You might have "John Smith", "Smith, John", Jsmith@aol.com, etc. Now, you can type "smith" in the search bar above the list of correspondents and the list is automatically filtered down to only those whose name contains "smith." This is also very handy in consolidating identities. NEO automatically creates a separate correspondent for each email address. But it also allows you to combine those email addresses into one identity. You just drag the extra identities onto the one you want to survive and now all the emails show in one combined view.

Outlook 2003 added the "Find All Related" messages feature. NEO 3.0 added the "Search for Conversation" feature (hot key Ctrl-Alt-F) which finds all messages with the same subject. Outlook takes over 1 minute (I didn't let it finish), but for NEO the search takes all of two or three seconds. I use this pretty often to focus down on a single conversation thread.

NEO 3.0 also added a new Category view which exposes Outlook's categories. Categories used to be the only way to view a group of related emails together. Some people like categories and now NEO supports them. It also provides a convenient way to easily set categories in the message viewing pane.

The 3.0 version was a big upgrade and I could go on and on about things like Group Folders, Wildcard addresses, and editable subject lines, but you can learn about these yourself at the NEO Web site.

Using NEO and Outlook together
NEO is not a stand-alone program; it uses Outlook's services and then adds better searchable full-text and attribute indexing plus a great user interface. The fact that it co-exists with Outlook is the hardest thing to get used to. Either you start NEO and it starts Outlook under the covers, or you start Outlook and then start NEO as an adjunct.

I use the latter approach. One feature I would really like to see is tighter integration with Outlook. It would be great if NEO simply enhanced the Outlook user interface rather than giving you another user interface. It's not that big a deal, but I believe it throws off new users and users who are not that technical.

Accelerator or decelerator
There is a phenomenon I've noticed that, when a program is hard to use, my interest in it falls off in proportion to its usability. If a feature is too slow, I start using it less and less. Each time I use it I feel like "oh no," because I have to wait. Eventually, if the value of that feature is not great enough, I'll stop using the feature altogether.

Outlook's search has been that way. I only used it if I absolutely needed to and that was very rarely. I actually preferred trying to remember where the message was myself. Example: "Hmm, I think it's in this folder here. I think it was from so-and-so (sort by person) and it was around spring of last year (search in that area of all the messages)." This was often more productive than Outlook's search.

The corollary to that phenomenon of reduced reliance is when you find something that works well, you start relying on it heavily. I also start having lots of ideas for how to improve it. NEO falls into this category. I'm always coming up with ideas. As soon as I found it and found out how useful it was, I was flooded with ideas.