Some time ago I mentioned an ultimate tool for email managament called Mailbag Assistant (- find the article under "Hot News" in end of this article). And yes - the program has saved me a lot of hassle and time going through folders with tens of thousand of mail messages. Still some mail correspondence are more important than others and need a separate achieving system. In this category I have of course to include booking requests and final bookings (you just have to take extra care of such details, credit card information and alike are nothing you can afford to loose).
TREEPAD
Among hundreds of programs proclaiming to offer you the ultimate file system - one larger and more feature rich than the other - I always come back to a small programs that during the last years have saved mother nature quite some trees, and my office for paper. So what else could such a small little pearl of software (less than 300 kB in download) be named than Treepad?
Well I expect Henk Hagedoorn who creates Treepad maybe was considering the fact that this program is developed with a "tree base" - much like in Windows Explorer. Treepad has two main screens, one with folders (nodes) and subfolders, and the other with place for text (article).
I use it myself for all bookings to my travel agency, one folder/node for each client/traveller - and sub folder/sub node for each in/out mail. Copy the original mail with headers (so date, email addresses and other basic information are not lost) into Treepad. Each guest with his/her reference/booking number and name in the main node.
Treepad give you search with the options of searching in; "Subtree" - "Total Tree" - "Subtree articles" - "All Articles" - "Subtree nodes" - "All nodes" or "Current Article". Add that you further can choose to make the search "case sensitive" or not (case sensitive mean that if you search for "Smith" it only find "Smith" and not "smith" or "...smith..." inside a word). With such a search function, it's a breeze to find your information even in huge files.
There is a beta version out for an upcoming new version and Hank write like this to me in a mail where he answer for this new version; "New TreePad versions: despite not having updated TreePad for eight months or so, I'm still fully committed to improving the program. The last year has been extremely busy (and even this is an understatement ;-). However, in the new millennium I hope to be able to spend a lot of time on improving the program, creating new versions and adding some smashing new features to it."
