is an excellent companion program to OutLinker. I does the thread compression suggested above in a careful way that preserves the non-redundant information. Pre-process your inbox with this add-in and then folllow-up with Outlinker

There is updated macro code on the wiki that fixes this.

http://wiki.activityowner.com/index.php?title=Outlinker.bas

The setup program hasn't been updated yet.

In my experience, most work conversations are not "well behaved" enough for me to ever use a feature like this. Here is a typical sequence:

msg1: original message with attachments
msg2: reply to msg1 (no attachments)
msg3: add embedded image in reply to msg2
msg4 looses embedded image in reply to msg4
msg5 same person replies again to msg 4 different point/question
msg6: new attachment
etc.

I usually want to archive the key points/attachments so I use threadzoom to narrow down to the message that I need and then archive or process.

Note that the latest version has two new macros available, "delete" and "archive", which will let you delete or archive one or more selected messages with one click from the toolbar (and include them in stats as well). I like the bulk delete as gdeleting messages takes a couple of seconds each and doing it all at once for messages I know I want to get rid of is easier.

If a message has OutLook categories assigned, they are added into the next action box as [*category1][*category2] etc.

If you enter a next action and it has any bracket text as [*tag1][*tag2] etc, that text is used to overwrite the outlook categories as "tag1, tag2".

You can customize the context or label buttons to include * if you want to use these to set outlook categories.

Note that if you message has a category assignment and you wipe it out in the next action, it will be wiped out in the message.

If you need to archive messages with categories you set, the trick would be use a "dummy" info-only action and just delete the transferred entries for these later. There is no way to wipe out

The harder part is your last request. How do we decide what information would go back into the email category as part of archiving? A task might have several bracketed terms [next week][@web][projectA]]R:AO]. You probably wouldn't want all this going out with replies you might make from the message, would you?

We could have the the category information coming from the message to the text entry box labeled with a prefix (e.g. [olcat:Project A] and only incorporate bracketed terms with that prefix back into the OutLook category.

Ideas?

I have been trying to synchronize all my tags and labels across different applications that I use in a daily basis , i.e outlook, evernote, Xmarks, areas in mindreader/MM/RM, etc. Using the same tag taxonomy helps keep everything consistent and easy to find.

I use Taglocity (www.taglocity.com) for all email that I retain as reference/ supporting material for a project. Taglocity is using email category field in outlook message to store the tags. As more people in my company use it, more emails come in already tagged with relevant information.
It would be great if Outlinker would be able to read this information form the email and populate the text entry box with it. For example, if category of the email contain ProjectA, Area1 and subject reads Draft deliverable for review, Outlinker would display Draft deliverable for review [ProjectA][Area1] in the text entry field.
If I already have a map set up for ProjectA and there is a link to it in MindReader configuration map, the action will be routed to the right map.
It would also be great if Outlinker saves the labels in the category filed of the email after it processed and before it moved to the archive folder. By using searches based on categories it's easy to find all relevant emails related to a specific label/project/person etc. Currently this information gets captured in the task information in MM, but does not get stored in the email once it's archived for reference.