Searching Outlook Emails
Outlook has always crawled when searching for emails. It probably would be faster to export mail to a .csv file, open it in notepad, and find what you are looking for then using the built in Search mistake feature. I came across Lookout. It was an outlook plug-in that worked amazing well. Search a year worth of emails in about a second, great!
Lookout was such a great tool and I have been using it for 3 years now, I went to their site to see if it was open source(ish) or had a plug in model. One of the problems I have up at work is most of my older emails are sitting on a PST file on my computer. When I am at home and need to jump on a production server, I go to my emails to look for the credentials.
However, I don't have access to the emails. I wanted to create a extension to Lookout so I could search from my home computer (using the fancy web services) and return a list of mail items to me so I could get the information from my PST. Of course I google for the site because I know what it is called and clicked on the first item returned. Next thing I know I'm looking at the Windows Desktop Search page.
Whoa, that's horrible. Finally I've experienced a case where Microsoft purchases a good piece of software and buries it. I've heard the rumors of this happening where highly useful software disappears into the Vault at Microsoft. It appears Microsoft bought lookout so they could use them to integrate into the Desktop search.
Well, that isn't going to work for me. As all good computer geeks do, it is coming close to time for me to reinstall my machine. That has been put on hold until I can find the Lookout plug in. I'm not going to redo my machine and loose the ability to search emails. Yes, that software is that good. I'll trade the slow boot up time for the impossibly slow Outlook searching.
I just want simple software that will search my emails. I don't yet want a Microsoft worm crawling my machine indexing all my documents. That day will probably come, but there is no need for it yet. I just want to search emails.
Xander up at work was kind enough to send me his old zip file for the install, but I found out that Outlook 2007 specifically prohibits Lookout from being installed on top of Outlook. I have since saved it for posterity, so if anyone is looking for it, shoot me a message.
Bad Microsoft...if you are going to take away a feature, then you should at least offer a compatible replacement.