San Francisco (CA) – Xobni (that’s inbox spelled backwards) has released a free utility that promises to be the ultimate add-on for Microsoft Outlook – and from initial testing we wholeheartedly agree.  Emails are a double-edged sword for many, sure they are easy to type and quickly sent, but you can easily drown in the deluge of replies.  The Xobni app cuts through this clutter by indexing all your emails and then giving a column of all your attachments, conversations and other information, all neatly organized by sender/receiver.

The 3.1 MB download for Windows XP and Vista users is available at Xobni’s website here.  Owners of other email programs aren’t completely out of luck because the company says that it will release Xobni for other email systems “soon”.

After installing Xobni, you’ll see an additional column in your Outlook panel.  This column can be collapsed by clicking an icon in the bottom-left corner.  Xobni will index all your email, something that took just a few minutes on my email-laden laptop.

Outlook users are probably used to the pathetically slow search bar, but thankfully you’ll never have to touch this again after installing Xobni.  The program has its own search bar and its insanely fast thanks to its pre-indexing of emails.

But I like the bevy of information you get when you click on any email in your regular Outlook inbox.  The Xobni panel displays the sender’s information, a graph of emails received by the person and a list of conversations and attachments.  If you hover your cursor over the conversations you get a couple of sentences worth of pop-up previews.  You can also easily request meetings or phone numbers of people by clicking in the panel.  This calls up the Outlook send email window with all the blanks spots filled in.

But if all that isn’t enough, Xobni has built-in analytics that calls up a snazzy dashboard with line and bar charts.  Here you can graph all your emails received/sent by day or even by hour.  How geeky is that?  Heck you can waste even more time here than the actual Outlook Inbox – or you can cry yourself to sleep by seeing how many emails you answer after work.

Simply put, Xobni turns Outlook into a smarter, faster and better email client.  I highly recommend it.

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