One of my bad habits is to “file” stuff in my inbox. A lot of it is project related that I read and forget to file (often on a mobile device the triage is a little hard remember when you’re quickly flitting through email), a lot is stuff I read and think I should delete… but forget to.

Well, enter Auto-Mate from Pergenex Software. It’s one of a suite of Outlook add-ins that they have to make life easier and extend the product you probably use every day to make you more productive.

Within a few minutes of installing it I had some rules set up to find and file away a bunch of project related emails that frankly I’d been too lazy to sort out… and my mailbox is starting to feel more responsive and well behaved with each new rule.

It’s not just about filing old messages though. With careful use you can create a rule to handle just about any situation and have it react as mails come in (for instance letting you create customized Out Of Office messages for different projects or clients).

It has a standard and pro version and both come with a free 30 day trial so you can take the rules for a test drive before committing. I think I’m sold ;)

Thanks to a tweet from FrankArr I’ve been playing with Digsby, a fairly new combined IM, Email and Social Networking client.

So what does that all mean?

Essentially it provides a replacement to the Windows Live Messenger and GTalk clients I usually have running on my dekstop. In that role it’s much like Pidgin or AdiumX for Mac users and does the job at least as well as they do. It still needs a bit more polish to get it on par with more developed clients for things like smileys but it does what it says on the tin (and I get tabbed chat which I love!)

The it adds on a notified for Social Networking tools like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook to let you see messages, alerts, status changes and what have you. It saves me many a wasted moment in the browser checking these things. You can even respond to some things directly, or get taken straight to the relevant item to manipulate it however you want.

Finally it acts as a mail poller for Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, POP3 and IMAP accounts – letting you read, manage and reply to email.

If it continue to evolve and deliver a stable, reliable, light footprint (resources and screen real estate) client I think it’s going to be a keeper.

It’s not going to replace Outlook (or Communicator for Exchange based IM and phone control) any time soon, and it doesn’t support Skype or MagicJack to manage all my communications … but who knows what the next build will bring :)

When Hotmail recently rolled out their new UI I liked it. It added value in a whole bunch of little ways that added up to a good experience. It's still not perfect and hopefully they'll continue to optimize the use of screen real-estate and layout, but their ajaxy-right-click goodness is great.

I used to like the Gmail interface because it was clean and simple and sparse but on one of my accounts I seem to be one of the lucky 1% who are part of the initial roll out of the new UI.

Now I don't like it as much. Stupid hovering things, more bold text highlighting stuff I don't care about, chat turned back on by default and a bunch of little tweaks that all take away from the reasons I liked it so much before.

I know it's a beta service and these tweaks may come and go, but this is the first upgrade that IMO had some retrograde features.