Xobni – a Free Addin for Outlook

I’m always interested in programs that help me work more efficiently. That interest is especially strong when the program is free. Xobni (pronounced zob-nee – it’s ‘inbox’ spelled backwards) for Outlook 2003/2007 fits that perfectly. Here are some of the things it will help you do.

• Find all emails from or to someone – very quickly. You can see a list of all emails you sent to or received from John Smith, including those where John was only a CC or BCC.
• Consolidate contact information. If someone emails you using both their business and their personal email (or multiple personal emails), Xobni will show them all when it creates that person’s profile.
• Find related emails. You send an email. The next day they reply. You reply with more information a couple days after that. Xobni brings all those emails together so you find them all in a single place.
• Find attachments you’ve received or sent. You remember sending John an excel spreadsheet with budget information. But you can’t remember when it was or what the name of the file was. Xobni lets you see all attachments in emails involving John. Look down the list and you’re most likely going to find that one dealing with budgets.
• You can get some very interesting stats on your emails. Want to know how long it takes you, on average, to reply to emails from your boss? Or your spouse? Or whether you take longer on emails your boss sends to you versus emails where she is replying to an email from you?
• Discover connections you have with others. See a person’s LinkedIn information (employer, job title and, if you want, photo). Click to get their public profile. Click to add them to your own connections. All without leaving Outlook.
• Ever wondered what that person you’ve been emailing really looks like? Xobni will automatically show you their Facebook profile picture as well as their most recent status message.
• Get information from the Hoovers database about a person’s company.

If you look at my Outlook set up you’ll see something like this. Xobni sits unobtrusively over on the right side.

When you click on the “<<” at the bottom, it expands and gives you full access to the program’s features.

The first area (1) is based on the person who sent the email currently selected in Outlook. If, instead of one of my own emails, the current email (the one highlighted in blue above) was from John Doe, any available information on John Doe would show up. Xobni creates this profile by taking information from different sources and merging them. For example, if you have a friend who emails you both from work and from home, both email addresses will show up. Click on an email address and Outlook opens a new email to that person. Click on the phone number and (if you have Skype installed), it starts a new phone call to that person. You can edit that profile. This lets you change the picture (or automatically select a picture from Outlook, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) If there are multiple email addresses, you can decide which ones should show up in the profile, change phone numbers, company information, etc. We’ll talk about those icons at the bottom of the profile in a moment. The second area (2) shows the people you have emailed and who have emailed you. If you have actually emailed someone, the icon is orange. Otherwise it is gray. There is supposed to be a separate icon for distribution lists, but I’ve not seen it yet – even though I get mail from a lot of those lists. Click on one of the names and that person’s profile is loaded. That person’s ‘network’ then shows up. For example, if I click on my wife’s name (Barbara), the names in the network box changes. People in the new list are ranked based on how often they are included in conversations between you and the person whose profile is loaded. That gives you a good idea of who knows both you and that other person. Those are people you can approach if, for example, you’re looking for a job from someone, people that show up in that person’s network in Xobni know both of you – and can put in a good word for you. The next area (3) shows all emails you’ve sent to and received from the person whose profile is loaded. If you have your own profile loaded, you can see how many emails the program has indexed. Click on an individual email and you’ll see the email inside the Xobni sidebar. You can quickly send a reply, forward it or open the email in Outlook.

When you open Xobni, you’ll see something like this.

Xobni also consolidates emails that are part of a conversation. (Emails are part of a conversation if the same people show up in the “To” and “CC” headers. That means mass emails are often treated as part of a single conversation – like the one used in the next example.) I’ll use emails from the Wall Street Journal as an example to avoid using personal emails.

Notice the ‘29 mails’? If you click on this email, you’ll see a list of the individual emails in the conversation. The “Detail” slider lets you see just a couple lines from each email (like you see below). Or you can see more detail by moving it to the right.

Click on an email and the full email shows up in Xobni and again you can reply or forward the individual email.

The final area (4) shows any files attached to emails between you and the person whose profile is loaded. Click on the file and it opens. Now, how nifty is that? You know you sent Mary Johnson an Excel spreadsheet sometime in the past. But you can’t remember exactly when it was. Maybe you can’t even remember the name of the file – but if you saw it you’d recognize it. No problem. Pull up Mary’s profile. There’s a list of every file you’ve sent her. Scan down the list. When you see it, you’ll recognize it. If you want to see the file, click on the filename. If you want to open the email, right click and you’ll see an option to open the email. (You can also right click and save the file – for example if you want to put a copy on your USB drive to take to a meeting with that person.)

That’s a quick overview of the program.

Next, let’s look at a couple other features. First, the icons at the bottom of a person’s profile.

The first one, when clicked, gives you a summary of the emails received from an individual or company.

This tells me I’ve received 536 from the Wall Street Journal Editors and that only 4 people send me more email. I can also see what time of day I usually get emails from them. For something like mass mail, that’s not really important. But consider if you’re thinking of emailing an individual. If you know you often get emails from them in the evening, you might conclude they’ll probably you’re your email even if you send it at 8 p.m. But if all the emails you’ve received are during ‘normal’ work hours, you’ll probably be safe saying they won’t see it until the next day.

The next icon brings up Xobni actions.

	Click on “Request phone number” and the program creates an email asking the person for their phone number. When they respond, Xobni automatically extracts the number and adds it to their profile.
	Click on “Schedule time” and Xobni looks at your Outlook calendar and sends the person an email saying when you’re available the next several days.
	Click on “Email” and it opens a new email to the person.

The next icon shows the person’s Indeed.com profile (assuming they have one) based on their email address.

	Move your mouse over their occupation and company and you’ll see the summary of their current position. Click on their connections or profile and those pages from LinkedIn open in your browser.
	To offer this capability, you must be willing to let Xobni know your LinkedIn username and password.

The next icon is for Facebook.

	Click on “View Profile” and your browser opens that person’s page on Facebook.
	If you’re not already friends with the person, I had assumed that pressing the “+ Add” button would send a request to the person. Maybe it does, but when I tried it, my browser opened to my own page and there was no indication a friend request had been sent.
	You’ll see status messages, the person’s profile picture, latest photos uploaded and photos in which they were tagged, as well as network information.

The final icon is for Hoovers – the company that provides information about companies.

	Assuming the company is in the Hoovers database, a quick summary will show up. Xobni uses the email domain name (microsoft.com in this example) to identify the company.
	Click on “View More” and your browser opens to Hoovers free company factsheet.
	Click on “View More” and your browser opens to Hoovers free company factsheet.
	Company information displayed includes the official company description in Hoover’s, size of the company, headquarters location, and sales figures

Finally, let’s talk about Xobni’s ability to provide interesting stats about your emails and your contacts.

If you click on the menu button at the bottom of the screen, you’ll see something called “Xobni Analytics”. Click on it and you’ll be introduced to a whole new world of things you never knew about your emails.

The first screen you’ll see is a summary of today’s emails.

You can see the people (or distribution lists) that have emailed you (1) and who you have emailed (2). Both outgoing and income emails are shown in the graph at the bottom (3).

Move your mouse over the + sign in the emails and you see more information.

Using the icons at the top of the graph (inside the rounded rectangle) you can change the graph to columns. You can also email the graph, copy it, save it or print it.

While that may all be interesting, the other statistical offerings are much more interesting (and potentially useful).

The next set is called “Mail Traffic” and lets you see what your email volume is like on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. This screen shows that the heaviest volume of my incoming emails are around the noon hour but that I’m getting them almost around the clock.

You can also see which see your daily average. This lets you see, for example, that you get most of your emails on Wednesdays (better allow more time for it in your schedule) and that you send most of your emails on Mondays. If you have include a full year, you can see which months of the year are heaviest for you.

The tabs in the rounded rectangle let you filter the results. This can provide some very interesting information. For example, if I want to see how many emails I get from someone, I can do that easily by searching for them and then applying the filter. I also filter by domain (how many emails do I get from Microsoft?). Or if I keep emails in folders, I can get graphs based on all the emails in a particular folder. And I can do it by words in the subject line of the email.

The “Recipients Types” shows emails in three categories. How many did you receive (and send) where there was no CC or BCC. How many with a CC? How many with a BCC?

“Flag status” counts the emails either with or without a flag status on them.

“Context” breaks your emails into three groups: original emails, emails that were a reply and those that were forwarded. “Action” lets you see the number of emails that you personally replied to, that you forwarded and that you used the ‘reply to all’ button.

The next graph can be very helpful if you’re trying to evaluate how long you take to respond to emails. Basically it looks at emails you replied to, groups them by recipient and then calculates the average time it took you to respond. I was glad to see, for example, that it took me only 13 minutes, on average, to respond to emails from my wife. If someone complains about how long it takes you to get back to them (like your boss?), this will help you figure out if they’re right. And, assuming your response time is reasonable, will give you ammunition to bolster your assertions that you’re now unreasonably slow.

With all these charts, you can filter out any emails you want. For example, you can look just at emails from your boss and then see the difference between how long it took you to reply when the boss sent you the email versus when the boss was responding to your email. Or you can filter out emails where you ‘replied to all’ on the assumption those emails may not have been as important.

You can include (or exclude) any PST files or folders in those files in Options.

Here you can see that while I asked Xobni to index my primary calendar and contacts folders, I don’t want it to index any of the subfolders (which, in my case, are either archive or test folders). I also don’t want it to index anything that I’ve deleted, but do want it to index drafts. And I want it to index everything in all my inbox folders and all my sent items.

One problem I’ve encountered. When you’re selecting folders to index, if you select (or unselect) a “parent” folder and then click on the +, you may be surprised to see the “children” folders haven’t changed. But if you go out of the options program and then go back it, you’ll see that all the “children” folders have been affected. In other words, it looks like changes affecting subfolders don’t take effect until you exit options.

It would also be nice if you didn’t have to have PST files open. For example, another indexing program I use, X1, lets you index folders on your harddrive (or network) that you may not actually have open in Outlook. That’s good because I have lots of Outlook archive folders. Having lots of Outlook folders open seems to slow Outlook.

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