Productivity Portfolio

Ella is both elegant in design and remarkably effective. What is appealing is the simplicity of the program, which uses an adaptive learning engine. Many of the spam filters I've reviewed have been effective, but complex. Often these programs require the user to spend too much time setting up and maintaining the program.

In contrast, Ella's set up routine consists of a 6 step-training wizard that asks you to identify 10 emails each for three categories of email. These categories include email that should stay in your Inbox, email that can be deferred till Later and Spam.

Using the information from the training exercise, Ella classifies each email and takes one of three actions:

As you can see from the above actions, Ella goes beyond identifying spam. The program also organizes your Inbox by offloading items into the Later folder. I found this feature useful for deferring such items as newsletters, confirmations, jokes etc. By moving both spam and nonessential items out of my Inbox, I could concentrate on those items that were a higher priority.

Another appealing aspect of Ella is that it becomes more effective, the more you use it. While I would love to tell you Ella properly identified all spam and items that should be deferred, it didn't. (I also didn't expect 100% accuracy.) To compensate, the software includes a tiny toolbar that allows you to reclassify an email without opening it. Again, each time you reclassify an item, Ella learns from your behavior.

Overall, I give Ella high marks, as the program seems to have found the right balance between ease of use and effectiveness. During my testing, I only encountered two examples where Ella incorrectly classified the email as spam. While I still reclassify one or two emails per day, this is typically less than other spam filters I've used. The big difference is that reclassifying an email amounts to a single mouse click instead of editing a spam filter.

Although Ella has many strong points, it does suffer from some of the same weaknesses of other Outlook add-ins. In particular, it may interfere with Outlook email rules you've written. For example, in my testing I noticed it took precedence over my rules and they didn't trigger. One side benefit is that it appeared to me that my email retrieval was somewhat faster. I suspect this may be because my Outlook email rules add overhead. Secondly, if you use a Pocket PC you may need to remove the device from the cradle before starting Outlook. Again, this problem is not unique to Ella as it is a conflict that exists with many Outlook add-in programs and Microsoft's Active Sync. You may find out, like I did, the benefits far outweigh these issues. If need be, I can still run my email rules after Ella using Outlook's Rules wizard.

The other advice I'll give you is about second-guessing Ella if it misclassifies an item. Don't fall into the trap of thinking the program is ineffective because it missed a spam item that you thought was obvious. Mistakes will periodically happen. However, if you continue to correct Ella, you will see the rate of mistakes drops in short order. In fact, I would be surprised if after the 15-day trial you didn't see a dramatic change in your Inbox.

As for the name Ella, I'm not sure where it comes from. From my perspective, it could be an acronym for Eliminating Lots of Little Annoyances.