SNARF: Microsoft tells you who your friends are

A new utility from Microsoft called SNARF (Social Network And Relationship Finder) promises to help users deal with email overload by automatically prioritising your inbox in a new way.

According to an article on CNet News, SNARF works by indexing your email, putting your best friends (or “most important correspondents” perhaps) first, based on how often people correspond with particular content in the body of a message and how often you reply to another person’s correspondence.

Marc Smith, Microsoft’s in-house sociologist, says

If my dog can tell who strangers are, apart from friends…my e-mail reader should be able to do the same.

It seems likely that this social sorting technique will one day find its way into Outlook, Exchange, Hotmail and Outlook Express.

CNet also carries some screenshots of the experimental app.

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2 Responses to “SNARF: Microsoft tells you who your friends are”

  1. Blake Handler says:

    SNARF a wonderful program — and if you have a Mobile device there’s another great “hidden” Microsoft program called:

    Outlook Mobile Manager (OMM) which “can prioritize your messages and makes smart decisions about when to send email. OMM also sends calendar reminders, task reminders, and an Outlook Today style daily summary all to your wireless device.”

    http://research.microsoft.com/adapt/omm/default.aspx

  2. Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Wish-list for an email client says:

    [...] Set a timer on a received message to appear as unread again at a future date (for waiting for and “must do” messages) The first is very much what Microsoft’s new SNARF utility promises to do. [...]

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