Microsoft's research arm today released a free
tool to help users slog through e-mail messages in their inbox in the
order of importance, according to one of the researchers who developed
the software. Created within Microsoft Research, the Social
Relationship and Network Finder, or SNARF, is an application that uses
the same database as a user's e-mail client to count the number of
times users send and receive messages from people, says A.J. Brush, a
researcher in the community technologies group at Microsoft Research.
Calling this kind of e-mail triage process
"social sorting," researchers worked with graduate students, at least
one of whom is studying sociology, to come up with the tool so that it
will help users prioritize the e-mail in their inbox based on how often
they send and receive messages from contacts, she says. "One of the core SNARF notions is that it's
about people," Brush says. "We're really trying to remember information
about the people in e-mail rather than on a per-message basis. SNARF
will know [for example] that it's a message from Julie, I talk to her
all the time, so it will put that [message] higher in order of
importance."
View: The full story
Download: SNARF for Outlook
News source: PCWorld
