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Microsoft Research is quickly becoming the place to turn within Microsoft for all sorts of fascinating cutting-edge utilities. Not much work has been done so far on desktop tools for e-mail, but a new tool called SNARF holds a lot of promise.
SNARF is short for "Social Network and Relationship Finder." It's a utility that scans unread e-mail and tries to determine how important it is to you. It indexes all existing e-mail in Microsoft Outlook (a process which takes a few minutes on first install), shows a list of currently unread e-mail, and then assigns a priority to each of those messages.
When you run SNARF, you'll see three panes:
- The top pane shows messages from the last week that are still unread.
- The middle pane is the same, except it includes e-mail that doesn't list the user's name in the To: or CC: lines.
- The bottom pane lists all people involved in all mail from the past week, read and unread.
The priority for each user is represented by a graphical bar -- the longer the bar, the more important the e-mail; this lets you single out the most important unread e-mail in your inbox, and tend to it first.
SNARF also lets you take multiple e-mails and consolidate them into a "thread," which gives you a quick graphical overview of all the e-mails passed between you and another person on a given subject.
By default, Microsoft Outlook only tracks replies to a given message, so this makes it easier to find everything related to a given conversation -- to see a message, and a conversation, in context.
SNARF requires Outlook 2002 or Outlook 2003 (any e-mail connection will do), and the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1.
About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is the editor of the Windows 2000 Power Users Newsletter.
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