Email Insights

Designed for Windows 10 with Anniversary Update, Email Insights is an application developed by Microsoft to help you find emails faster, straight from your desktop. It gets integrated with Microsoft Outlook and Gmail.

The tool can be swiftly downloaded and installed from the Microsoft Store. However, it gets launched like any other desktop program (not as a Modern UI app). Wrapped in a clean and intuitive interface, Email Insights gives you the possibility to choose between Outlook and Gmail integration at startup.

For Microsoft Outlook, you must have the Outlook app installed (not the Windows 10 "Email" app). If you are already logged into Outlook, authentication is automatically made in Email Insights.

For Gmail, however, the utility opens the email service in your web browser and asks for permission to view and modify but not delete your email. According to the developer, the transfer is made over secure protocols like TLS/SSL.

Next, a local index is created on your machine for the selected email accounts, in order to facilitate instant search results, which can be updated by clicking the sync button in the main window.

Searches are performed in real time (as you type) within the subject, body, sender and receiver of the messages, listing suggestions in a menu via autocomplete, in addition to all matches in the main window.

Relevant emails are shown on top and the recent ones on bottom. Clicking on an email expands it, so you can check out the entire message, attachments, sender details, email folder, and timestamp.

Multiple tabs are supported so you can conduct multiple searches within the same email account at once. You can enable accessibility mode before account login to hear text read aloud by Microsoft David (a robotic male voice). The speech rate can be adjusted from the settings area.

Moreover, search results can be narrowed down by applying filters. By default, all email folders are included but you can exclude anything, such as the inbox, outbox, sent messages, archives, or junk. This feature is currently available only for Outlook accounts.

Additional options are visible in Email Insights, such as buttons for replying to the mail or forwarding it. However, these actions cannot be made from the app itself (clicking them opens the Outlook/Gmail service). Two more buttons are shown for marking emails as relevant or irrelevant to the search. Clicking them returned no response in our evaluation, so we can only assume that their functionality will be implemented in future releases.

On top of that, Email Insights cannot download attachments and doesn't support multiple email accounts logged in simultaneously, which would had made more sense for the multitab support. It gets sent to the systray on close and can only be exited from the right-click menu of the systray icon. It's not possible to log in with a different Outlook/Gmail account from the interface, meaning that you have to restart the application every time you want to switch to another account.

Taking everything into account, Email Insights seems like an ambitious project for enabling instant email searches from the desktop. Considering that it was just recently released, issues are expected. We're looking forward to see what upcoming updates will bring (perhaps support for additional email services).