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

Didn't they learn anything from spam?

[Peregr1n]

Frankly, as no system I know of has 100% efficiency in sorting spam from real messages, I don't trust it one inch in prioritising my messages either.

I wonder what criteria it uses to sort email - if it's simply looking at the email address, then it's going to take up the user's time in setting up relationships and sort criteria, something which I can guarantee most people can't be bothered to do.

I can hardly find the time to sort email into folders, which is why I'm quite fond of gmail - as it doesn't have folders, I don't feel guilty about not using them...

Business landmine

[lheal]

It also offers transportability if one of my employees moves on or if we bring someone on for a contract gig.

If the mail is on gmail, it's theirs, not yours. When they leave, all that information goes with them. If the departure is ... untidy, that could mean anything from simple spam to having competitors know your trade secrets. If the departure has legal implications, you lose valuable leverage.

Granted, a savvy employee can archive his email and keep it at home, or even plop an automatic dup in their .forward file, but most people don't do that. With gmail (or any free mail), they don't have to.