Cluttered Inbox?

I have tonnes of emails in my Yahoo inbox. I used to create folders and filters to organize it but after a while, I became lazy. The number of email grew by the day and looking at it now, I’d rather just leave it as it is. Unless someone else wants to help me organise?

I stumbled upon a cool tool in under Applications in my Yahoo Mail – Automatic Organiser created by OtherInbox – the idea is that it will scan you inbox and segregate emails from similar senders to specific folders.

So I gave it a try.

Once I added the application to my mailbox, I clicked ‘Get Organizer Now’ and it brought me to a separate tab to request permission to my Yahoo.

Once I clicked ‘Agree’, it started scanning my inbox. But I had a problem here – the scanning stopped after going through a couple hundred emails, when in actual fact I had more than 3000 emails (I’ll come back to this later).

Once the scanning was complete, it created folders like OIB Shopping, OIB Social Networking, OIB Finance and OIB Groups, and moved the relevant emails to these folders. E.g. all emails (from the few hundred that it scanned) ending with @linkedin.com was moved to OIB Social Networking folder. I was impressed – it was a great tool.

I could also create my own folder, e.g. OIB Jimmy and put in one email from Jimmy. The tool will automatically recognize the email and all future emails from Jimmy will go into the folder directly. Also, on a daily basis, it sent me a summary of emails that it organised.

About the ‘not scanning all emails’ issue, I wrote to OtherInbox. After a few emails exchange, they finally said the following – “The reason for those messages not being organized is because they are too old. Organizer does not go that far back to sort out those messages.”

Then it dawned on me that this tool wasn’t much different from the filter function available in Yahoo. What made it different was its ability to scan my current emails and organise it accordingly. I was a bit dissapointed – it was a great idea but unfortunately it had limitations.

I hope the people at OtherInbox will rectify this problem because I see the value of this tool. And I hope they add the ability to re-scan the inbox for circumstances where you want to organise emails from a new sender. For now though, I have removed the application from my Yahoo Mail.