I use NewsGator Outlook Edition as my RSS aggregator, which creates an Outlook message for every post of every feed to which I subscribe. My feeds are semi-organised into subfolders and there are a lot of them. When I have the tree fully expanded it is about a screen and a half high. This is unmanageable so I leave the folders collapsed and periodically expand them to see if there are any new posts. What I want is a way to know if there is a need to expand the folder. I want parent folders to tell me what their children are doing, like little yellow secret police. To illustrate this point I have had an artist compile a representation of what such a system might look like, which you should see to the right. I will leave it up to the Add-In developers / Microsoft to determine the final colours.

I did a bit of googling and couldn’t find anything that did this for me, but then I got bored. Maybe such a thing already exists. If so, please tell me in the comments. If you are a developer and make this, it was my idea so you have to give me a free copy.