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Recommendations on the "new" generation of outliners?
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Posted by Tumbleweed
Dec 19, 2022 at 02:11 PM
Hi, so my old generation of tools is becoming a bit stale. I typically use Outlook with NeoPro for email, and UltraRecall for most other things. It’s a good, stable combination. Then I keep a large and somewhat superfluous database of web info, etc. in Rightnote. Despite having licenses for InfoQube, Zoot, and a bunch more, I found that “less is more” with organization.
The new batch of tools led by notion.io intrigue me. Can I get some recommendations and discussion regarding the strengths and weakness of these? In particular, I am particularly interested in how email can be transferred/integrated, as keeping critical email organized and easily accessible has always been an issue with my previous systems. I also am looking for a very flexible tool that can handle task management and cross-link all items (which obviously all these seems to do). Offline access on PC would be highly desirable.
notion.so
heptabase.com
saga.so
capacities.io
tana.inc
obsidian.md
logseq.com
roamresearch.com
So any options on these?
Posted by Cyganet
Dec 22, 2022 at 08:23 AM
Is your use case to preserve emails as such, i.e. with full HTML formatting, metadata and the ability to archive and reply to them?
Or just to copy the content across?
What do you want to do that a regular email manager doesn’t handle?
Of the apps I have dabbled with (Notion, Logseq, Obsidian, Capacities), none are email managers, they work with text or text blocks, so they won’t be able to preserve an email in their native format. You would have to look at how to add emails as attachments.
Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 22, 2022 at 11:00 AM
Doesn’t UltraRecall already have a pretty good integration with Outlook? I thought it was just a matter of drag-and- drop.
I have tried to organise my emails with UR once, but I found that when the going gets tough, the whole process just slowed me down.
These days I just save important Outlook emails directly onto the hard drive, and if there is content that needs following up or tracking, I just copy and paste that into Roam as plain text and work on it there.
Ultimately an Outlook email message is just another medium, and it’s the information content that matters (to me), and the info can be extracted and dealt with in one’s preferred system.
Having said that, I do keep the original emails in outlook as well, and super important emails I also save as PDFs.
Posted by Cyganet
Dec 22, 2022 at 11:59 AM
@Tumbleweed, thanks for mentioning Neo Pro. I hadn’t heard of it before. Their website lists a Notes4Email product that looks perfect for my needs.
Posted by Tumbleweed
Dec 22, 2022 at 12:51 PM
@Cyganet, Sure, glad to help. NEOPro an amazing tool if you use Outlook, well worth the cost.
Regarding UltraRecall, yes it still works quite well for email. My reason for “switching” is just that information is not going in and being found very easily, which is how the wiki/markdown style seems to solve via Zettlekasten principles. Similarly, email is getting lost in my system, in terms of having to drag/drop an email from Outlook to a project folder in UR and then link into the contacts, etc. I used EssentialPim which has natively linking of everything, but frankly that program is so buggy that I couldn’t rely on it for email. So in terms of email I will still use Outlook/NEOPro and process/backup email from there, but would like to be able to insert important or reference emails into the new program.
@Dr Andus, I remember you were a huge fan of ConnectedText back in the day. It’s a shame that didn’t keep being developed, as it was ahead of it’s time.
Now that I’ve had some time to look, it is clear that OBSIDIAN is the one to use. Wow, is it every powerful! Windows installation and seems to be able to handle anything/everything as well as be customized for many use cases. However, learning it appears to be more daunting than Zoot pre help file and InfoQube combined.
Do any of you have any recommended resources, or tips for learning and building an Obsidian structure for various uses?