Sent Items Organizer - Automatically Manage Your Sent Messages

For the last few weeks I've been working with a surprisingly useful Outlook Add-in called the Sent Items Organizer. Let me tell you a bit about it, and explain why I think you might find it useful to have.

At first blush, you might wonder what the point of this is. After all, Outlook automatically stores your sent items in the Sent Items folder, where you can retrieve them if you want them. But depending on your personal situation, the default handling of sent items might not be enough.

Leaving all your sent items in the Sent Items folder is analogous to leaving all your incoming messages in the Inbox. As long as you don't send and receive a lot of messages, and you don't have much need to refer back to old ones, you can get by well enough. But if you need a significant amount of access to stuff in the Sent Items folder, it gets real clumsy real fast. Here's an example of what I mean.

For the last several years, I've been caring for sick parents. Among other things, that has required all sorts of email back and forth between me and attorneys, doctors, social workers, insurance companies, brokerage houses, and so on. Keeping track of all these different lines of communication was complicated, particularly when it came to putting pressure on those individuals and organizations that didn't want to cooperate.

Tracking down who I sent what information, requests, or demands to became a real problem, as it required constant digging through the Sent Items folder. I eventually resorted to manually copying sent items into the relevant folders, just so I could find them when I needed them. Sent Items Organizer would have been a huge help to me back then.

Meet the Sent Items Organizer

Sent Items Organizer is an Outlook Add-in from Sperry Software. It gives you three ways to automatically file your sent items, based on criteria you define. The first of those three ways is Confirmation Mode.

In Confirmation Mode, a dialog box appears after you send a message and asks you where you would like to file the sent item. This gives you the most control, but can be time-consuming if you're sending a lot of messages.

In Keyword Mode, once you click Send, the add-in looks for the keywords you specified in the subject and body of the message. If it finds a match, it automatically moves the message to the folder you specified when you set up the keyword match. If you can figure out ahead of time which keywords and folders to use, Keyword Mode provides transparent automation.

In Associate Contact Mode, you specify contacts and folders. When you click Send, the add-in scans the list of recipients for the message, and if it finds a match, it moves the sent item into the associated folder.

To further add flexibility in sent item handling, the add-in allows you to process sent items using combinations of these modes, one after another in sequence. That means you can construct systems like this:

If the message was sent to any of the following contacts, move it into the Project X folder.
If the sent item contains the words Project X in its subject or body, move it into the Project X folder.
If neither of the above conditions apply, ask me where you should put the sent item.

As you can see, the Sent Items Organizer gives you tremendous power to manage and file your sent items.

Using the Sent Items Organizer

Setting up the Sent Items Organizer isn't hard, but I did find it a bit confusing at first. You get access to the add-in through the Sperry Software Add-Ins button that appears in Outlook's toolbars after you install the product. The following figure shows the add-in open to the General Settings tab:

This is where I got confused. Unless you've already figured out exactly how you're going to do things, you really want to configure this thing by setting up the keywords and contacts for each of the modes before coming back to the General Settings tab. The help system explains all this in more detail, and once I consulted that, everything was much clearer to me.

Once you have everything set up the way you want it, you can click the Run Now button on the General Settings tab to organize your previously sent messages.

Does it Work and Should I Buy It?

As I mentioned earlier, I've been using the Sent Items Organizer Add-in for a while now and it works well. Since I got everything set up the way I wanted it, the add-in has performed flawlessly for me.

Ultimately of course, it's your call. However, if you find yourself digging through the Sent Items folder more than you like, you should seriously consider getting a copy of Sent Items Organizer. It's well worth the $29.95 list price in time saved digging through the Sent Items folder, not to mention the peace of mind of knowing that important sent messages are stored in an appropriate folder, rather than buried in Sent Items somewhere.

Click here to go to the Sent Items Organizer page at Sperry Software.

--Bill

P.S. I managed to talk Mike, the owner of Sperry Software, into creating a special discount code for my readers. When you order Sent Items Organizer, or any other Sperry Software product, enter this discount code: PK4CZK97 on the Shopping Cart page of the Sperry Software site to receive a 5% discount.