Watch This

File sharing has evolved greatly, with options to send photos, songs and even large files over the web through specialized services or servers. This is also useful for office environments, but this requires administrators to keep an eye on activity so that no malicious data comes in or important info goes out. To make this task easier, Watch This wants to help you out by sending email notifications whenever changes are made to a folder.

The initial start prompts you with the email configuration window, which only takes a little time to fill in. You can either give your account details, such as username and corresponding password, as well as server information for outgoing emails, or go with an anonymous login.

Setting up tasks is easy enough and this is because of the simple design that poses no accommodation problems. The main window is split into several panels such as job list, watched folders in each job, as well as the list of emails that receive notifications.

It's not possible to simply drag a directory over the main window to add it to the list, but it's only a minor inconvenience. Creating a job is as easy as providing a name and picking a folder. You can add multiple addresses and even change its content by modifying the body.

Job settings are rather poor, with the application attempting to send alerts whenever changes of any type are detected. The only thing you can manage is the interval at which this happens, with a minimum of ten minutes.

As long as you're making changes to a task or creating new ones, anything can happen without any alerts. When you're done, you need to hit the “Stop Editing Settings” button, which enables a background service to keep an eye on your directories.

Sadly, we had to wait a considerable amount of time for the application to do its job, but it was all in vain. Tried out on a few Windows iterations, under administrative privileges and different email settings, alerts stubbornly refused to be sent, with a major impact on practicality.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Watch This comes with good intentions, letting you configure an email account and target directories with only a few mouse clicks to be alerted of any change. However, poor implementation of features keeps it from properly functioning, which makes you look for alternatives.