I wasn’t surprised to read this morning that Microsoft had acquired Lookout, a company that produced a well regarded search extension for Outlook. As my Gmail volume increases, I find myself relying more and more on the search facility to find old mail, and missing that facility when I read my mail in Thunderbird. Thunderbird has decent search features, but they’re not as easily accessible as they are in Gmail. I’m absolutely terrible about organizing my mail (I have over 1500 messages in my in regular in box, not including the 200+ threads in my Gmail in box), so the idea of just tossing all my mail into a big bucket and searching it using full text search is unbelievably appealing. Obviously Microsoft recognized that, given their acquisition. Hopefully Thunderbird can be enhanced to provide similar functionality.