I’m a bit of a packrat when it comes to email. I constantly receive warnings about exceeding my space allowance on our mail server, and have PST files so large they would kill a brown dog. I just can’t bring myself to delete mails because "you never know when I might need that". I blame my Dad, actually. Over the years he has had to build successively larger sheds to house his collection of stuff that might came in handy one day.

Well, rather than having to deal with the source of the problem, technology has once again allowed me to live in denial. LookOut, from http://www.lookoutsoft.com/, is a free download that adds full text indexing to Outlook, and I’m totally smitten.

Yes, once you install it you’ll have to let it index your folders (make sure you go into Options and check out what it is going to index. It’s default wasn’t quite aggressive enough for my liking), but this can take place in the background. And yes, the indexes will take up a bit of space, but not as much as I expected.

But I guarantee, the first time you enter a search and have it return in less than 2 seconds, having searched every piece of mail you’ve hoarded away for the last few years, you will not care. This is what Outlook Search should have been from the start!