How Inbox by Gmail Saves Time and Increases Productivity

Top Tools to Tame Microsoft Outlook

You can beef up Outlook with the right programs.

You may rely on Microsoft Outlook for your email, calendar, and contacts. And Outlook certainly offers a lot of features and flexibility. But you want more. Maybe you want a better way to search for emails and other information. Perhaps you’d like an easier method for accessing and modifying key Outlook settings. Maybe you need a good tool to find lost or unreadable emails. Perhaps you want to sync your Outlook calendar with your Google calendar.

Never fear. Some top tools are here. We’re going to review:

• Email Insights, which tries to find more relevant emails based on your search parameters.
• OutlookTools, which provides a single place where you can view and change key settings and folder options in Outlook.
• Stellar PST Viewer, which can scan a corrupted PST file and help you access emails you may have thought lost.
• And Sync2, which syncs your Outlook calendar events with those in Google Calendar so you can easily view and update either calendar. I ran each of the tools in Outlook 2016 via my Office 365 subscription. But they should work as well in the past couple of versions of Outlook. Now, let’s check out these helpful tools.

Email Insights

With Microsoft’s Email Insights app, you can search for specific messages, sometimes more easily than you can in Outlook. (You can download the app from the Microsoft Garage; it doesn’t come preinstalled.)

Open Outlook. Launch Emails Insights, and it asks whether you want to use it with Outlook or Gmail. With Outlook, you can then choose a specific account if you juggle more than one. The app opens with just a search bar. Wait for it to index your email.

Click on the funnel icon to choose which folders you want to search; you can search all of them or only specific ones. Then type your search term. You can type the sender’s name, subject, body text, date, and a host of other items. As you type, Email Insights offers auto-complete suggestions.

From the list of results, you can click on a specific email to read it in its entirety. You can also click on the down arrow next to an email to see all the messages in that thread. You can even open multiple tabs to run more than one search.

OutlookTools

OutlookTools provides a potpourri of settings, troubleshooters, and more — all in one spot.  You can download it here.

Open the program and you’re greeted by the main screen where you can access your Outlook account settings, start Outlook in Safe Mode, scan your PST and OST files, and launch Event Viewer and the Registry Editor.

Here’s how you move through the app:

• The Folder Paths window shows you the path to different Outlook files and features.
• The Startup Switches window lets you troubleshoot problems by launching Outlook with different switches.
• The Clear MRU window cleans out most-recently used settings for Outlook as a way of resolving problems by starting fresh.
• The Blocked Attachments window shows you all types of file attachments that are blocked for security reasons. You can unblock a specific file type if you need to open it.

The Support Guides window serves up helpful links to articles on how to use and tweak Outlook. And a More Tools window leads you to additional tools for Outlook. OutlookTools is free, but you’re asked to donate if you find the program useful.

Stellar PST Viewer

Running into problems with Outlook that you can’t pin down? Maybe Outlook has gotten slow. Perhaps it’s freezing or crashing. Or even worse, maybe certain emails have disappeared or become unreadable. One culprit for these types of glitches is a corrupt PST file. And one way to uncover lost emails in a corrupt PST is to use a program like Stellar PST Viewer from Stellar Phoenix.

This tool scans your PST file and displays all the individual emails in the file, including ones that you may not be able to access or read through Outlook. Launch the program and point it to the PST file for your misbehaving account. The tool displays all types of emails, including deleted messages, drafts, and ones that were otherwise lost. You can click on the different folders to browse for the emails you need or run a search for specific messages by sender, recipient, subject, and/or date.

You can also view your calendar, contacts, and tasks. And even if you’re not having problems in Outlook, you can still use Stellar PST Viewer to track down emails you thought were gone. If you believe the PST is corrupt, however, you can scan it and hopefully repair it using the scan feature in OutlookTools or Microsoft’s Inbox Repair tool (scanpst.exe). Stellar Phoenix also offers its own PST Repair Tool, though it’ll cost you $99.

Sync2

Do you maintain a calendar in Google as well as a calendar in Outlook? If so, you may find it helpful to synchronize the two so you can see the same appointments and events in both places. Outlook Google Calendar Sync and Calendar Sync are two free tools that can sync both calendars.

But the program I use is Sync2, or actually Sync2 Cloud, from 4Team Corporation. Though Sync2 or Sync2 Cloud will run you $39.95, I think it’s worth the price.

Sync2 can sync your Outlook and Google calendar and contacts, while Sync2 Cloud can sync information between Outlook and iCloud or Exchange as well as Google. The program is fairly simple to configure and use. To start, just add the account you want to sync with Outlook.

Tell the tool what data you want to sync – calendar, contacts, and/or tasks. Set up your sync schedule. You can tell the program to sync your calendar and other data at virtually any interval from every five minutes to once a week. You can apply filters to limit and control what information is synced and tag specific folders to include in the process. And you can view and change all the advanced settings in one screen.

Sync2 then takes over by running in the background each time you load Windows and automatically syncing your calendar and other information. Just set it and forget, and you’ll find your appointments happily in sync across your different calendars.

How Inbox by Gmail Saves Time and Increases Productivity

Trying to get to inbox zero? Switching from conventional Gmail to Inbox can help you get there, thanks to features like bundling, snooze, and templates.

Inbox by Gmail first appeared in 2014, when the vamped-up web-based email client was still invite only. But there are still people who haven’t switched over, and may not even be fully aware that they can.

Those people are missing out. Inbox by Gmail takes what you already enjoy about Gmail — message sorting, filters, great archive search — and makes it even more useful. Its ethos and functionalities will feel familiar to fans of the Getting Things Done productivity approach, as Inbox works to make every email actionable, even if that action is merely to archive a message. This helps you clear things out of your inbox and focus in specifically on what you need to do with your email, when you need to do it.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say Inbox literally transformed the way I use email,” said Vinay Pai, the founder of Unfake.us. “I used to be pretty dedicated to desktop-based clients like Thunderbird, Outlook, and Eudora but Inbox made me decide to switch my whole email workflow around it.”

It might take a few days to get used to Inbox’s somewhat-different look and layout, and you’ll want to spend a bit of time exploring the email client’s features and setting them up to best fit your needs and workflow. But once you do, you’ll wonder how you ever found time to manage email without Inbox.

Here are some of the key features of Inbox to familiarize yourself with.

Write More Than Just Emails

In Inbox, composing emails isn’t your only option when you hover over the red plus sign in the lower-right corner of the screen. You can write an email or a reminder, which will be welcome news to those of you who regularly email reminders to yourself.

The compose button gives you the option to compose an email or create a reminder, and brings up commonly used email addresses.

And you can do more than one thing with the emails you receive. Every email has a toolbar on the top right that gives you options for the email: pin it, snooze it, mark it done, or move it to a specific folder. Pinning an email keeps it in your inbox, and you can toggle to a pinned-only view by clicking the pushpin button at the top right of your screen.

Manage Multiple Accounts

If you need to work with more than one email account — for example, a work one and a personal one — Inbox makes that easier to do. “As someone with four active email accounts, juggling them and staying on top of messages through various apps and platforms was always a major headache,” said Nate Masterson, marketing manager of Maple Holistics. “With Google’s Inbox I can manage all of my email accounts in one convenient place without any time lost.”

To forward emails to a Gmail account, go to the wheel at the top right of the inbox window in the regular Gmail view, then choose “Settings,” then “Forwarding and POP/IMAP.” Then you can use the bundling features to sort emails from the forwarded accounts into appropriate bundles. Or if both accounts are Gmail accounts, you can select “Add account” in Inbox by clicking your user image at the top right, which allows you to set up your additional Gmail accounts and toggle back and forth.

Bundle, Bundle, Bundle

“Like with any email app, the trick with Inbox is to ignore as much as possible,” said Michael Heiligenstein, SEO director with FitSmallBusiness.com. Inbox’s built-in bundles make this relatively easy, by putting related emails in one place so they don’t overwhelm your inbox.

Inbox provides a few standard bundles, but you can create your own as well.

“Most important is the Low Priority bundle, which is also the hardest for Inbox to figure out,” Heiligenstein said. You have to tell Inbox what to put in that bundle, at least for a while, but Inbox will eventually start to recognize what belongs based on your previous actions. “You don’t lose these emails, but Inbox keeps them out of the way so they don’t clog up the rest of your mailbox.”

Take Advantage of the Social and Promotions Tabs

“I previously had a complex labelling system setup so when Google introduced their Social and Promotions bundles, I was dubious,” said Fiona Adler, founder of Actioned.com. But Adler has found the tabs useful after giving them a try.

You can bundle all newsletters or promotional emails together, and even set them to only appear in the inbox once daily to avoid distractions.

“Mainly I use the Promotions bundle for all the reading material I receive that I’m interested in — but don’t want interrupting my day,” Adler said. “When something hits your inbox that you don’t want to read straight away, simply bundle it into this tab.”

Use That Snooze

Pai aspired to hitting “inbox zero” but in the past was never able to achieve it. One of the things he likes about Inbox is that it makes every email easily actionable, thanks to a snooze function that lets you remove emails from your inbox until you want them to pop up again.

By using the snooze feature, you can keep emails out of your inbox until you need to see them.

“Plan on following up with someone in a few weeks? Great, snooze it for that Monday. Meant to grab drinks with a former colleague ‘in a few months?’ No problem, just snooze it for three months from now,” Pai said. “Inbox lets me stay on top of my email way better while simultaneously spending less time on it.”

Set Up Labels

Inbox’s strong filtering tools add another way to manage your inbox, and save time in labelling and sorting emails. “Too many people neglect to use the tools that Inbox provides despite the fact that they have the power to make lives easier and simpler,” Masterson said.

In the left-hand menu, select “Create new” to create a new label for your messages. And under Settings, select the “Labels” tab to turn bundling for your labels off and on. This will help you keep related messages together and let you set rules for the bundles themselves.

Start Using Templates

Inbox allows users to set up canned responses that can save a lot of time if you often send similar messages. To set up canned responses, choose “Settings” in the left-hand menu, then navigate to the “Templates” tab and select “Create a Template.”

If you frequently write similar emails, templates will be a significant timesaver.

Then you can start writing templates of common emails that fit your needs. “Simply write the email you want to reuse. I like to use ‘xxxx’ for placeholders that will need to be customized,” Adler said. “Take a bit longer to ensure that it’s well written and includes all the information you need. You can always delete extra parts that aren’t necessary for all emails.” To save your template, click “create” and your template will be saved.

Don’t Be Afraid to Archive

Using the archive function to get things out of your inbox is a great way to keep things clean, Adler said. “There’s no need to store most emails in folders these days as you can trust that Google’s search function will find anything you need,” she said. To help keep your storage space under control, set a rule for Inbox to delete all emails that are 12 months old, or another timeframe that makes sense for your needs.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday: Graphics, Wireless Keyboard Fixes Need Attention

Close to 70 vulnerabilities addressed in this month’s Patch Tuesday update from Microsoft

Microsoft patched 67 different vulnerabilities in its monthly Patch Tuesday release. Of the common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs), 24 are considered Critical, 42 are rated Important, and one is characterized as Moderate in severity.

There are no zero-day patches this month. Affected products include: Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, ChakraCore, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office Services and Web Apps, Adobe Flash Player, Microsoft Malware Protection Engine, Microsoft Visual Studio, and the Microsoft Azure IoT SDK. Adobe also patched 6 vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash. The details on the releases can be found on the Microsoft site.

While there were no zero-day releases, Microsoft had already released urgent fixes in weeks leading up to Tuesday, including one that addresses an exploit that was created in an attempt to correct earlier patch issues related the Meltdown chip vulnerability. Across industry blogs on this month’s patches, researchers noted several of the updates deserved attention. Also notable is Microsoft’s disclosure of a publicly known SharePoint elevation of privilege bug (CVE-2018-1034).

“There is one public disclosure this month in SharePoint Server. The challenging aspect of this month is that there are enough critical vulnerabilities in the Operating System, browser updates, and in Office that all three should be prioritized,” said Chris Goettl in a blog post for Ivanti.

Here is a round-up of some highlights from the releases and the products impacted.

Graphics

Microsoft released five fixes for critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-1010, 1012,1013) in the Windows Font Library (called Microsoft Graphics). According to the software maker, a remote code execution vulnerability exists when the Windows font library improperly handles specially crafted embedded fonts. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could take control of the affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights. There are multiple ways an attacker could exploit the vulnerability.

“Those of us who lived through Duqu always shudder a bit when we see font-related bugs, and these have me downright shivering,” said Dustin Childs in a blog post for Zero Day Initiative. “Each of these patches covers a vulnerability in embedded fonts that could allow code execution at the logged-on user level. Since there are many ways to view fonts – web browsing, documents, attachments – it’s a broad attack surface and attractive to attackers. Given the history of malicious fonts, these patches should be high on your test and deployment list. This is also a good time to remind you to not do day-to-day tasks as an administrator.”

Microsoft Malware Protection Engine

The fix for the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine (MMPE) was actually released earlier because Malware Protection Engine updates are released whenever necessary. Microsoft credited Thomas Dullien of Google Project Zero for discovering the vulnerability.

“The flaw is reportedly quite easy to exploit and impacts the malware scanning capabilities for a variety of Microsoft anti-malware products, including Windows Defender, Microsoft Endpoint Protection and Microsoft Security Essentials,” said security blogger Brian Krebs in his monthly analysis on the patches. 

Microsoft Wireless Keyboard

Microsoft Wireless Keyboard 850 Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8117) is a “fascinating bug” according to Childs in his blog post.

The bulletin explains a security feature bypass vulnerability exists in the Microsoft Wireless Keyboard 850, which could allow an attacker to reuse an AES encryption key to send keystrokes to other keyboard devices or to read keystrokes sent by other keyboards for the affected devices. An attacker would first have to extract the AES encryption key from the affected keyboard device.

“Patches for hardware are rare, and patches for keyboards are especially rare, so it was somewhat shocking to see this bug detailed,” said Childs. “However, the severity of this bug should not be scoffed at. If you have this keyboard, do not miss applying this patch.”

Spectre patch

As mentioned earlier, a fix was released last month to addresses an exploit that was created in an attempt to correct earlier patches related to Meltdown. Updates released this week now include Spectre Variant 2 fixes AMD devices.

“The ongoing Spectre/Meltdown saga continues to illustrate the complexity involved with trying to work around hardware vulnerabilities via software,” said Greg Wiseman of Rapid7. “KB4093112 mitigates CVE-2017-5715 for Windows 10 version 1709 systems running on AMD processors. By default, applying this update will only protect against some attack scenarios. To prevent a malicious application run in user mode from being able to disclose the contents of kernel memory (user-to-kernel), the Indirect Branch Prediction Barrier must be enabled by adding certain registry keys and restarting.”

Browsers

Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge saw the largest grouping of fixes this month, which is not unusual. Many of these fixes are rated as Critical, including Internet Explorer Memory Corruption vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-0870, 0988, 0991, 0996). According to the bulletin, a remote code execution vulnerability exists when Internet Explorer improperly accesses objects in memory. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user. If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, the attacker could take control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. This applies to all currently supported versions of Windows client and server OS.

A cumulative update for Internet Explorer patches several reported vulnerabilities, one of which could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted webpage in Internet Explorer. Details on this update in KB4092946.

Adobe

Adobe issued its fixes for 19 total vulnerabilities on Tuesday, including bugs in Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe InDesign CC, Digital Editions, ColdFusion and the Adobe PhoneGap Push plugin. Three vulnerabilities are deemed critical.

Windows 10 Spring Update Is Almost Here -- So Let's Look at the Fall

Microsoft will be wrapping up development of the fifth feature update for Windows 10 in the next couple of weeks. Even as it does, it’s already working on the fall update, known as Redstone 5.

There are a couple of items that are already being tested in these early builds, so we can extrapolate some ideas about what new features we might see in Redstone 5 when it arrives this Fall. Let’s look at what those features might be.

Sets

The idea behind this feature is that you would open one window within an app — say a Word document — and then open other apps/browsers in tabs within the same UI for other research and content related to your current work project. Windows 10 would remember these various open tabs the next time you open that app to continue working on your project.

We saw this feature previewed in the pending spring update a couple of months ago, but it was not tested across all Windows Insider devices, so Microsoft ultimately decided that this functionality would not be part of the spring update, aka the Redstone 4 feature update.

It has now been re-introduced in the Redstone 5 builds and is being tested on all Windows Insider systems on a broad basis. Seeing it added into the early builds of this next feature update, while not a guarantee, gives developers and testers nearly six months to work on Sets and really tweak the UI and overall experience of using the feature.

Cloud-Powered Clipboard

This feature was announced last year, but it has not yet made it into test builds. The Cloud-Powered Clipboard is intended to give you access to data you copy into the clipboard on one Windows 10 device and make it available across your entire ecosystem of Windows 10 device.

If you are familiar with Timeline, which shares activities across all of your Windows 10 devices for easily picking up work on other machines, then Cloud-Powered Clipboard is the same concept.

Unless Microsoft has completely abandoned this concept, I expect to see this feature in early Redstone 5 builds so that it also has a good six-month testing period like Sets will have as noted above.

Cortana

There were some reports over the last six months or so that Cortana would be moved from the Start Menu area of Windows 10 into the Action Center on the other side of the desktop screen. So far, we have not seen any activity in this direction in the pending spring update, but the early stages of Redstone 5’s development would be a good time to see this activity begin.

Just like with Sets and the Cloud-Powered Clipboard, early testing would allow this change to get thoroughly checked out for the best user experience.

Security

This is another area that always gets work during each subsequent feature update cycle for Windows 10.

Whether it is to add enterprise related security tools or improve the detection ability of Windows Defender Anti-Virus on consumer, business, and enterprise machines this is an area that Microsoft does not rest on and it is making a difference.

Just look at the recent details of how Windows Defender stopped a huge coin mining campaign in its tracks when it detected and stopped over 80,000 instances of a trojan looking to infect Windows machines.

Control Panel

Expect continued work in this area to move functionality out of the legacy Control Panel and put it inside of the Windows Settings app on Windows 10.

Microsoft did a little of this during pending spring update relating to keyboard, sound, and storage settings. They did back out the keyboard changes after testing them for a couple of test builds, but I expect those to return as this migration continues towards this Control Panel to Windows Settings project.

So What Can We Learn from the Very Early Fall Previews?

Work in the operating system is much more incremental that it used to be when Microsoft was releasing a new version of Windows every three years.

New features and enhancements are not going to take us by surprise, but we should expect solid improvements in functionality and usability each and every cycle.

This past cycle, one thing Microsoft did do was they backed off from committing certain features to certain updates because that was just an opportunity for criticism because they would have cut or removed a planned feature for a specific update. By doing this, I think it results in better development and internal critique of the features without the pressure of having an external commitment to meet certain deadlines to include the capability in Windows 10 during a specific timeframe.

Will it make a difference in the overall development cycles down the road? Well, that remains to be seen but there is something to be said for spending time stabilizing Windows 10 feature updates before they are released instead of just stuffing it full of new stuff just to satisfy the need to have that new stuff in the OS.