NEO Find 1.0 E-Mail Software

Though NEO Find brings faster searches and additional organization to Outlook e-mail, you must switch back and forth between Outlook and a separate program window to get its benefits.

The program, available as a $15 download, creates a separate index of all your messages, which can take a while--the program says this step can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. On my PC, it took 55 minutes to sift through about 5000 messages. Completing the indexing step, though, allows for searches that are much faster than what the regular Outlook search function offers. It also permits you to view all messages to and from a particular correspondent easily, or to gather related messages (a "conversation") together in a list with the click of a button.

Those are all useful features, but you can't reach them within Outlook. NEO Find runs as a separate program that, by default, launches automatically when you start Outlook. (You'll have to shut it down manually, though.) You access NEO Find by clicking its icon in the Outlook toolbar or in your system tray. Its tabbed interface includes two options: an Outlook-like view and another mode that swaps in a list of all your correspondents for the mail-folder view.

In the Outlook-like view, your e-mail folders appear on the left, while the familiar message list and preview pane sit on the right side. A search bar sits at the lower left of the interface. You can type in search terms, and choose whether you want to look in the subject, body, and/or names and addresses. Once your results display, you can further filter them by status (such as read/unread or flagged), by containing folder, or by date.

The second, correspondent-centric view lets you click a contact's name to see all e-mail messages sent to and from that person. You can apply the same filters (status, date, and so on) to the listed messages.

You can read, reply to, or forward your e-mail within NEO Find, but you can't compose a new message; for that, or to access your calendar, contacts, or other features, you'll need to switch back to Outlook.

If you don't mind the program switching and you tend to run e-mail searches frequently, the inexpensive NEO Find could help you manage your inbox. But it's too bad that its creators didn't roll everything into the existing Outlook window.