A good friend passed this on to me last week. I finally installed it on my computer last night (it’s free). Now I wish I had done this earlier.

When I was between jobs, I stopped using Outlook. The only reason I used Outlook was because at church we usually had an exchange server and we could take advantage of email, calendar sharing, tasks and all the other things that come with Outlook. However, since I wasn’t a part of all of that, I just used my gmail account. As soon as I came on staff at Gateway, I started using Outlook again. I immediately missed using gmail as my primary email. The search function of gmail is so amazing and it absolutely puts Outlook to shame. If I’m looking for a particular email to a certain person, I could waste quite a bit of time scanning emails looking for the email in question. Then there was Xobni. Xobni brings Gmail type tools (and a lot more) to the Outlook environment.

Ultimately, it indexes your email and allows you to search email by the word (or even part of a word). Even if you don’t have any contacts loaded (I don’t yet) it will create contacts within Xobni. It will tell you how many times you’ve emailed them, how many times they’ve emailed you. I don’t know why it would matter, but it even charts when during the day you communicate the most. It will put your conversations in threads as well. Okay, here is the really cools stuff. It will search the context of your emails and look for phone numbers and if it finds a number, it will make it the contact’s phone. If in any of your emails you or that person copied someone, it puts them in that contact’s network all right there at your fingertips. Last of all, it creates a little bin at the very bottom of every attachment you and that contact have ever sent each other. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen something this cool. So, check out the video below and think about installing it. It’s super easy and very free!