Lifehacker is running a story on things you would like to see in an email client. The writer starts the ball rolling with three wishes:

• Prioritize messages from people in my address book or who I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve sent mail to in the past
• Let me add a note that would appear on rollover when I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m wondering what a message is still doing hanging around (ie, “I’m waiting to hear back from Joe about the bike”)
• 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.

The last two Mail.app users can already get with MailTags 1.1.

Using MailTags you can add notes (and keywords) to emails, although not in roll-over form.

You can also set due dates to make emails “reappear”. See Roger Eberhart’s GTD set-up for doing this, easily adaptable for non-GTD use.

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.