Lookout email search for Microsoft Outlook – Lookout Software

After a few false starts I got Lookout for Outlook running yesterday, and I am fairly impressed. I can see great things for this product, once it gets integrated into the core application of Microsoft Outlook. I can see where Microsoft wants to take this product, and for once I am really happy about them buying a small company.

Lookout is installed easally. You dont even need to close outlook. It finishes reinstalling when you restart outlook. You then need to set up what folders are needed for searching. This is fairly easy, and allows you to search DOC and XLS files as well as TXT and some others. Aparently you can do PDF but I cannot see the results in any of the searches that I have done.

The first few indexing attempts failed. I am not sure why, but it was only on the last folder. I have since broken down the initial indexing into three parts and it worked fairly well. I should point out that I have email going back to 1990 all in outlook so this would have been a lot of work for the software to index. [No, I was not Using outlook back then… I was using MAILX under UNIX on an AMDAHL running UTS].

Searching is fast, but the retrieval of the headers takes a bit longer. A simple of two words took 0.04 seconds, and then the displaying took maybe another second. My thought Also the results display in their own window, not inside Outlook so things can be a pain. AutoPreview could be really good… It would save me from opening up all the messages.

Another thing missing is the ability to right click delete messages… I just found 5 copies of the same spreadsheet with my MP3 collection in it. So now I need to open everyone and delete them in turn.

Overall rating 4.5/5. Future rating, 5/5.

Music: REM: Best Of – even if it is missing a couple of their best songs