My inbox is massive, and when I’m busy I sometimes miss messages, so when I read about Snarf via John, I had to give it a try. 

Snarf is an application from Microsoft that helps you triage your unread email. 

The process on which SNARF is based is called social sorting. The concept has been around for a while; in fact, Microsoft Research’s Eric Horvitz worked on a similar project called Priorities a few years back. But what’s new about this implementation is its simplicity. The tool, which has been deployed within Microsoft for a field study, simply counts e-mails, sorts them by sender, and draws conclusions about their relative importance from the intensity of the correspondence relationship.

I had a surprising number of messages that I’d left unread, and without any tuning on my part Snarf did a good job of prioritizing the messages from the “most important” correspondants first.  Snarf’s default ordering is really simple– ordering is based on the number of message I have sent to the sender in the past year.

Snarf is free and a small 2MB download; it feels like something I may keep using.