MakeUseOf Directory » outlook

Meshin: A Semantic Search Engine For Your E-Mails

Israel Nicolas — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 01:01:22 +0000

Sorting, searching, and making sense through thousands of e-mails can be very messy. Even if the most powerful e-mail clients today like GMail and Outlook can handle being your conversation assistant, you still end up spending more time searching for e-mails from months back to get the full picture of your conversations.

Of course this is a problem of good old keyword search. While search technology has gone through a lot, many people believe that semantic search is the next step. One tool that exemplifies this is Meshin, an MS Outlook plugin and sidebar that provides semantic search for your e-mails.

To start using Meshin just download the plugin and install it as an add-on to your Outlook. The Meshin sidebar stays on the right side where you can enter a search term to find e-mails. In addition to conversations listed with the keyword, Meshin also adds a list of people that have mentioned the keyword in their conversations as well as relevant attachments, and web search. You can then click on the boxes to view more details for each.

The strong suit of Meshin comes with everyday use. With semantic search, keywords are transformed into entities, which brings more meaning to your information. Words are classified into person, place, or thing, and processed together to form relationships. This way, you can search for terms in your e-mail within contexts, rather than randomly going through e-mails hoping the right e-mail with the right keyword comes along. At the end of the day, you are searching for real-time, relevant information without being removed from the search process.

We are not sure how much semantic search Meshin has employed in the backend, and it’s not like the technology is alien to us considering Google and other alternative semantic search engines. But it is nice to have a smart search engine for our e-mails to increase our productivity. Meshin can transform how you work with e-mails instantly. Hopefully it crosses over to other e-mail clients.

See Meshin in action:

Features:

Uses semantic search to sort through e-mails.
Find contexts across bits of information in e-mails.
Works with out MS Outlook as a search sidebarFind people in the conversation for the search term.
Find related conversations easily.
Attachment search.
Search on the web.
RSS semantic search to follow.
More natural and efficient.
Streamlines your e-mail workflow.

Check out Meshin @ www.meshin.com

ESLAssistant: Correct Grammatical Errors In Your English

abhijeet — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:03:01 +0000

ESL Assistant is a new web service by Microsoft Research team to help people correct grammatical errors in their English writing. It is particularly useful for those whose native language isn’t English (ESL – English as Second Language). Just type in or copy paste the text into their box and hit check to find out the errors. It also searches Bing to check examples of English usage.

And if you use Outlook as your email tool then you could download and use their Outlook add-in to check your emails for any errors in English.

Features:

Correct grammatical errors in your English writing.
Web based, easy to use and does not require registration.
Search Bing from the page to find usage examples on the web.
Outlook add-in available for Outlook users.
Similar tools: AfterTheDeadline, Spellify, Orangoo, Spellist, WebSourceIt and SpellJax.

Check out ESLAssistant @ www.eslassistant.com (By Abhijeet from Jeet Blog)

Gist: Intelligent Contact Management Tool

abhijeet — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:46:00 +0000

Gist is a brilliant web based email and social network contacts manager which entered into public beta recently. In fact, it could be better called a relationship manager. After you sign up for their web based service and provide them your email and social accounts (like Twitter, LinkedIn etc) information, it checks your contacts and creates a dashboard where you can see comprehensive details about each of them.

It can tell you who are your most important contacts, their web presence, the tweets, blogs and articles mentioning them and much more.

It also offers an Outlook plugin which can neatly integrate with your Outlook mail. Plus it can leverage your Salesforce contacts too.

This web based service could certainly prove to be an useful one for people and businesses who want to prioritize their email by contacts and network with them in a better way.

To see Gist in action watch video below:

Check out Gist @ www.gist.com (via ReadWriteWeb) (by Abhijeet from Appscrazy)

ShortcutWorld: Keyboard Shortcut List For Essential Apps

abhijeet — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 02:42:16 +0000

If you are someone who works at the computer for long hours, you would agree that using your mouse as less as possible is one of the most productive ways to work on the computer. Keyboard shortcuts are always great but the problem is different applications have different keyboard shortcuts and hence we find it difficult to remember. ShortcutWorld is a site which aims to address that problem by providing a keyboard shortcut lists for some of the most important tools we use everyday.

Currently, it provides keyboard shortcut lists for the following apps.

Firefox
Winamp
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Powerpoint
Google Chrome
Photoshop
Windows XP
Fireworks
Outlook 2007

Certainly, a site worth bookmarking. You might also want to check KeyXL which is another similar tool profiled earlier. Or better go and download some MakeUseOf Cheat sheets.

Check out Shortcutworld @ www.shortcutworld.com (By Abhijeet from Appscrazy)

YouSendIt Outlook: Send Emails with Large Attachments from Outlook

Aibek Esengulov — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:54:44 +0000

Large file transfer site YouSendIt has released an excellent plugin for Microsoft Outlook. With this plugin you’re able to send large files to any email address directly from Outlook. Simply attach the file as you normally do and let the plugin do the heavy lifiting. One really neat feature is the ability to configure the plugin to use YouSendIt for files larger than a pre-selected size.

Features:

Send large files (videos etc.) directly from Outlook. No need to launch external program.
Avoid serer slow downs and email bounce-backs.
Send files to multiple recipients.
Auto resumes file upload in case your PC was shut down.
Set it to automatically use YouSendIt when the attached files are bigger than certain size.
You must be a registered user to be able to use YouSendIt Outlook plugin.
For more details check out Outlook plugin FAQ section.
Free account is limited to 100 downloads per file and lets you send files upto 100 MB in size

Download YouSendIt Outlook plugin @ www.yousendit.com/cms/plugin-outlook