So here's a free idea for you: there's money to be made in somebody who can make a full-on search function that works as a no-brainer, quickly addresses any issues or bugs, and doesn't scare the shit out of you with their privacy policy.

Basically, if there is somebody that does this, they need to fire their SEO person, because I sure as hell can't find them through Google.

Here's the deal: in general, everybody's got way too much crap on their hard drives. You can buy a USB stick that's 400 times the size of the first hard drive I ever owned for $10. You can literally have a terabyte of storage on your desktop for relatively nothing. Hell, the new mondo desktop I bought has 750GB of storage on it. And I have a 500GB external drive just for my music and other backup purposes. Bottom line: storage has gotten stupid-silly and we're all now digital packrats.

I don't know about you, but I can't find my bloody car keys. So the prospect of 750GB of potential space in which to lose something is rather terrifying. And let's face it: the stuff is in a sort of quantum lost state–we know it's in there. It's not like it vanished. But we can't possibly tell you where. It might as well be etched on a rock off the coast of Malaysia unless you can lay hands upon it. (And I can't tell you how much I want some smartass with a smartphone to send me a pic of them standing on a rock off the coast of Malaysia.)

My problem is this–and this is what sparked this particular rant: I run Outlook 2007. Yes, I know, I shouldn't. I know Microsoft is Satan and Apple is oh so much better and whatever whatever yeah right okay. In Realitysburg, though, I know Thunderbird would make a great alternative, but after most of a day trying to get all the add-ins and plug-ins that it would take to get Thunderbird to work with my IMAP setup (if you don't know what that is, trust me, you don't want or need to know), I gave up. I'm not completely technically inept, I just have shit to do, you know?

So I'm sticking with Outlook. Trouble is, I can't search for my e-mails easily.

There's the built-in Windows Search, but it's terrible. And that's when it's working. My problem is that you let it index until the cows come home and it won't finish. This is a problem that affects many and the only responses I've seen to it are: have you waited long enough to let it finish or rebuild your Outlook file. So it might as well be a flash-frozen ferret in a bun for all the good it's doing me on finding this audiobook e-mail request I have filed somewhere.

There's Google Desktop. It's fantastic when it works–like most things from Google. But it opens the e-mail, once found, in Firefox. And when you click "View in Outlook," the damn thing just sits there. There's this fix, which doesn't work for me. And then there's just repairing Office, which doesn't fix it either. So that's even worse because it's teasing me with an e-mail that I can't do a damn thing with in Firefox. "Do you want to forward this? Reply to it? Even just view it in the program we pulled it from? Well, good luck with that."

(Sidebar: Yes, I could use Gmail. But Gmail needs to stop the whole forced threaded conversations nonsense. I'm tired of e-mails that I deleted or moved being attached to a new message just because Gmail thinks it's one conversation–and then I can't unattach them.)

There's Xobni. It looks friendly enough, but its privacy policy is vague enough to be scary and I uninstalled it pretty rapidly. "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you," remember.

So my free idea is this: somebody figure out how to fix this crap. Seriously. I know that's easy for me to say, because while not technically inept I can't code my way out of a paper bag unless there's a way to do it in HTML or PHP. But I'm thinking there's got to be some open source Mozilla-esque search that will simply work, index everything and then not tell anybody what you've got on your machine. And I don't know about you, but I'd pay $5 a month or something just to get access to a plugin or program that would shave minutes off of me looking around for my e-mails. The car key plugin can come later.

But if you know of one already, please let me know. Because this combing through e-mails is getting silly. It's 2009 for God's sake.