Lookout!

SWEET!  I read about this a bit yesterday via the “Don” of COM.

I didn’t think much of it since when I went to the website, pretty much all I got was that it was recently assimilated….I mean purchased …. by Microsoft.  This morning I saw that it had appeared on the Microsoft Download Center feed (RSS).  I downloaded it and installed it.  It created an index of all the contents of my PST (including all the blog posts from my aggregator since I use NewsGator!) and then was ready.  I ran a few quick searches and all I can say is HOLY FLYING BITS BATMAN!  I haven’t seen GMail in action, but this tool certainly blows the intrinsic Outlook searching tool out of the water!

Not only does it find what you are looking for fast, it also allows you to add some keywords to your search such as “TO:” and “Attachment:”.  You can quickly find any message “From:Andy” that has an “filetype:pdf” (all messages from Andy that have a PDF attached!).  Very neat stuff!  I wonder where it stores this index it has created and how much space it eats up….it does update it automatically.  It can appearently handle multiple PSTs as well.

I’ll probably still use folders to group messages and such, but I’ll never worry about having to find something again.  This is seriously slick stuff.  It will be even nicer when it is fully integrated with Outlook as the intrinsic search engine for the application. Update: The download site for Lookout has changed to http://www.lookoutsoft.com/Lookout/download.html