This post marks the beginning of another category on this blog: Useful Software.
Being in IT for the past 10 years, I’ve accumulated many useful tips and tricks – and more importantly, a hunger for new and more optimized ways of doing things. Nowadays, if you want something done in a computerized way, you’re very likely to find a piece of software which does just that. We’re facing challenges daily, and sometimes the solution is just few mouse clicks away, so hopefully you’ll find it easier to decide whether you need something or now and how you can use it, by just reading this category of my blog.
Meet lightning-fast email search: LookOut
LookOut is an amazing add-on to your Microsoft Outlook email client, and it allows you do all kinds of searches in any emails you have ever sent or received.
MS Outlook is mostly a corporate tool these days – you’re most likely to be using it at your workplace. And while some of us are blessed by having only a handful of emails a month, other people like me are facing hundreds of emails on a daily basis. And so as the volume of useful messages grows, so does the time it takes to find something unless you’ve got a perfect email filing workflow in place. Which I don’t. Not yet, anyway :)
So LookOut helps you improve your productivity by minimizing the time and efforts to find a particular email in your inbox or any other folder. It takes 15 minutes or so the first time you start it, because LookOut has to index all your emails before it can speed up your searches. After the index is generated, all new emails are being indexed automatically.
What LookOut can do for you
- index all your emails AND documents to ensure everything is accounted for when you search
- make any search return results in just few seconds. What this really means is that you’re going to save lots of precious time simply because you’ll never have to wait on a search again
- empower your searches with a flexible search query language
- easily limit periods or places you search in: limit search to last month or last week, or search only emails or contacts. You can also specify a certain folder you’re interested to search in
Search query examples
This is really just to give you the idea of how powerful the search is with LookOut:
from:gleb – this will find all the emails which have “gleb” anywhere in their “from” field
from:alex yesterday – this will find all the emails you received yesterday from all the people with “alex” in their name
from:alex nice – this will find emails from people with “alex” in the name and word “nice” anywhere in the email body
from:alex subject:nice – this will find emails from people with “alex” in the name and “nice” in the subject
LookOut: why you need it
So, if you:
- hate waiting longer than 2 seconds to find an email
- do lots of email searching daily
- like the idea of having intelligent searches (LookOut has a very simple yet flexible system of queries)
then this is definitely a tool for you. Go on, download it and give it a try: Lookout for Outlook