Posts tagged Outlook

I recently read the following:

The only thing that has changed with email in the last ten years is that everyone gets more of it. Email is overflowing with information. It’s hard to find what you need. It’s hard to know what you have.

I have for a few years been advocating for using Thunderbird, and I was one of the first sysadmins at work to ditch Eudora in favor of Thunderbird. Simply cause Thunderbird supported IMAP far better then Eudora.

It saddens me to see that the Mozilla Foundation doesn’t see the value of their email client, with their delays of version 3.x and integrating a decent calendar application. Their lack of interest in developing Thunderbird, made me first look at Spicebird. But development of Spicebird also seems to have halted …

I then had a quick look at Evolution for Windows (not even including a link to a download page, to spare you the time and trouble). It got uninstalled faster then I installed it!

It was time to bite the dust, and conclude that I haven’t found any 3rd party email client able to compete with Microsoft. I first tried the latest beta of Windows Live Mail (to be release in 2009). I must admit that it both looked far better then the current state of Thunderbird and also worked better! It has one short-coming, together with Outlook, I wasn’t been able to get LDAP working correctly. More or less at the same time I read about Xobni (Zob-nee – Inbox spelled backwards), and decided to install Outlook for the first time in years. But this is not a review of Outlook, but rather of one of it’s add-ons.

Xobni is the most amazing email productivity tool I ever seen for an email client, and lets you look at your email inbox from a whole new perspective. The add-on improves management of messages and contacts, one of Outlook’s biggest shortcomings.

Xobni indexes your mail (and it even works brilliantly with IMAP), so you can search for contacts and text (please also read my article about Search in Windows 7). The add-on uses the indexed information to create it’s contact profiles. If you’re reading a message from for instance Elin … (one of my colleagues – screenshot), it will show you the number of e-mail messages Elin has sent you, broken down by the time of day they were sent. You will also be able to tell when Elin tends to respond during the day. Perfect for me that needs to plan my working days, I now know that most of my scientific staff then to writing their emails in the morning and late in the evening.

Your contact profiles show (with a photo, from LinkedIn – I have now started using this social service – or if you have manually added one) in the top of the Xobni pane; the application will pick each contact’s phone number if included in the emails. Below each contact profile, you see a thread of conversations you’ve had and files you’ve exchanged. Xobni also creates a kind of social network by keeping track of any additional recipients on email messages sent to you. You can add your friends’ contacts to your address book or quickly draft e-mail to them from within Xobni. If you have Skype installed, Xobni integrates it; a quick tap of a phone number within a Xobni profile generates a SkypeOut call. Two template options also appear in this pane: One creates a blank email, and the other creates a meeting request.

You can use Xobni for simple searches within Outlook, too, and it often returns results much more quickly than Outlook’s own inbuilt search does. Xobni also goes far beyond speedy searching, providing logical social information and extended functionality that Outlook simply doesn’t. Instead of treating mail conversations, contacts, and calendars as separate entities, Xobni weaves them together in a responsive, intuitive interface.

Another feature I haven’t even talked about is the Xobni Analytics that’s available. Loads of graphs and charts providing information like:

• Daily summaries
• Mail traffic
• Response times
• Unique contacts
• Folders used
• Subjects
• Recipient types
• Flag status
• Context of e-mails
• and lots more