Xobni – knowledge from your emails

email… still the killer application of the Internet !!!

Given that the typical user spends several hours each day using email it just got to be a valuable store of potential knowledge.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying out xobni.

This is a plugin for MS Outlook that gives an additional layer of information extrapolated from the email store. Initially I thought it would be something of a fun gizmo but now I’m quite taken with it.

Xobni (which btw is ‘inbox’ spelt backwards), runs in a separate pane that integrates with the main outlook application. For a currently selected email it will give you a conversation based view of the email, an analysis of the volume of emails sent/received with the particular sender/recipient, an extrapolation of their phone number, a social network type view of the sender/recipient (ie who they also typically include on their emails) and a list of files exchanged with this email sender/recipient (ie attachments).

Of these, perhaps the most useful feature is the ‘file exchanged’ view. How many times have you spent ages digging away in your email folders looking for a particular file you sent or received?

The most amazing thing, though, is the search which is just lightening fast and very accurate. I’ve been using this a lot. I don’t know how many hours I’ve wasted using the built in MS search looking for some long ago sent or received email.

Xobni also provides some fun analytics such as who responds the most quickly to your emails and the peak times of day that a particular user sends / responds to emails.

All in all, this is an amazing bit of software and I’d strongly recommend it to anyone running outlook. Apparently, MS have been sniffing around Xobni looking to buy it but the xobni people have held out… well done… I think they are really onto a winner with this… I just hope they have thoroughly patented the great ideas in their code. With any luck we’ll be seeing this kind of functionality, ie a knowledge based view of email, appearing in more email applications both desktop and web based.