Email Prioritizer

Microsoft Office Labs has released a neat prototype tool for Outlook 2007 that give you two clever features:

1. Lets you turn on a “Do Not Disturb” feature for emails for a period of time that you specify
2. Adds between 0 and 3 stars to each email to tell you the importance of the message

The former feature is clever, though I’m not sure how much I would use a “Do Not Disturb” feature.  I tell clients to email me instead of calling me if at all possible, so blocking incoming email isn’t very fair.  I guess where I might use a feature like this, actually, is if I were in a meeting, hooked up to a projects let’s say, and I still want to have Outlook running in case I need to look up an email (for example), but I don’t want my new email notifications popping up and potentially embarrassing me.  So maybe it does have some merit.

The star feature really intrigues me though.  They’re not telling you what algorithm they’re using for prioritizing messages — that’s a secret.  But they want you to try the tool and see how well it works.  Why not, right?  Sounds kind of cool.  I can’t wait to see how well it starts prioritizing my messages.

My prediction is that it weights messages based on:  (1) whether they come from inside your domain, (2) whether the sender is in your address book, and (3) how often you receive and/or send emails from/to the sender.  That’s just my guess though.

Download at: Email Prioritizer

I read one comment that there is a much better outlook plug-in available:  ClearContext