Next Generation Outlook Search

By Author: Hermann Toebben
Total Articles: 1
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Email is today one of the most predominant internet communication services worldwide for private and commercial issues. In the companies even more operations are conducted in with the help of email than years before. At the same time email serves not only for direct communication with colleagues and clients, but serves also as a transportation mean to negotiate appointments and meetings, delivers documents and others. This increasing usage leads to overflowing mailboxes and to more complex communication. Thus it gets harder to retrieve all emails and attachments that belong together in a contextual sense. The following challenges are common for many email users:

1. Who was also involved with this email?
2. How do I find all relevant emails for this issue?
3. Who was informed and had which information in this communication?
4. I have many attachment duplicates, but which one is the right one?
5. Who are my major communication partners and whom do they know?

Many other challenging questions exist. Getting back how we proceed with email today the issues listed above share a common problem: ...
... email clients support only poorly for a retrieval based on relations between emails, attachments and communication participants respective contacts. Google's Gmail and Microsoft Outlook cautiously approached the phenomenon of email conversations. But they did only the first step. Aside the pure segmentation and ordering of emails and sub-mails much more information is available in the users' mailboxes, mostly invisible as relations between emails, attachments and contacts. Since behind every single email is at minimum one contact the mass of emails represent a complex communication network respective a social network, if we take contextual issues into account. This network supplies with information about who knows whom. Evaluating the personal network of a single contact may lead you to many other interesting and even valuable contacts. We can also retrieve indirect contact. These are communication partners to whom we do not have direct email communication. This is the case, if you receive an email that contains a sub-mail where the sender of this sub-mail has not been in email contact with you directly. Usually this happens, if an email is forwarded. Nonetheless unintentionally forwarded emails can be detected this way. An email conversation may also point out who of the communication participants has had which information at which time. It would be nice to make the information visible that a specific contact had during a conversation. eMFlow Solution is a Microsoft Outlook search extension that offers a new integrated feature mix to visualize and analyze communication and the contact network behind the emails.

Concerning the size mailboxes suffer peculiarly from the mass of attachments. Email is often used as a transportation service, although it was originally not intended for that. In the commercial sector document attachments are often send multiple e.g. if new versions are created. But the gap between a mailbox and a document management system lies in the management aspect. It would help a lot it email client applications provide means to manage attachments like we manage files with a file-explorer. eMFlow offers for this an attachment explorer that is fully integrated in Microsoft Outlook. Attachments can be filtered, sorted and managed in the sense of deleting or storing them in the file system.

Although a full-text keyword index is more than helpful retrieval times can be further reduced for emails and attachments via the use of typed information. E.g. phone- or fax-numbers belong to the class of wired network addresses and as such obey a specific syntax. You can find much other typed information out there in the world like zip-codes, tax-numbers, product-codes and more. Retrieval can be improved if the type of information can be determined in a search. Seeking for german tax-numbers that usually start with 'DE' can be written as 'DE*' and returns all results that purely contain DE as part of a tax-number and no others. eMFlow provides already many information types and significantly enhances the Outlook search with that. eMFlow Solution is available via www.emflow.de.