Select "Custom" and click the button 

Click "Add". This is where you manage the different criteria. You may create one or more criteria

Create the search criteria to identify emails.You may use any regular expression format. A basic example would be to put something like XYZ*  - this will identify all emails which have in their subject the term XYZ and create a folder called XYZ. Press the test button to see how your criteria would affect existing emails in your inbox. You will probably need multiple expressions as you probably have multiple projects