Email Plugs Into Social Networking

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft Research recently released SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder. It works in the Outlook email client to prioritize and sort emails based on the relationship to the sender and other characteristics of incoming email messages. Trusted Reviews wonders if 2006 is the year of ordering information and reports on ClearContext, which does similar prioritization of emails as well as some email driven task management."

Comments

I'd rather Snarf-It than Snarf!

[webword]

Snarf-It -- "Snarf-It.org is a state of the art torrent indexer born out of the ashes of the legendary Suprnova, built by the old nova members for their huge community. It has access to the largest torrent, nzb and nfo database in the world where you can find torrents for dvd's, games, movies, software, anime and television all within our easy to navigate site."

Of course the other Snarf is fine too: "snarf is a command line resource grabber. It can transfer files through the http, gopher, finger, and ftp protocols without user interaction"

Re:Somebody please tell me they're kidding!

[brontus3927]

It's not a filter, it's doesn't delete or forward email. It SORTS the email you receive. Their engine may or may not work that well, but I believe it's an idea whose time as come. Popular Science had a write-up a few months ago about the need for something like this. The idea is to train an AI to know what's important to you so if your busy, you'll only get informed of important, high-priority messages and not bothered with the newsletters. At work we use Groupwise, and I have Notify running in the system tray to tell me when new emails arrive, but I wish I could set it up to not inform me when I receive the daily company newsletter, I already know that will be in my inbox at 10:30.

Basically, what this is designed to do, is sort your email for you, so you can start off with the important emails first, think of it as a advanced form of sending priority emails, except that the receiver is the person who decides what needs priority.

From screen-shots, it looks like SNARF also has the ability to arrange emails by thread, like gmail does.

Re:Gave SNARF a try, but it had one critical flaw

[geekwithsoul]

I agree. I went ahead and tried it out and found it to be seriously lacking in useful features. I also have to question why it runs as a separate app instead of a plug-in for Outlook itself. You'd think Microsoft would have at least been able to integrate it into their own damn mail client.

It is a mildly interesting tool poorly implementing a mildly interesting idea.

Re:E-mail needing new features?

[DrStubbs]

It's worth noting that SNARF doesn't actually analyze the content of messages, AFAIK. Rather, its sorting is based on metrics such as who you reply to most often, who replies to you, whose messages you read, etc. Purely metadata-based, which is a lot easier for a computer to do. Whether or not this is the right approach is another question.