As you have probably heard by now, Microsoft has bought Lookout Software. Lookout has written an add-in for Outlook which allows you to easily search your PST files, much faster than Outlook’s built in search allows you to do (see my previous post for more infomration on it). Since that time, Lookout has released a v1.0 version, and is currently up to 1.2.

As I recall, Lookout was free while in Beta, but once it was released it was for-pay software. Now, however, since Microsoft has bought it, it’s a free download from their web site. Very cool.

I just had it index all three of my PST files (mail, archived mail, and news, which totals at over 500MB), and it took it about 15 minutes or so. I even used it to dig up some of the links for this article, and it returned the search results nearly instantly. Now that’s sweet.

My only gripe is that you can’t modify any of the items that it finds like you can in normal mail views (mark as read/unread, change category, create a rule, etc.). Hopefully Microsoft will be able to include this in either the next version of Outlook or as a service pack, and improve the integration as well. Now that would be a killer feature for Outlook.