SEATTLE, WA – Microsoft has beta released a new utility designed to sort incoming email in a novel fashion; organizing messages based on how well-known the sender is to the recipient.The function, known as SNARF (“Social Network And Relationship Finder”), is based upon the idea that people tend to interact more with people whom they know, and thereby respond to such senders’ messages more frequently than they would email from strangers.

“You don’t respond to everybody, and not everybody responds to you,” Marc Smith, one of the Microsoft researchers who developed SNARF, said in an interview with CNET News.

Smith likens the way SNARF works to the way that a person’s dog learns to distinguish its owner’s acquaintances from strangers over time, and ceases barking at more familiar faces.

“If my dog can tell who strangers are, apart from friends,” Smith said, “my e-mail reader should be able to do the same.”

The SNARF software is crafted to measure how often people reply to one another’s correspondence, and how often people include similar content in the body of a message – like a friend or relative’s name, for example.

“The beautiful thing about computers is that they are really, at their core, accounting machines,” Smith said. “They love to count things. Social relationships are countable.”

SNARF can sort messages based on whether they were sent directly to the recipient, the recipient was CC’d, or the recipient was part of a distribution or mass mailing list.

For the time being, SNARF has been issued as a download for end users to experiment with, but Microsoft has said that SNARF will definitely work with Outlook 2003 and Windows XP Service Pack 2.