For the past few months, I’ve been using a beta version of an amazing Outlook add-in called Lookout.
Today, the folks at Lookout Software released the preview version of Lookout 1.0. If you use Microsoft Outlook 2000 or later (not Outlook Express, which is a completely different product), you need this add-in. It’s as simple as that. The fact that it’s free makes it even more enticing, but I’d say the same thing if the price was $29.95, as it will be when the preview period is over.
Officially, the folks at Lookout describe their product as “a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that provides advanced, lightning-fast search capabilities to your mailbox.” Unofficially, I can tell you it’s just magic. Installation takes a minute or two. (If you have the .NET Framework installed. If not, then you’ll need to budget for the time it takes to download and install that code.) When it’s done, Lookout adds a toolbar to your main Outlook window. Behind the scenes, it builds an index of your PST file, which it updates every hour. The indexing activities have no noticeable effect on performance, as far as I can tell.
To search for something in your Outlook store – an e-mail message, a contact, a meeting on your calendar, a file attachment – you type a word or phrase into the box in the Lookout toolbar and press Enter. The search results come back at Google speed. (Lookout doesn’t index the contents of file attachments, only their names.) If you want to fine-tune the process – say, looking for a message that contains a specific word that was received in the month of February – you can open the Advanced search box and build your query.
Lookout passes the “it just works” test with flying colors. It doesn’t mess with your data files, and it doesn’t play any games with your privacy. The people who build the software are responsive, too. During the beta testing process, I reported several bugs and made a few suggestions. I got quick responses from the developers, Mike Belshe and Eric Hahn.
The more you use Outlook, the more you’ll like Lookout.
Thanks to Marc Orchant for letting me know about Lookout in the first place.
Ed Bott 