Lightning-fast search for emails in Outlook

This piece of (free) software is awesome ! If you use Outlook and manage huge PST files, you’ll love it ! I sure do!

Lookout is lightning-fast search for your e-mail, files, and desktop integrated with Microsoft Outlook™. Built on top of a powerful search engine, Lookout is the only personal search engine that can search all of your e-mail from directly within Outlook – in seconds…

You can use Lookout to search:

* E-mail messages
* Contacts, calendar, notes, tasks, etc.
* Data from exchange, POP, IMAP, PST files, Public Folders
* Files on your computer or other computers

Just enter your search and press enter. Results are instant. Lookout will find your search terms hiding nearly anywhere in your Outlook mailbox – subjects, bodies, phone numbers, addresses, etc.

I’ve tried it today, and a simple search in about 3 500MB PST files gave me about 350 results (files, emails and apointments) in 0.3 seconds !

Try it, it’s free and very USEFULL ! I dont know how I’ve worked until now without that software!

How I deal with high email volume

There are plenty of posts about emails overload at work, email organization, email productivity… There are even interesting blogs dedicated to the subject.

Actually, increasing email volume is a reality we have to face up. Here is how I try to deal with the «Inbox overload».

* Folders: I automatically organize inbound mail into folders: as I belongs to different email lists, I like to get inbound emails automatically classified based on the destinatory lists to which I belongs; I have a folder for each list.
* Thread (pre)view: I organize emails in each folders by «Conversations topics» (Outlook), filtering «unread email» only, and I enable the «2 lines Autopreview»: I get a fast preview of full conversations with unread (new) mail. That way, I can see rapidly the topic of each thread and if it has already been dealt with by any list member (generally a colleague). I’m able to fastly discard full conversations (possibly tens of email) in a minute — «mark as read» button is your friend!
* Snarf: I sometimes also use SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder, from Microsoft Research: It let me see if I have new unread emails from people which I frequently exchange with. I can also fastly mark those emails as read and or delete them.