Paul Allen's Xiant Filer

This beta from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's company helps sort and browse over-full e-mail inboxes.

Xiant Filer was created by Allen's company for his personal use when his email inbox was unmanageable, and it has now been released in a beta version. The program is an Outlook 2007 plug-in, and you'll have to pay for the final version, but the beta is free and worth looking at to see what the Microsoft co-founder is up to. It's also rather good software.

Xiant Filer aims to makes anyone a more efficient user of e-mail. It integrates into Outlook and begins making filing recommendations as soon as it is installed. You don't have to create rules or train the software. Xiant Filer learns from where you file emails, so its recommendations improve the more you use it.

Filer suggests an appropriate folder in which an email should be filed when you right-click on it. A second click moves the message. Each time you move a message, Filer incorporates that knowledge to help it predict more accurately for similar messages in the future.

Allen is the co-founder of Microsoft with Bill Gates. He left Microsoft in 1983, and founded a company called Vulcan. Xiant is a subsidiary of Vulcan. Filer is the first consumer software product from Allen since he left Microsoft. The Xiant website promises that further products are in development. Allen is well known for getting his techies to create software personally for him, including an e-mail filing program for Blackberrys.

The final release of Filer will be offered free for 60 days, and while the current version is 2007 specific, a version for Outlook 2003 is due soon.

You can download the beta here.