Skip to main content

Find that missing message with Microsoft Garage's newest app, Email Insights

Microsoft’s Garage is the company’s software skunkworks of sorts, a group of developers who spend some of their working time developing unofficial and often experimental apps. Quite often, those apps are cross-platform and sometimes even exclusively for competitive platforms, and they’re usually aimed at solving a very particular problem.

The latest Garage app is Email Insights, and it’s for Windows 10 only. The specific problem that this Garage project is directed at overcoming is the challenge of finding email messages faster and more efficiently, and Microsoft provides an overview on its news site.

Recommended Videos

For now, Email Insights works with the Outlook desktop app and with Gmail — there’s the cross-platform support aspect. Once you install the app, you’re directed to select either Outlook or Gmail and the app configures itself accordingly. Once it finishes configuring itself and creating an index complete with autocomplete and fuzzy logic, you’re ready to go. You can create separate tabs that connect to both email services and switch between them as you need to search your messages.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

The app’s purpose is best described by Suresh Pathasarathy, senior research developer on Microsoft Research India’s Applied Sciences team, who says, “The idea is to remove the cognitive load of a user while searching. A user need not remember all the exact keywords or spellings for their queries. Contextual fuzzy name search obviates the need to remember spellings of peoples’ names. For instance, ‘Chris’ gets corrected to ‘Kris’ and ‘Philip’ gets corrected to ‘Philippe,’ depending on your inbox.”

Image used with permission by copyright holder

According to Parthasarathy, Email insights is a search companion for Outlook and Gmail. Its entire purpose for existing is to make it easier and faster to find messages that might be difficult and time-consuming to locate in other email clients. The app is best when it’s pinned to the Windows 10 taskbar, essentially moving the Outlook or Gmail search button from the application or browser to its own easily accessible spot.

As with most Garage projects, Email Insights is an experimental project that’s laser-focused on a specific task. Garage projects don’t always last forever, and so users should be aware that the tool could be discontinued without notice. One example of a Garage project that was unceremoniously cancelled is the Cache note-taking app, which is shutting down at the end of the month.

In the meantime, you can check out Email Insights by downloading it from the Windows Store. You might find that it helps you locate that elusive email that you thought you’d lost, but really was only buried in your tens of thousands of spam messages.

Mark Coppock
Mark Coppock is a Freelance Writer at Digital Trends covering primarily laptop and other computing technologies. He has…
SanDisk’s latest drive sets new benchmark for consumer NVMe SSDs
The SanDisk WD Black SN8100 PCIe Gen 5 SSD with and without heatsink variants

SanDisk has officially introduced the WD Black SN8100, its latest high-end PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSD targeting PC enthusiasts, gamers, and professional users. With sequential read speeds of up to 14,900 MB/s and write speeds of 14,000 MB/s, the drive sets a new bar for consumer SSD performance, surpassing some of the best NVMe SSDs currently on the market, including the Crucial T705. 

The SN8100 uses a standard M.2 2280 form factor and is available in capacities of 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB. It’s worth noting that the 1TB model offers lower write speeds, up to 11,000 MB/s, compared to the higher-capacity versions, which reach up to 14,000 MB/s. 

Read more
Pairing the RTX 5090 with a CPU from 2006? Nvidia said ‘hold my beer’
RTX 5090.

Nvidia's best graphics cards are often paired with expensive CPUs, but what if you want to try a completely mismatched, retro configuration? Well, that used to be impossible due to driver issues. But, for whatever reason, Nvidia has just removed the instruction that prevented you from doing so, opening the door to some fun, albeit nonsensical, CPU and GPU combinations.

The instruction in question is called POPCNT (Population Count), and this is a CPU instruction that also prevents Windows 11 from being installed on older hardware. Its job is counting how many bits are present in a binary number. However, as spotted by TheBobPony on X (Twitter), POPCNT will not be a problem for Nvidia's latest graphics cards anymore.

Read more
AMD’s upcoming CPU could offer bonkers gaming performance
A fake and real AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D side by side.

AMD's Zen 5 architecture has been a popular choice for gamers due to its outstanding performance and 3D V-Cache capacity, and now a leak suggests Zen 7 could double down on that through a new "3D Core." According to YouTuber Moore's Law is Dead, "[AMD] is moving toward a lot of official variants."

AMD reportedly plans to launch a single overall architecture, divided into different product categories, including the expected lineup: Classic Cores, Dense Cores, Efficiency Cores, and Low-Power Cores. The 3D Core is the latest addition, and it is said to "require full cache chiplets" that "seem to be leading to profound performance increases."

Read more