The lead story in today’s IT News Digest newsletter discusses a new technology developed by Microsoft researchers called SNARF, which stands for Social Network And Relationship Finder: “SNARFing your way through e-mail.” The gist of SNARF technology is that it allows you to organize your incoming e-mail based on “social sorting.”

“In SNARF’s case, the software looks at how often people correspond with particular content in the body of a message and how often they reply to one another’s correspondence, among other things.”  Take a look at the images: Microsoft’s SNARF e-mail sorter (the main image appears below).  I don’t know about you, but I’m not convinced SNARF software would be more useful than the build-in filtering capabilities that already appear in Outlook and other e-mail services.