Useful bits of software

• By Mike Gunderloy
• December 10, 2004

Sometimes it seems as if I spend my entire life in Microsoft Outlook - probably because I do. It's the first program I fire up on my main box after a reboot, and critical information from it synchronizes to my PocketPC to join me on those rare occasions when I actually leave the house. So, when I was thinking about software that I use all the time, the first three that came to mind integrate with Outlook.

Let's start with the WinZip E-Mail Attachment Add-On for Outlook. Though still in beta, it's already quite stable (as I've found to be generally the case with WinZip products; registering that particular piece of shareware is something that I've never regretted. Anyhow, if you're a WinZip user and you use Outlook (not Express) 2000, 2002, or 2003, you should grab this one. What it does is integrate zipping directly into Outlook. You get some new icons in every e-mail message so that you can zip and insert files as a single step, as opposed to needing to zip to a disk file and then attach the file. Alternatively, you can set it up to just transparently zip any file you attach to a message. I use this one daily, since my bandwidth is limited and my commitments sometimes seem like they aren't.

Next on my hit parade is X1. X1 is one of the current crop of applications that indexes your local hard drive so you can find things quickly. But it does a lot more than some of the competition. For one thing, it indexes all of your e-mail as well as whatever disk files you point it at, and it has no trouble with network drives. For another, it's blazing fast. With over half a million e-mail messages in my index, it's a matter of just a few seconds to find the ones that match any search term I care to think of. The current release version has a sort of funky interface; if you're willing to live on the beta edge (and this is another case where the beta has been wonderful for me), mosey on over to the support forums and grab the latest version, which has a much more standard Windows UI as well as integration with the taskbar.

Finally, where would any of us be without a way to beat back the spam? Buried, I suppose. After trying a bunch of alternatives, I settled on SpamBayes. SpamBayes uses Bayesian filtering to determine whether messages are spam or ham - basically, you train it by showing it a bunch of spam and a bunch of non-spam and then it decides whether incoming messages look more like spam or ham. I like SpamBayes because it's free, it integrates easily with Outlook, and I can set my own threshold for how certain it should be before tossing a message in the spam bin. By adjusting this, I can be sure to catch any false positives before they get lost, at the cost of still having to read a few new spams each day.