This sure sounds interesting to me:
“[…] There are two videos up on Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows from PDC 2005 that are worth watching. The first one shows off Outlook 12’s new “to do bar,” which is viewable when you’re reading email, and the ability to right-click and automatically create a task from a message. The second one shows off the integrated RSS reader, and the rebuilt search implementation.”
Nice nice nice….
You can basically the same thing today with at least Outlook XP and 2003. Just drag a message the the folder tree view Task section. A task will open with the email subject as the task title and the message body as the task body.