Useful plug-in for Outlook from Microsoft Office Lab

27th August 2008

The research department of Microsoft Office Labs has released an addon to the new Outlook 2007.
It helps at least partially to cope with heaps of e-mails received daily to a user`s mailbox. The product with a speaking name E-mail Prioritizer helps to temporarily stop delivery of mail from the server, and systematize incoming messages by their actual importance. After installing the module E-mail Prioritizer into the Outlook 2007 interface a new toolbar appears, where you can set the mode “do not disturb”. With this mode activated, your PC will not receive new letters until the specified time period expires. The abovementioned mode provides a few useful options: the exact duration of your absence in minutes or hours, or restrictions on receiving messages until the end of the current meeting, appointed on the calendar. Unfortunately, this function works only locally, and if you activated the forced delivery of messages to your pocket computer, the messages will still be received by it, even if you temporarily disabled the delivery of letters to your PC. Perhaps, in the future, users will be able to stop delivering messages to your mailbox directly on the Exchange server.
E-mail Prioritizer, also provides an option of assigning priority (from zero to three stars) to any incoming message automatically. Thus, you can give different rating to personal letter and “CC” messages.