Imagine being away from your Microsoft Outlook account for four months. Sounds peaceful, right? Now imagine coming back to it, only to find more than 8,500 messages. That’s the situation I faced last month after returning to eWEEK after a four-month-plus hiatus.
When I loaded Outlook 2007 on the new laptop IT gave me, more than 2 hours passed while all of the back-loaded e-mail from February through mid-June filtered into my account. I was horrified. How was I going to wade through this e-mail swamp to find important stories to link to or contacts that I needed to connect with for my reporting? I was a prime candidate for Xobni.
Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) is a free plug-in that indexes Outlook e-mail and makes it easier for users to search conversations and threads. It also let users connect with contacts through Facebook and LinkedIn, which I thought was pretty nifty when I first saw a demonstration of it last year. But I wasn’t sold on the value of the tool specifically for me because I had never let my e-mail run wild.
I thought Xobni was just for lazy slackers who couldn’t be bothered to delete their e-mails as they came in but chose to just search through them occasionally. However, two million downloads later and Xobni rolled out a “freemium” offering on 15 July, charging $29.95 (£18) for a perpetual license. Xobni Plus is tailored for individual knowledge workers and small to medium companies that may buy licenses in bulk.
When I went to install the tool for the first time, I panicked because I thought it would take forever for Xobni to index my e-mail glut. In reality it took 5 minutes of finger-tapping, none too shabby.
Once installed, Xobni Plus appeared as a collapsible sidebar to the right of my Outlook inbox, showing me profiles of the people I work with along with associated conversations I’ve had with them via Outlook.
Advanced Search
The first new feature I looked at was Xobni’s advanced search. Xobni always let users do a word query search for people or keywords in e-mail. But finding e-mails that contain a single word or name leaves users with a lot of e-mail to sift through.
The Advanced button in Xobni Plus appears under the search bar when users begin typing in a query. Clicking Advanced immediately gave me the options to search From, To and Has Attachments. Clicking the + button next to the “Has Attachments” option, added search filters for CC’d, All, With, Date, Body, Subject, Type and Folder fields. It was a big leap in efficiency, to narrow the search to find e-mails containing a particular word using these filters, which is what the tool is all about.
For this test, I searched for the term “Google,” and typed my colleague “Scott” in the “From” header. Without hitting Enter, the 54 e-mails from Scott that reference Google appeared, narrowing down the search experience. Then, I wanted to find an e-mail with a Google-related document that I’d sent to Scott awhile back. So, I adjusted the search, taking Scott’s name out of the “From” box and moving it to the “To” filter, and clicked “yes” for Has Attachments. Voila! The e-mail popped up.
