Can SNARF ing your Outlook mail simplify your life?I've been working with SNARF for a couple of weeks now and am pretty happy with it. It is small and simple and does what the job without making a fuss. In use, SNARF appears as a little window sitting on the desktop, with different panes (called Views) providing different perspectives on your messages. 
SNARF's plain interface masks lots of power. By default, SNARF provides three views on your messages, each looking at different aspects of the mail in your Outlook folders. NOTE: SNARF can see your messages whether Outlook is running or not, but you still need to run Outlook if you want to send or receive messages. The first shows unread messages where you appear in the TO: or CC: fields, received in the last 7 days. The second shows unread messages, whether or not sent directly to you, received within the last 7 days. The third shows all messages received in the last 7 days, whether you've read them or not. The Power of SNARFThe real power of SNARF is in how it organizes the messages in the views. The messages are grouped by sender or recipient's name, and sorted by how often you have sent messages to that person.The idea is that the more often you send messages to someone, the more important they are to you. That means that messages from them are likely to be more important to you than messages from someone you seldom write to. An example will make this clearer. If you and your boss communicate by email, it is likely that you've sent lots of messages to him or her. Because of this, SNARF will likely put messages from your boss at or near the top of the list when it displays your unread messages. When you find time to deal with your mail, you can start at the top of SNARF's list (double-click an entry to open the message) and work your way down, confident that in most cases you will be dealing with the most important stuff first. This approach to handling messages isn't infallible. Messages that are important, but that come from people you seldom write to, won't show up high on the list. And SNARF has no way of knowing which of the messages you get is MOST urgent. But for most of us, the biggest problem is that we can't deal with all the messages we receive in a timely manner. For this situation, SNARF excels. How often do you get high-priority messages from people you seldom write to anyway? Configuring SNARFIf you want to change the way SNARF sorts your messages, you have complete control. Each view has a Settings button, which looks like a little blue chest with the lid partly open.Click that to open the View Settings dialog box. 
You can configure each SNARF view. SNARF includes a set of named views that you can select, and allows you to create your own or modify the existing ones to better suit your specific needs. So far, I've found that the default views and settings work for me, and haven't felt the need to make any changes. But if you want to experiment, this is the place.
A Potential ProblemI've found one potential problem in the use of SNARF. It conflicts with the Personal Folders Backup add-in. The backup add-in can't do its job if SNARF is running.The work-around is simple. Close SNARF before you close Outlook. It isn't an ideal solution, and hopefully Microsoft will come up with a better answer before the SNARF beta is complete. Should You Try SNARF?If you regularly get more mail than you can process in the available time, or if you just want some help in dealing with your most important messages first, SNARF is a great tool. It isn't flashy, and it isn't infallible, but it definitely beats sorting through your overflowing Inbox and folders manually.NOTE: I reviewed SNARF recently for OutlookPower magazine. If you would like to check out the review, here's the link:
SNARF review at OutlookPower
That's the story on SNARF as of today. From here you can:
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