Major update of Soup Mail Outlook add-in

Over the next couple of weeks, we’re rolling out a major update to the Soup Mail Outlook add-in. We’re very excited about this, not least because we’ve given it a major makeover, but also because we’ve addressed several bugs and introduced some performance improvements.

What’s changed?

Fundamentally, the add-in works the same way as it always has. You send an email (or select emails in your mailbox and click the green “Save to Soup Mail” button), the prompt pops up and you click Save.

Here’s how it now looks…

…and here’s a list of what’s changed:

• Look-and-feel makeover: we’re now using a modern user interface, which is more aligned with the Soup Mail look-and-feel, whilst also working better on high-resolution devices, and adapting better to multi-screen setups.
• No more spontaneous logouts: a longstanding issue where you’d get logged-out of the Soup Mail add-in has been fixed – we’ve completely revised the way credentials are stored and maintained.
• Better visibility of emails you’re saving: the email(s) being saved are now easier to identify. Previously it could be hard to figure out which email was waiting to be saved in the popup; now they’re all listed with details right in the popup.
• Better “get help” experience: we’ve added a feature to the settings dialog that will automatically create a support request email if you need our help. This attaches the latest log file to the email.

What’s new?

There are two significant new beta features in the updated add-in. You can enable them in the Settings form, in the “Beta features” tab.

• “Don’t save, just delete”: for sent items, this adds a new action button for emails that you don’t want to save to Soup Mail, but instead just want to delete from your Sent Items folder. This feature now enables you to do this straight from the pop-up.
• Save attachments locally: the idea of this feature is that you can configure the add-in to save attachments contained in the emails you’re saving, to a local/network drive in addition to saving the email to Soup Mail.

What do I need to do to get the new version?

An automatic update process will occur sometime in the next week or so which will apply the update for you. Once it does, you’ll need to log into the add-in using your Soup Mail login, confirm your preferences are as expected, and continue as normal.

There are a few scenarios where you’ll need to manually switch to the new version, particularly if you’re using one of the alpha or beta versions currently. For more information, or if you just can’t wait for the automatic update, please see this help article.

Clean out your inbox week

This week is “Clean out your inbox week” – the seventh year such a week has been observed. A sign of the times not only that clogged inboxes are so commonplace that people need to be rallied to clean them, but also that the task gets honoured with a whole week!

Not many people would argue that cleaning up their inbox is a good idea, and most would agree it’s a tough ask due to the sheer volume of email that arrives daily. The trickier question, which would probably leave most people wondering, is how exactly to clean inboxes out without losing important information that is likely to be needed some time in the future. Where should you put them – into an archive? into a hierarchy of folders within your mailbox? into the file system somewhere?

It’s easy to frame this as a question for individuals, and answer it in terms of what works best for the user when it comes to retrieving the emails. But in an organisational context, there must be a better approach. Emails, after all, are the bread-and-butter of interactions between an organisation and its customers, suppliers, and other partners. They contain key information relating to agreements, commitments, clarifications, and decisions – and this information belongs to the organisation. Shouldn’t it be accessible to team members so it can be discovered, reviewed, checked, and actioned? Shouldn’t it be searchable, so that anyone working on a particular project can retrieve any email relevant to the project?

We’ve designed Soup Mail to achieve exactly these things. Soup Mail provides a common repository where people can save emails to team folders, outside of their inbox. So you can have it all: a clean inbox, and easy searchable access to the emails – not only those you were party to, but the full history of emails for each project. Check us out, and sign up for a free trial account, at www.soupmail.com.

– Euan