Chris Szurgot's Blog

Everyone suffers from Information Overload these day, but I'm starting to suffer from Information Management Program overload. These programs to help me manage my data are working pretty well, but some of the interactions are going to drive me bonkers.

Take SpamBayes. I currently use SBS, Outlook, and SpamBayes. Largely, SpamBayes works great as an Anti-spam product (although I wish you had a little more control over it, like a sender white-list), and even catches a lot of viruses. But where it fails, and pushes things into overload territory, is the fact that 1) You can't adjust it's sender list, so every now and then infrequent senders get flagged as spam again, and 2) (the more frequent offender) almost every email that comes through is still notified with a desktop alert, a sound, and the stupid little email icon. Which means instead of silently processing the messages, and only notifying me of good mail, outlook is notifying me of every mail that comes in anyway, defeating a good portion of the purpose of filtering out the spam. Overload!!!!

Or take Sauce Reader.  I've been using Sauce Reader for some time now. I like it's integrated posting tool, it's display styles, etc... But it ends up (ended up, they *finally* fixed it this week), you had to manage the tool as much as the data to make sure you weren't missing any data. There was a bug where it would automatically focus on new items. While this would sound like a nice feature, this meant if you were reading an item, it would flip up to the new item. Which was especially bad if you had followed a link or two, because they were lost. And it was also bad if the Reader was minimized, because it would collect items in a feed, and auto-read them, so if you left it on an active feed like MS, you could come back after several hours, and have 1/2 of the new items already read for you. So you'd have to remember to put the reader on a quiet feed so it wouldn't do that. Argghh!!!!

It's truely frustrating when you have to manage the tools that are meant to help you manage your information. The Sauce Reader issue has been fixed, and now just a couple of bugs have to settle out from that...

SpamBayes is a different matter. It does what it's supposed to, and does it pretty well, (filter spam) but those notifications are killing me... I'll probably have to add a new layer into the system to pre-filter spam (ugh) and add rules into Outlook/Exchange to pre-filter common spam messages into a separate folder so they miss my inbox, but it would be nice to just set something up so that it could capture my mail, filter out the spam so I could no about the good positives, and check the negatives once a day or week.

Enough... This rant is contributing to overload. Just a thought to other developers *not* to contribute to information overload when developing information managment programs.