Lookout: Search plug-in for Outlook
Say what you will about Microsoft Outlook, but I rely on it more than the telephone for work-related communication. I also use it to keep records–if you’ve ever sent me a message, it’s in my Outlook folders. Somewhere.
While I’m pretty good at organizing messages, I found something better: Lookout is a plug-in for Outlook that adds a search toolbar and a powerful search engine. It’s far faster than Outlook’s built-in search–to the point of being nearly instantaneous. It has a handy search toolbar and a background indexing system.
Lookout has a nice Google-style search syntax. You can type a keyword or two and get quick results, listed by rank, or you can use modifiers like +word and -word and specify dates, subjects, and other fields. I haven’t spent much time figuring out the syntax, since it usually finds what I’m looking for with keywords alone.
Lookout is free while it’s in beta, but I’ll gladly pay for it. I rarely used Outlook’s search feature, since I could usually find things faster by browsing through my semi-organized folders. By contrast, I’ve found myself using Lookout’s search several times a day, and it hasn’t failed yet. [Found via Marc’s Outlook]