Searching in Outlook is like a bad dream--the one where you're trying to run and your feet keep moving, but you get nowhere. As one sufferer puts it, "Whenever I try to search for messages in Outlook, the dreaded hourglass pops up, and I stare at it for minutes at a time--that is, if the blasted program doesn't crash altogether. What's the point of having a search feature if it takes so long?"

While Outlook gets a makeover and new features with every Office update, its sluggish search engine hasn't changed much since its childhood. Outlook still physically scans each of your messages when you search. This is fine if you have only a few dozen message in your Inbox. But let's not kid around: if like most people you have more than a thousand messages in your Outlook folders, you have a search nightmare on your hands.

Try these ideas.

1. Place your messages up into subdirectories.

Once you've created subdirectories (lots of them) and siphoned all your messages from your Inbox, stop the global searches and restrict your searching to individual subdirectories. By cutting down on the number of messages Outlook needs to search, your search results will speed up dramatically.

2. Install a message indexer.

Search engines like Yahoo and Google don't actually scour every page on the Web each time you plug in a search term; if they did, you'd grow cobwebs waiting for your results. Instead, these services continually scan millions of Web pages and create a massive index of their contents. When you perform a Google or Yahoo search, the lightning-fast results come courtesy of the index.

E-mail indexers use the same principle to speed up your searches. We're partial to Lookout, a plug-in that installs its own search box into the Outlook user interface. The first time you run Lookout, the program indexes all of your e-mail messages, a process that can take several minutes, depending on how many messages you have. Once the indexing is completed, just type in a search term, and your results will appear almost instantaneously. You can set Lookout (which was recently acquired by Microsoft, natch) to index new messages in the background so that you never have to go through the start-up index process again.