About a week ago I saw a story on Digg.com about tools to help you be more productive. I can’t remember the exact story, but more than likely it was from LifeHacker. Regardless, this story talked about this little California company who has created a plugin for Microsoft Outlook call Xobni. I’ve been test driving this for a week and let me tell you that I’m in love. Searching for emails is a breeze, what would take 10-15 minutes to finds, you’ll find it in under 3. Trying to find obscure emails is a breeze and being able to find any sort of conversation for any one contact is great.

The installation was quick and the indexing took a few hours, depending on how much email you have. The only draw back, which makes sense, is that you have to have the PST open in order for it to be indexed. It would be great for Xobni to index “offline” PST folders.

Lastly, Xobni comes with some pretty cool analytics. For example:

This is the mail traffic I’ve had today:




The email I’ve had in the last few months, which shows what happens when you get closer to production on a project:




And finally, a pretty interesting graph showing the time it takes you to respond to an email:




I highly recommend this for all Outlook users.

~dmacias