Open Letter to Google

It's been a long time since I made a blog post, but I have a good idea that I want people to listen to.  Specifically, I want Google to pay attention.  Like anyone that uses Gmail, I take it for granted that I will have the entire history of an email exchange on one screen.  But I have a problem.  At work we have a Microsoft Exchange Server and have to use Outlook.  As much as I love have 15 lines of my inbox taken up by one message chain, I would prefer to have it all collapsed down by conversation.  This would be especially key for my email archives I think.  It's a pain in the ass to try to find something in an email from last May from someone you worked a lot with last year.  I've got 1200 email from someone and I need to find one sentence - "Sort by Sender" just doesn't cut it.  At least cut that down to 400 or so conversations; better yet, give me Google search capabilities.

So Google, this is the product I want.  I want something that can read in MS Outlook *.pst archive folders, sort the messages into conversation, and allow me to use Google search on the messages in the archive.  Here's the catch, like many people, I work on very proprietary stuff - my company would NOT be cool with this being advertising-based and sending any sort of information about the emails to a central server.  It would have to be a stand-alone program.  But, I would pay for this program.  I think that if you could offer me this product for $20, I would buy it.  I would even fight my IT department to get a corporate implementation if I had to.

Even if you never really sell this product, could you just create a Beta version that people could download for free?  What I'm really looking for here is to force Microsoft to modernize their email client a little.  There are a few small variations, but MS Outlook's mailbox looks more or less like my AOL mailbox in 1998.