SNARF your email
26th April 2006 by Bill Boyd, ABC
Is your organization drowning in email? Microsoft’s Marc Smith has an answer for you: SNARF. SNARF stands for Social Network and Relationship Finder. It sorts your email based on your history with the people who have sent you messages. SNARF indexes your email – paying attention to whom you communicate with and how often. It emphasizes the messages it thinks are most important to you, displaying them in a window with three panes:
* People who have sent recent, unread email addressed or cc’d to you
* People who have sent recent, unread email addressed to anyone
* People mentioned in any email you have received in the past week
Smith describes SNARF – and offers other email management tips – in an article in the Financial Times. Read it at: news.ft.com/cms/s/8d3cef66-c971-11da-94ca-0000779e2340.html
Then try SNARF for yourself at research.microsoft.com/community/snarf/
July 31st, 2006 at 5:56 am
Bill, I tried SNARF for a while, but ended up pulling its plug because it tied up a lot of resource and I couldn’t figure out how to ‘drive’ it more successfully than my current system - which is to delete anything not urgent and attend to the urgent stuff. Those emails I delete only come back at me closer to their deadline — if they don’t come back, they weren’t that important.
Too many times I find emails are monkeys that the originator wants me to put on my back — I have enough of my own that I just push back unless they are REALLY insistent.