Briefs

By Ina Fried, CNET News.com, December 2, 2005

With the world's in-boxes overflowing with unread messages, researchers at Microsoft are offering up a tool they hope will help people sort through the morass.

The software maker this week released a free utility that aims to sort e-mail in a new way: It can organize messages not just by how recent they are, but also by whether the recipient knows the sender well.

The program, known as SNARF, bases its approach on the fact that people tend to interact more with messages from those they care about.

"You don't respond to everybody, and not everybody responds to you," said Marc Smith, one of the Microsoft researchers who developed SNARF, or Social Network And Relationship Finder.

You can download SNARF here.

Here is the rest of the CNET story.