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 ;)

I've noticed that when I restart Vista I sometimes get a dialogue "The data file .... was not closed properly." when I fired up Outlook again.

It was driving me slowly mad (or actually driving me to use those extra 2 minutes to grab one more coffee!) but... I've found a solution... and it's really simple.

All you have to do is make sure Outlook has an open window - ie it's not minimized - when you hit shutdown or restart.

It appears that if Outlook isn't an active window then Vista is a little aggressive in shutting down and if Outlook doesn't respond quick enough then it just gets closed.

Now obviously this doesn't solve the problem of a crash, power cut or other hard stop, but when you're in control it's easy enough to work around.

I'm going to hunt to see if I can find a way to make Vista a little less understanding about Outlooks obsessive need to tidy up ;)

What with my UMPC and my new phone and my laptop I have a lot of places to consume blog posts. The problem is that it's very easy to get very out of sync and confused very quickly - especially throwing in reading on the web on a bunch of machines in various places.

Admittedly with a lot of the blogsphere you're not sure if it's deja vu because you're reading the same post twice or because a meme has suddenly popped and everyone is writing about the same thing!

I've tried a bunch of different solutions over the last year to try and manage it. Google Reader, Bloglines, RSS Bandit, new the Origami Experience (which has such a good RSS reader on the UMPC platform I hate to be without it! It's coming soon Steve), Outlook, IE, Viigo ... and while they're all good in their own ways it comes down to keeping in sync, being able to flag things for follow-up and just making good use of my time and attention.

The other day I saw on Brads blog that NewsGator was making it's clients free. That was the most ridiculously good bit of news for managing my problem! Greg Reinacker explains why they made the change, but it quickly makes it the best solution for Windows, Mac, Mobile and Web users.

I now have NewGator Go! on my phone, Newsgator Desktop on my UMPC to keep that in sync, Newsgator Inbox running in Outlook for when I'm at the laptop and when I'm sitting at someone elses computer... NewsGator Online of course!

I can now read, clip and stay synchronized over pretty much any device I use. The only exception is on my UMPC where I can't clip posts to follow up later - must ask someone about that...

Looking to the future, like Steve I'm keen to see Fav.or.it ... I just hope it supports my mobile, distributed, attention disorder, reading and posting syle!