I've seen some very interesting methods that users have developed to handle their flood of email. There are a few folks who are very organized and compulsive enough to file everything. This takes a LOT of time. I know because I was one of these people for a while.

Then there are the users who just delete old messages to keep their inbox clean. These tend to be executives who have other people to rely on or entrepreneurs who are willing to take the risk that they will delete something important. I even met one person who deleted mail, but never cleaned out his deleted mail folder. He used the "deleted mail" folder as his long-term archive.

The bottom-line is that there are few good ways to manage email and all of them either take a lot of time to manage the filing or risk not being able to find what you need later.

NEO 3.0 is the newest version, which was officially released around March. This is a major rewrite with many new and long-awaited features. But first, let's look at what made NEO great in the first place.

Super fast searching
Super fast searching is one feature that's easy to understand. If you've ever used Outlook's searching you've noticed that it takes forever. If you have a lot of messages like I do, it can be downright painful. I only used search as a last resort.

With NEO, searching became a common occurrence because it was almost instantaneous. Even better was the fact that you could store the search criteria as a dynamic folder of sorts. Rather than needing to file messages in particular folders so you can find them, you only need to define a search and you can bring up that group of messages regardless of what folder they are in.

Microsoft Outlook caught on to this in the 2003 version, but they have a so-so implementation. If you are searching on an attribute criteria like "read" or "flagged" messages, Outlook does work quickly, but if you are searching on a keyword or phrase, Outlook is still slow. It's only a matter of time before Microsoft catches up, but by then I expect NEO will be even further along.

NEO isn't the only product that offers fast searching of email these days. For example, you can get X1 (at http://www.x1.com) to get fast free text searching, but it doesn't search on attributes and at $75, it's a bit more expensive than even NEO's Pro version.

Another key feature of NEO 2.x was the ability to switch to a view of all the emails to and from a certain correspondent with a simple hot-key. If you have the focus on an email from a particular person, you just hit the hot key Ctrl-J (for jump) and you are instantly looking at a view of all the emails to and from that person.

You may or may not realize it from the description, but this is the feature I use most frequently after the Active view (more on that later). It is incredibly handy to be able to filter down to just the emails for a certain correspondent. And after that, you can also easily focus down further by filtering to select only the messages from that person or only those you sent to that person. This type of incremental filtering makes it much easier to find what you are looking for.