Much to my dismay, the love affair I’ve had with X1, my all-out favorite for desktop search, has come to an end.

Why? It’s certainly not because I’ve found something better, no.

It’s because it’s simply stopped working. Others have given up on it a long time ago, but it has stayed and remained my favorite.

Nothing else give you the speed and flexibility. Results as you type, etc.

Crashes with the products have become more prevalent, though usually work-around able, they were becoming more than I could stand. I checked for an update, and there was a ‘minor’ release. I tried to upgrade to that. Tried simple upgrade, and full-reinstalls. It works, it indexes my files, and my Mozilla email but for some reason it won’t touch my Outlook anymore. The prior version had stopped updating per the schedule, but I could still manually update the index from time to time, which I had done.

But now, nadda, nothing, zilch. No Outlook/Exchange indexing to be had. Spending more than an hour screwing with it negates all benefit, so it’s now gone.

I’m now on the hunt for the best tool for my needs. No, Windows desktop search isn’t it. While it works, it’s slow and clunky.

I’ve just re-installed Google Desktop. It’s claming it will take another 10 hours of idle time to finish the initial index. We’ll see how that goes.

My biggest need is searching emails. I get too damn many. When it’s time to fill out an expense report I want to be able to search for $49.95 to find the email receipt for that software I purchased a month ago. I want to be able to easily pull up all emails from *@domain.com fast and easy. X1 used to give me that.

Outlook search folders work fine if you’re in no hurry but I usually am.

If you have tip for a good email indexing product, post it in the comments.