Microsoft developing software to sort e-mail

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By George A. Chidi Jr.

(IDG) -- Microsoft wants to help sort your mail.

Researchers at the software giant are developing e-mail software that learns which messages are important to you and which aren't, and ranks them by urgency.

The software will learn users' preferences and priorities over time, said Bill Gates, the company's chair and chief software architect, during a talk at the Computer-Human Interaction Conference in Seattle this week.

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The program learns your likes and dislikes in part by examining which e-mails you read first, and which people you communicate with most often. It performs a statistical analysis on this data, said a company spokesperson.

First Up: Mobile Manager

Outlook Mobile Manager includes a test version of the e-mail ranking software as part of the optional "Priorities/Notification" add-on, the company said. Future versions of Microsoft Office and the Windows XP operating system will include e-mail ranking functions, according to the company.

Eventually, the ranking software will incorporate an "intelligent agent" that can interrupt user activities for important messages. It will also be able to judge the right time and place to make such an interruption.

Microsoft President and Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer first described the Priorities software last month at the ACM1: Beyond Cyberspace technology conference.

"One of the interesting features about having a priority mail filter is that it becomes a sort of junk-mail filter too," Eric Horvitz, an engineer with Microsoft Research Labs who joined Ballmer on stage, said at the time.

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