I inbox, you inbox, we inbox (or box in?)

The beta version of xobni (zob-nee) was recenlty released and I had to give it a try.
All one needs is Outlook and a busy inbox (btw, xobni is inbox spelled backwards, a bit like bron and norb...).

When working in a very messaging-intensive company like MS, mailbox management is sadly one of the main daily tasks. I am truly convinced of the impossibility to reduce that amount of e-mails to a necessary/comfortable minimum while keeping the information level to a good/necessary amount, to the affected people, this means "just get used to it!"
While at home, my Outlook is connected to 3 mailboxes and even on a personal level, it can be hard to manage them and not miss some messages.
Outlook is basically the ONLY decent mail+calendar+contacts+tasks software available. Sure, there are Mozilla alternatives, but they don't even compare to the product a multi-billion dollar company can spit out with fairly good quality.
Years of product lifecycle passed and what happened? The opposite of what should have been. We humans adapted to a software and this is soooo wrong! Sure there were some additions and improvements, but it's still so far from perfect (not to mention the nasty bugs and the behemoth it just became as a program).

Then these little fellows, xobni, came along and produced a piece of software that might very well become a native inclusion in OL one day (just wait until MS buys the company).
After installation, the program indexes the mailbox (totally independent from the Windows Search indexing). When that is done, I click on a mail and it shows me: what time of the day I usually get mails from that source, his main contacts (the phone one has a direct link to skype), other addresses related to mails from that contact and so on... It's in its essence a statistical analysis of the inbox. With the amount of information going back and forth, it looks like the only way to improve mail and contact management. That's what it's all about in the end, manage contacts and (social/professional) networking.

On my neandertal-era laptop, I could not for performance's sake hold long enough to it as my OL's memory footprint just grew from 70 to 120megs. But I do invite whoever feels like testing the beta version and letting me know if my prediction might become true.


happy techying

n.-