The Bottom Line
Unfortunately, EmailTray's sorting is not exactly spot on initially, and some of the interaction with email accounts is obscure.
Pros
- EmailTray notifies you about POP and IMAP (including Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail,…) and Yahoo! Mail
- Based on your past actions, EmailTray spots important mail and separates it from, e.g., newsletters
- You can reply to emails right in EmailTray and delete them, too
Cons
- EmailTray's sorting is a tad obscure, as are some of its actions
- Only prioritizing based on sender, EmailTray cannot spot the odd important email
- EmailTray does not integrate with email service address books
Description
- EmailTray checks POP, IMAP and many web-based email services (including Yahoo! Mail) for new messages.
- Using your past actions and other users' email habits, EmailTray tries to identify your key contacts and their messages.
- EmailTray also sorts out bulk emails such as those from social networking sites, newsletters and marketers.
- Depending on the message priority, you can have EmailTray use different sounds and system tray alerts to notify you.
- It's easy to change any sender's priority from one of their messages.
- Integration with Outlook has EmailTray check your Outlook accounts without further setup.
- EmailTray supports Windows Vista/7.
Guide Review - EmailTray 2.0 - Windows Mail Checker and Prioritizer
Nothing, say EmailTray's makers, as long as it's not you keeping these tabs on all the email inflow. Instead, have a little utility analyze your email history and people's connections, then check all email accounts periodically and notify you of the few emails that really need your attention.
EmailTray promises to do just that, of course. Support for POP and IMAP (which includes many free email services such as Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Zoho Mail and AOL Mail) as well as Yahoo! Mail lets EmailTray offer a unified inbox. Going through your sent and trashed mail, EmailTray gains some insight into how you act on certain sender's mail. Integration with Facebook and other EmailTray user's email habits lets it identify new, valuable senders.
In practice, EmailTray did classify some mail intelligently, some oddly and most not at all. Why or how it did or didn't do any of this is not clear, and though assigning a priority to any sender is easy this seems a little less than satisfactory for an email concierge.
Also not clear and a bit obscure are some of EmailTray's antics: you can delete to emails and write quick replies, but there's no way to move or archive mail. Deleting a message from EmailTray's notification list does also delete the email from Gmail, for example, but deleting in Gmail does not remove a message from EmailTray.
Assuming the classifying works, EmailTray can remind you with different sounds and system tray notifications for the different categories. You can have the reminders and sounds repeat, too.
