Email is the life blood of a lot of peoples’ jobs. Many of them use Outlook as their email manager. As such, any new tool that makes Outlook more useful is very valuable.
I very recently heard of a free add-on piece of software that works with the email function of Outlook. It is called Xobni (www.xobni.com). (Note that Xobni is just “inbox” spelled backwards – it’s not some foreign-language or nonsense word.)
Xobni offers some neat abilities that help you to work more efficiently with your many emails. It adds an area on your screen (dark column below) that gives you a great amount of information about and control over the email in your inbox.
Xobni can search for emails by names, words in the subject or body, etc. It seems to operate much faster than Outlook! Information about the sender of the current email helps you to put the email in context. The person’s contact information (email and phones) is displayed. Their “ranking” in your email contacts (#1 has sent the most to you, etc.) is shown. A graph shows when the person sends you emails (I.e. do they start at 9:00 AM, take lunch off, work after 5:00 PM, etc.?) There are sections that display the emails just from the current sender, attachments from the sender, the network of people their emails to you also touched, etc.
I’m still getting used to Xobni, but I find that it’s a great tool.
