Xobni - Email Inbox Management

posted on Mon, December 17th, 2007

Xobni
One or two months ago I registered for a beta of Xobni. Xobni is a tooI for email organization, navigation and search that seamlessly integrates into outlook. I forgot about it completely quickly after registration, but got an invitation last week to download their latest beta and to try it out. So I did. As I am already using Nelson Email Organizer Pro (which I am really satisfied with) I have high standards for any new tool for email organization. I have approx. 14'000 emails in my inbox, as I do all the structuring work with Nelson. It automatically sorts all emails by author, which saves a lot of time to create rules and folder just for the purpose of sorting them by author. Additionally you can tag each message with several keywords, which helps a lot to find messages in different contexts. There are some more nice features like order by status which I became used to lately and search by attachement. I'm pretty happy with it, although it became a bit slow lately (but thats another story).

Xobni As Nelson is an additional program that opens up another window next to the outlook window I was looking for another tool that would seamlessly integrate into outlook. So I was exciting seeing another tool approaching the market. The Xobni installation is easy and straightforward. It took about 10 minutes to index all my emails and than I could work as normal. Xobni shows up on the right side as a panel. On top of the sidebar an activity index of the author of the selected message is shown. A ranking is calculated for each author depending on the number of incoming and outgoing emails. Below that simple statistics you see a list of people that are connected to the selected author. This comes very handy when you look for certain people and you can only remember vaguely who it was, but you may know the context and remember some other people. If you click on an author at this list the whole panel switches to that author, but leaves a tab for the original author on the top of the sidebar. These tabs stack up further if you click on another author in this list. This makes navigation in the context of authors pretty easy and very important to me is that the interface is responding fast on these actions.
Xobni Right below the list of people connect to the author of the selected message a list of all conversation held with that author is displayed. If you click on a conversation a detailed view is opened where you can select the level of detail of the message with a slider at the top. Together with the list of documents exchanged with the author the search or better the navigation to emails is straightforward and easy. At first I didn't thought that these three lists (people, conversations and documents) could be useful to find emails, but in fact I could find message that I could barely remember very easy within seconds.

Although Xobni helps a lot in organising and navigating through emails I wouldn't like to replace Nelson for it yet. First I really miss the tag feature from Nelson. I have tons of emails tagged or "catgorized" and I rely heavily on that. Another drawback is that it is not possible to group people. That means that person with more than 1 email address will end up as different persons. This is definitely a problem. I have lots of people using different emails for different purposes. So looking for 2 or more email addresses would become troublesome.
One thing I also miss is the synchronisation of the contact image displayed on top of the sidebar for each contact. It is possible to manually assign images to each contact identified by Xobni. But as I already have a lot of contacts with an embedded photo in outlook it would be so much quicker if a quick lookup in outlook contacts would be done to check if there is a contact with that email address and then synchronize the image.
But on the other hand I like the interface of Xobni and the additional features for navigation it delivers.