I finally got my beta invitation for Xobni. This plug-in for Outlook promises to make Microsoft Outlook better by:

• Fast email search
• Analytics on my email usage
• Summarises all attachments by the contact (particularly like this one)
• Extracts phone numbers from the body of email messages
• Navigate through my email by people
• Threaded conversations
• Fast email search
• Automatically suggests meeting times in a click of a button based on free space in my calendar

Here is their demo:

I have to say, I like it. Compared to say Google Desktop, which includes an Outlook search function, it takes up a lot less disk space and seems to be just as effective. It seems to work fine with IMAP, which is surprising, but great. It fits perfectly with how I use email, which is to archive everything and then just search when I need to retrieve something. I try to get my inbox down to zero every day and I don’t file emails in elaborate folder structures, although I do use Labels in Gmail, which is effectively just a folder.

Overall though, this is the new and I believe the most efficient approach for email. Forget about filing it, just dump everything into an archive folder and then just use search and a tool like Xobni to retrieve messages for you when you need them. Why Outlook doesn’t just have a search feature that works, I’ll never know. Xobni is definitely going to be acquired by Microsoft though, what other possible exit could they have?

Overall then, a big recommendation for Xobni. When you get between 50 and 100 messages per day, anything that saves you some time is a must have. If you want a beta invitation, just let me know, I’ve got 5 left at the moment.