Faster Mail: Faster Mail vs. Clio's Outlook Add-in

When working in the legal field, email is part of everyday life, and effectively preserving email correspondence in its proper format is paramount to a firm's organizational success. This article will explain the differences between Clio's Outlook add-in and Faster Mail as email preservation tools.

Key Differences

Clio's add-in and Faster Mail are both covered in more detail below, but this section will outline the most important differences between the two options.

• Clio's add-in works in Outlook installed on your machine as well as Outlook's web platform, but will only work with Microsoft-backed email accounts (@outlook.com or custom domains) powered by Outlook.
• Faster Mail does not work in Outlook's web interface but will work with any email address running through Outlook installed on your computer.
• Clio's add-in will save emails from Outlook as communications in Clio while Faster Mail will save the emails as communications as well as much more robust .msg files in Clio.
• Both options will allow you to extract attachments to Clio as well.
• Clio's add-in will allow you to mark an email to be saved after sending.
• Faster Mail will automatically prompt you to file sent emails and also configure exceptions for emails to be automatically ignored upon sending.
• Faster Mail will, In addition to saving emails and attachments to Clio, automatically organize filed emails into subfolders inside Outlook for easy browsing

Clio's Outlook Add-in Can I use it?

• From Clio's Help Center... 
  "The Clio Add-in is only available to Outlook Desktop 2013 or higher with an Office 365 Business Standard subscription. The Clio Add-in only works with Microsoft-backed email accounts. Though you can view email accounts from other providers in Outlook, you cannot use the Add-in with these emails. The Clio Add-in is not supported on Exchange Servers hosted by a third party or Accounts not acquired through Microsoft such as GoDaddy."

Preservation process

• Clio's add-in offers multiple options for preserving an email. While composing an email, users can manually select to file the email to a matter upon sending.
• Clio's add-in also adds some buttons to Outlook's interface that can be manually clicked to trigger an email preservation.
• Clio's add-in offers "SmartFile".
  From Clio's Help Center.
  "Clio will automatically scan your inbox for new replies to emails that were already filed and automatically file all following emails to the same Matter. Clio can also scan your inbox for new emails that were not previously filed and allows you to file multiple emails at once."

How emails are preserved

• When an email is preserved using Clio's add-in
  it is imported to a matter in Clio under the Communications tab. Communications in Clio will document the date and time of the email, the sender and the recipient of the email, and include the subject and body of the email. The content of the Clio communication is simple text and does not include special formatting like bold text, italics, or hyperlinks and images.
• Attachments can also be extracted to the Documents tab of the matter when filing an email using Clio's add-in.

Faster Mail Can I use it? 

• Faster Mail only integrates with the desktop version of Outlook.
• Users can use Faster Mail with other email providers such as Gmail, but the email account must be connected to Outlook and Outlook must be running.

Preservation process 

• When an email is sent Faster Mail will automatically prompt the user to select the matter that it is related to.
• Exceptions may be configured to ignore emails to specific people or groups and these automatic prompts may be turned off if desired.
• Emails that are received or not preserved upon sending can be preserved by manually selecting the email for preservation from the Outlook interface.
• Users may bulk file emails by selecting as many emails in Outlook at once as they would like to file to the same matter.
• Regardless of how the email preservation is triggered, Faster Mail will automatically find all previous related messages in the conversation and preserve them at the same time to the same matter.
• Future emails in the same conversation will automatically have the matter selected upon filing.

How emails are preserved

• Faster Mail will save the email into Clio both as a communication and as a .msg file on the Documents tab of the matter.
• The .msg file is a full preservation of the email and will include all formatting, attachments, images, and functionality (reply and forward), and will open using the default mail client on the user's PC (Outlook).
• Attachments can also be extracted to the Documents tab of the matter when filing an email using Faster Mail and can be preliminarily sorted into proper folders to avoid having to reorganize the files afterwards.
• Other functionality In addition to saving emails and attachments into Clio, Faster Mail will also organize the user's email account automatically.
• Emails saved using Faster Mail will be moved from the user's inbox or sent folders into a folder labeled (Faster Suite) which will be organized by the status of the matter an email is filed to, the client of the matter, and the matter itself.
• This organization makes it much easier to find all emails related to a specific matter right through Outlook. Emails in these folders still exist in the email account and can be found using Outlook's search function.