Forum Posts Feed
Mining E-mail Newsletters for Interesting Topics
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by Leib Moscovitz
Jul 21, 2020 at 09:11 AM
I suspect that you might be thinking about Zoot.
Earlier iterations of UR enabled one to use it as an email client (by using embedded Outlook), but this does not work in the most recent release, and it apparently doesn’t work in earlier releases with the May 2020 update of Windows 10 installed.
Other admittedly imperfect Windows options at integrating email with PIMs include Essential Pim (probably the best such option for Windows), Leadertask (POP mail only, IIRC), and Harmony PIM (now DoogiePIM, haven’t tried the DoogiePIM version yet).
Also, the latest version of EM Client (Pro version) confers a certain amount of PIM functionality, although nothing that could compare with a regular PIM.
Posted by Dr Andus
Jul 21, 2020 at 11:32 PM
David Garner wrote:
>Unfortunately, I am getting so many newsletters,
>that I can’t keep up with them. I’d like to automate the location and
>extraction of the data
This is an interesting problem and probably analogous to any other situation where more information is coming your way then is humanly possible to deal with.
Without discounting your genuine need for a solution for this (I don’t know much about it but sounds like Zoot might be relevant for this?), the question arises: what is the benefit of being exposed to such a constant flow of information (or rather data) as opposed to looking for that information only if and when you actually need it?
I have a similar problem with a service called academia.edu which sends me interesting research articles it thinks I might be interested in on a daily basis, and it ends up cluttering my Outlook inbox at work because many of the titles do look very interesting but in the end I never manage to look through them all because there is just not enough time in the day.
On the other hand all these emails simply are the results of automated searches that the service sends me, and I would probably find much more relevant information if I did a purposeful search on their site, where all this content is hosted and continues to exist.
There is the issue of serendipity, and that’s the only reason I haven’t unsubscribed from it yet, as I might discover some unexpected stuff occasionally. But then wouldn’t I do that anyway if I did a purposeful search? Serendipity may still happen.
I realise not all content that arrives in newsletters will forever exist on the server that sent it, so there is archival value in it, but it also could be that one day all content will be discoverable again on the net, even deleted information, in a similar way that decades (and even centuries) old cold cases are now solved because of improvements in DNA analysis.
Anyway, I haven’t got any answers, just problems, sorry… :)
Posted by Chris Thompson
Jul 22, 2020 at 08:26 PM
As satis suggested, DevonThink is good for this, in that you can let it ingest newsletters without having to read them, and when you’re writing about a topic or looking at a note you’ve written, it will identify ingested newsletters you’ve stored that also discuss the topic. It also supports auto-classification of material according to a taxonomy of topics you identify. It also can automatically ingest material from RSS feeds. This is most useful if the feeds include abstracts or full text, rather than just links.
If you find any solutions like this for Windows, please share them. I’m surprised there aren’t more applications to fill this niche. DevonThink is one of the last non-cross-platform tools I’m using these days.
Posted by Jon Polish
Jul 23, 2020 at 01:02 PM
Ultra Recall gets my vote too. I have used it in the past to archive vast amounts of email and the occasional drag/drop I needed for projects I was working on. Search and retrieval is versatile and robust.
A long time ago, I used askSam with varying degrees of success for this purpose. Others were far more successful. Fookes Software used to sell an excellent mail archiver, Mailbag Assistant. They just released Aid4Mail 5 which I understand is the replacement for Mailbag Assistant.
Jon
Posted by Jon Polish
Jul 23, 2020 at 02:05 PM
Another option is MailStore. The home version is free.
Jon