In his attempt to keep email under control, JOHN HARIS discovers the NEO Find software is a useful toool.

Email is a necessary evil in the networked world.

When used judiciously – that is, not cc’ing each email to every address in your Contact list – email is a powerful tool for communication and collaboration.
But emails – like details in my near half-century brain – can be tricky to recall when needed.

I use Microsoft Outlook to send and receive emails, but as the weeks, months and years pass, its archive becomes a monstrously unmanageable beast.

While it’s possible to search for emails with Outlook, it’s a painfully slow process. Third party vendors have taken advantage of this sluggishness by developing applications specifically designed to index Outlook catalogues quickly.

An early product was called Lookout, a nippy search-and-retrieve program that was eventually bought by Microsoft and subsumed into the Microsoft Search application.

NEO Find is another app designed to mine the rich informational resources of Outlook.

Developed by Caelo (pronounced Kay-lo) Software, NEO Find organises email into virtual folders to allow quick and easy location of an email.

NEO Find is a 9.1 megabyte download that installs easily, snuggling up next to Outlook and. indexing all inbound and outbound messages for fast searching.

NEO Find opens at the same time as Outlook, presenting a simple navigation screen.

At the top left, it’s possible to select a view of the email based on the Outlook folder structure or the email sorted by correspondent. Beneath that pane is a Search panel that searches the entire email archive for specific words, almost instantly.

Sorting emails by correspondent is incredibly useful as it allows a quick and easy overview of the history of communication with a particular person.
But it is the speed of searching through email that is most impressive: NEO Find is a lightning bolt compared to Outlook’s snail mail performance.

The only problem I experienced was that my computer seemed to slow down after I installed NEO Find. Although it was not a critical problem, the impact of the program’s overhead was noticeable.

However, if you’re struggling to tame the email beast, then NEO Find might whip it into shape.

NEO Find works with Outlook versions back to Outlook 98. Ditto with Windows. The software costs US$15 from http://www.caelo.com/ although you can try before you buy for 90 days.

John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia. www.johnharris.net.au