NEO (Nelson Email Organizer) helps me manage my email with much less time and it helps me find what I need when I need it. If you are as busy as I am, time is your most precious commodity. This makes a tool like NEO really valuable. Add to that a very nice user interface and lots of great features, and you've got a real winner.

I've been using NEO, shown in Figure A, for about 3 years now. I was looking for plug-ins to improve some of the countless shortcomings of Outlook when I discovered it. Caelo Software, Inc. is the name of the company behind NEO. Caelo is supposedly Latin for "the heavens". I suppose it's a reference to their ambitions because they sure do shoot high.

FIGURE A


Here's the main screen of the NEO application. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Organizing email
I'm an email pack rat. I save everything I can. My memory isn't as good as I would like, but with computers, I just need to be smart enough to keep things and lucky enough to have a good way to search for them. At this point I have over 10 years of emails saved, which amounts to over 30,000 messages sent or received.

Even if you only keep the last year or two of old messages around, organizing, navigating and searching those messages can be tough. If you're an active online person you can easily get and send over 3,000 messages a year. (I also have a sense of history and always admired people who kept a diary. For me, saving my old emails is like keeping a digital diary.)

My first attraction to NEO was its ability to do fast stored searches and the fact that it treated each email message as a database object rather than as a sort of physical object. The problem I was really trying to solve was the fact that operating systems still treat files like physical objects that can only exist in one place. This is silly given that files on disk and messages in Outlook are electronic objects.

As is now becoming understood thanks to Microsoft's Longhorn, these files and messages should not be constrained by a single location or folder. They should be viewed as objects with many attributes which allows the file or message to show up in any one of many different "views." Outlook 2003 has started to show features like this with its Search Folders and Find All Related messages. NEO has had these features for three years.