Email: Music to My Ears
Category: Just Plain Silly... Tech...
Posted Wednesday, March 31, 2004 at 02:21 PM [GMT-6]

Of all the Microsoft software I own, I tolerate Entourage the best. [Actually, that's a tacky way of putting it. All of MS' Office Suite components are first-rate, for my purposes anyway. But, as a Mac owner, I've sworn a blood oath to never willingly give an unqualified compliment to you-know-who.]

I've tweaked Entourage until it practically dances for me. Using Rules, it automatically identifies incoming email according to subject line and/or sender, and files it accordingly into the directory I've specified for that category.

It's not perfect, of course. I'm still waiting on a Rule that will, for example, identify with certainty sender names that sound Nigerian or Ugandan, so that I can send that scam spam directly to the Deleted Items box. (Although, I'm pretty safe deleting any email with the all-caps subject of "URGENT ASSISTANCE.") And I can't figure out a script to accurately identify a subject line as simply random, unrelated words, another sure indicator of either spam or a note from my dyslexic cousin in Iahod.

The latest cool thing I've done is associate different alert sounds with different categories of email. So, incoming mail from clients has one sound, potential spam another, comment notices from this blog yet another, and so on. No longer do I have to interrupt my reading to check to see if a new message is from a client, thus requiring immediate attention.

At least, that's the theory.

In reality, I've quickly forgotten which sound goes with which category. Plus, each cycle of email checking now sounds like a Spike Jones recording, especially the first one following the morning boot-up. This proves the adage that the technology is only as good as the user.

Still, there are worse things than being serenaded by Spike throughout the day. I think I'll keep it.