Joel Spolsky finds that, once patched, Outlook 2007 search is actually fast enough to be used, allowing him to reproduce the search speed he used to get with add-on tool Lookout:
The story has a happy ending. Last week Microsoft released a patch for Outlook 2007 which fixed the problem for me (I have a lot of big PST files, which, I’m told, is why search was so slow for me). Now I can search old email quickly enough that I don’t forget what I was searching for by the time the results come up. It’s not quite as fast as Lookout used to be, but it’s a big improvement and makes Outlook less of a downgrade.
Why is this important to web workers? Because one of the likeliest ways out of email hell is using search to find emails rather than trying to file them in folders of questionable usefulness. Filing is cognitively difficult and folder structures need maintenance over time if they are to offer any help to us.
Gmail, on the other hand, uses search as its main mechanism of message finding, combined with tags that are easier to apply than folders, since each message can have multiple tags. Could you make Outlook more Gmail like? It’s possible to configure Outlook to display messages in threaded view. You can hack a kind of tagging by modifying the subject, although this doesn’t allow for automatic tagging of incoming messages according to rules. And you can get fast search either with an add-on or patch (Lookout in earlier versions than Outlook 2007 or the patch Joel found for Outlook 2007).
You might wonder why anyone would make Outlook more Gmail-like. If you need to use Outlook at work or you choose to for some reason (like because Gmail continues to create that “on behalf of” garbage), that doesn’t mean you don’t want to explore new ways of interacting with it. Gmail represents a different way of interacting with email, one some people find quite useful.
How do you like your email client customized? What add-on tools do you use?
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