Xobni, a companion for your Outlook

Xobni is currently still in beta but worth a look. Xobni is a companion (or a plug-in) for Microsoft Outlook that is meant to organize & manage your hundreds (or thousands) of emails on your inbox. 

Xobni is “Inbox” in reverse, in case you didn’t notice

It also has its own analytics that will analyze all of your email traffics, which is kinda cool.

Xobni’s installation is around 8 Mb, so it’s quite reasonable to keep on your system. The memory usage, however, is quite high as you can see from the screenshot here:

Outlook in minimized state takes 15 Mb of memory and Xobni takes around 12 Mb?? It’s as big as a full email client of its own! I’d assume it takes that much because Xobni keeps all of your emails indexing information in the memory for a faster search and analyze.

Once you install Xobni, it will take a few minutes to index all of your emails (depends on how many emails you’ve got, this process may take a while). It’ll only be done once, so it’s ok to wait.

Xobni will be installed and “docked” on your Outlook’s Sidebar on the right. It’s not intrusive to see and definitely is eye pleasing.

Xobni also has its own analytics window/section, complete with graphs and numbers, if you are into that sort of thing.

Mail Traffic Analysis for Statistic Geeks

Why you’ll love Xobni

You can quickly search for all of your emails in an instant. Just type in a keyword to search and Xobni will search and display the matched result on the search results area. Searching is instantaneous and efficient. Thumbs up for Xobni for this. Email search is quite common when you are in the office as you usually need to dig through previous conversations to your clients, or your team.

Xobni provides useful information about the selected email on your inbox. The sender’s photo (which you can assign), total number of emails sent/received, the phone number (smartly extracted from the emails), the sender’s network (other recipients in which this sender has been included in a cc – very useful), all previous emails list, and all exchanged files with the sender). 

Xobni gives you less clicks to search and obtain useful information about your emails and files, saving you time and frustration on searching and clicking on every email to guess which one is which. Click on an email, and you’ll find all exchanged files history with the sender, in which you can simply click on a file to open it straight away!

Click on a file to open it

Why you’ll hate Xobni

Xobni provides other cool information about the email or sender, but most of the time, it only wows you once, and then you’ll think that it’s a piece of crap I mean, it’s cool to know that Mr. John Smith is the number 1 person who has sent you the most emails ever. So what? Nevertheless, I think it’s cool to know (at least you can tell which client nags you the most *oops*)

Same as above, the email analytics rocks, but last only for a while. It’s kinda cool to see the graphs, but unless you are a technical support company who wants to monitor who reponds the fastest, who is the most nagging client, etc, then you’ll probably not going to appreciate the analysis.

If you already have an instant search available on your Outlook, then Xobni’s instant search sounds like a duplicate feature. Although, however, it returns more than just a simple search.

Conclusion

If you are using Microsoft Outlook at the moment and you are doing quite a lot of searches, I’d recommend to give Xobni a try. As your inbox grows, you’ll need to have a more powerful plug-in to manage your emails and find things easily.

Xobni will save you a lot of time from searching and clicking to get an information out of your email. 

Xobni is still in beta, so let’s hope that they are still optimizing the code, usage, and the features.