80 – 20 Retriever, Isys:Email.Search and Lookout: Searching through Microsoft Outlook and Other Email Clients

Huge email files such as Microsoft Outlook's *.pst are painful to wade through when you need to look for some­thing. Here are some tools that index your email (and desk­top) archives and make search­ing through them almost instantaneous!

If you use Microsoft Out­look or Out­look Express, the *.PST or *.DBX can grow in size quite quickly and become painful to search through. My Out­look archives for instance (since 4 – 5 years now, speak of nos­tal­gia) are now break­ing through the giga­byte ranks. Here are some tools that index your email data (and the rest of your desk­top actu­ally) and allow you to search through all that bulk nearly instantaneously.

1. isys:email.search

Funky names like Isys:Email.Search aside, this is a pretty light-weight and effec­tive tool for any­one who uses Out­look. I have not tried it with mul­ti­lin­gual or double-byte search but I don't see it should not work for all kinds of text on the right kind of OS. The tool remem­bers your recent searches in a web-browser style inter­face and the search­ing itself takes a frac­tion of a second.

Best fea­ture, after find­ing results, there's a nifty but­ton to locate the email in Out­look itself. The search results include a handy fea­ture to be sorted by rel­e­vance, date, or the num­ber of times key­words appeared in the email. More fea­tures from the horse's mouth.

Below is a screen­shot of what the Isys:Email.Search inter­face looks like:

2. (Microsoft) Look­out

Look­out is another pop­u­lar (prob­a­bly more pop­u­lar than Isys) util­ity that pur­ports to do the same thing. It became so pop­u­lar that Microsoft recently pur­chased it. With such a flashy back­ground, I down­loaded it with high hopes, only to be ter­ri­bly disappointed.

After crash­ing once, and then tak­ing an eter­nity and a half to index my archives.pst and outlook.pst, it refused to search any­thing through archives files. The inter­face is easy enough, and if it works I believe it allows search­ing through cal­en­dar, notes etc (which as far as I know, Isys:Email.Search doesn't allow for now.)

Joel, among many, has some inter­est­ing pon­der­ings about Look­out and what Microsoft has in mind (appar­ently, to lever­age the index­ing algo­rithms for MSN!)

3. 80 – 20 Retriever

Save the best for last. The quirk­ily named 80 – 20 Retriever has to be my find of the year! This no-holds-barred superb all-rounded util­ity is eas­ily the most flex­i­ble desk­top index­ing soft­ware I have seen to date. Visit their web­site for some screen­shots, but here are some of my own.

You can select not only your Out­look archives, but spe­cific bits of your com­puter as well. Bye bye, Win­dows Explorer search!

Speak­ing of flexibility..you can select a bunch of file types, many of which 80 – 20 already recognizes!

Spec­ify how fre­quently you wish your indexes to be updated

But that's not it, you can update your indexes inter­ac­tively, as soon as mes­sages arrive!

If you ask me, Microsoft made the wrong acqui­si­tion!

Any­way, YMMV. As for me, I am a happy Isys cus­tomer on my office machine, it searches through my email and that's all I need. But at home where my stuff is burst­ing at the seams, I am a devout 80 – 20 fan.