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.

For everyone who has seen class cast exceptions during Berry411 startup, especially on the 8700 and 7100, thank you for your patience; a verified fix is now available

The latest beta build of Berry411 (version 3.02, released April 30th) has been verified to fix the problem for everyone I’ve talked to.

You can install the new build by following the instructions on the Berry411 beta page.

(Developer’s note: the surprising thing that seems to be at the root of the problem is that other applications (e.g. AskMeNow) can stomp on objects persisted by Berry411. My reading of the documentation suggests that this shouldn’t be possible, but nonetheless it seems to happen. The application now handles this condition gracefully.)