Active mail
The core of NEO is the concept of Active mail. When a new message comes in, regardless of where your Outlook rules may file it (if you have rules), that message shows up in the Active view. NEO adds an attribute called Active or Inactive to each message. This allows you to use the Active view as the starting point of your email processing.

Most people use their Inbox as an "active" area or they use the read/unread attribute to designate whether a message needs attention. Neither of these approaches is satisfactory. This is the most annoying part of Outlook in my opinion. There is no clean way to designate messages that you are not done with. I like "read" to mean read. I like "filed" to mean filed. But I also need to be able to designate whether the message still needs attention or is still an action item.

In Outlook you can sort of do this with the "flag" attribute, but setting it is not easy. In NEO's Active view you can mark a message as Inactive and have it disappear from view with a simple hot key (backspace). You can mark a message as "read" with a simple hot key too (spacebar). NEO also lets you set and unset other attributes with simple hot keys. And if you want to toggle the attribute back, just use Shift and the hotkey.

This leaves you feeling much more in control than Outlook does. It's much more like a control center for email than just a viewing station.

NEO 3.0 enhancements
Version 3.0 adds a filter toolbar with buttons for the most common attributes. This makes it very easy to add or remove filter criteria easily. Once you get used to this approach you will want even more filtering ability. I hear the NEO folks are working on it for future releases.

If you've read about the upcoming Microsoft Longhorn version of Windows you know that this is where Microsoft is headed. They've had the concept for over 10 years, and we're not likely to have Longhorn for another two or three years, but you can have Longhorn-like features today with NEO.

The most requested feature before 3.0 was the ability to index across multiple email stores or PST files. For people who receive and manage lots of email, they frequently store all those message in multiple PST files as a way of keeping the size of any individual PST more manageable (and easier to backup).

Some folks are forced to keep personal email separate from corporate email which is in an OST file under Exchange. Also Outlook gets slow and weird, if not unreliable, if your PST gets too large. NEO 3.0 now offers a Pro version that handles multiple message store files. It also let's you keep multiple NEO catalogs (indexes) so you have even more control.

A very handy new feature is the ability to filter down the folder list pane. When you are in the Correspondent view there can be hundreds or thousands of correspondents visible. If you are looking for John Smith, he might be listed multiple times in multiple ways for each of his email identities.