I have used the Lookeen add-on for Outlook for less than a week, but it has already paid for itself. Lookeen indexes my Outlook mailboxes. I have around 250,000 items in Outlook, including the offline archives that I create from each year's messages, going back to 1998. I try to be organized, but sometimes I just cannot find the message I am looking for.
Yesterday I had to document my purchasing card statement. This is a monthly task that I dread. Most things that I purchase are done over the Internet, so the receipts are somewhere in my e-mail. I create a special folder for the receipts, but sometimes I put them in other places or I don't get around to moving them at all, so I can't always find them.
This month I used Lookeen. I worked down the list of purchases and searched for the company name for each purchase. It took about 5-8 seconds to come up with the list of matching messages. Since I had the date of the purchase on the statement, it was trivial to locate the receipt and print it out. Each search took the same amount of time, because Lookeen looked in ALL of my mail files. So I knew it wouldn't miss the message I was looking for. The entire task took less than 30 minutes, and this was a month where I had purchased a lot of items.
I like being able to locate old e-mail messages quickly. I am often get computer questions from the faculty here at the University of Miami. If I have gotten the same or a similar questions in the past, I want to be able to quickly find that answer and use it as the start of the new response. Or I am dealing with a vendor and I want to find all the e-mail messages that we have exchanged. Quickly accessing old messages makes me more productive. Lookeen looks like a great solution to me.
It took a day and a night to index the 250,000 items the first time. Now it only takes about 7 to 8 minutes to update the index every four hours. Other than the disk activity, I don't notice that it is happening. If It slowed the computer down, I could lower the priority of Lookeen so that it took longer to index but had less effect on my CPU. This is a well designed product that is worth the $40 price, at least for me. So next month when I document my purchasing card statement, I will use Lookeen to find the Lookeen receipt. How nice.
