Walter Mossberg writes:
It’s often easier to search the vast reaches of the Web than to quickly and accurately search your own stored e-mail. This is because the most important e-mail program in use today, Microsoft’s Outlook, really stinks at searching. If you have a sizable amount of stored e-mail, searching within Outlook e-mail is painfully slow, and often inaccurate.
To address this problem, a number of companies have developed add-on programs that search Outlook e-mail. I’ve been testing a new entry in this category, a $99 product for Windows users called X1. This search product doesn’t just do a great job of finding things in Outlook e-mail. It also can rapidly search for any word within e-mail attachments and Outlook contacts.
But that’s not all. X1 also searches for words within e-mail in Outlook Express and the Netscape and Eudora e-mail programs. And it can rapidly search for terms in most types of files you have stored on your hard disk outside of your e-mail. These include word-processor documents, spreadsheets, slide presentations, graphics, database files and more.
X1 handles these file searches much faster and better than the built-in search feature of Windows XP, which I find to be slow and inaccurate, and which can’t search within e-mails.
X1 is a very valuable tool for rapidly unlocking all the precious information on your hard disk, and especially in Outlook e-mail.
