‘Drowning in e-mail?’ Give Xobni a try

Listen to this article

Everybody loves free stuff – especially free stuff that has actual value. Periodically, I devote an article to freebies on the Web that may be useful for lawyers. It’s been several months since the last one, so here’s the latest — Xobni for Outlook.

When you go to the Xobni.com homepage, it prominently asks, “Drowning in e-mail?”

Most people I know would say yes to that, me included, and I don’t get nearly the amount of e-mail that most practicing lawyers get.

Xobni (pronounced Zob-nee) for Outlook is a plug-in, and as its name implies, it’s for Outlook – I’m now using that program, instead of the free and easier-to-use Mozilla Thunderbird, because my former computer has expired. It was replaced by one of my husband’s many pre-loved models, which already had Outlook loaded.

So, Outlook is a basic requirement for Xobni. But, if you also use Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL, Gmail or any POP or IMAP-enabled mail account, you can set Xobni up to import those accounts as well – which would come in handy, for example, if you use the Outlook account for work only, and Gmail for personal use.

It takes about two to three minutes to download, simply by agreeing to its terms and clicking a series of “nexts.” Xobni displays on the right-hand side of your screen when you open up Outlook.

The first task it performs after it’s downloaded is to index your e-mails to make them searchable. Before Xobni, if I needed to find an e-mail that had been placed in trash many months or even years ago, it was a lengthy process for me to go back in time to when I thought I received it, or to search by the sender’s name. With Xobni, you can enter a keyword, and it finds the e-mail in seconds. It also displays your most recent conversations with a contact, and files shared. So, one way or another, it’s pretty simple to find the information you’re seeking.

Another really neat Xobni feature is its “Contact Info Search.” Xobni pulls contact info from e-mail signatures, message bodies and Outlook contacts, as well as its partners: LinkedIn, Facebook, Hoovers, Skype and Yahoo. If you need to quickly pull up the phone number, company name and title before your meeting with a client named “Jim” — simply type “Jim (surname)” in the Xobni search box, and his whole profile of information will be at your fingertips.

If “Jim” is one of your Facebook friends, his latest status will also appear, if you activate that application, which takes only seconds to do. Of course, the whole Facebook interface is a double-edged sword for some, me included. I might see that Jim just took a quiz about which character in “The Sopranos” he is most like, and I’ll think, “Wow, I wonder who I’m like? I hope it’s Adriana but I’m probably Tony’s mother!”

Before I know it, I am once again sucked into the time-wasting world of Facebook. If you share my addiction, think twice before loading it. (Then again, breaking the ice in the meeting with, “So you’re Tony, I’m Carmella,” might start it on a lighter note, and most of us could use a few more of those!)

I must note, however, that Xobni is probably better utilized on a computer with a larger screen than mine. The previously-mentioned new (to me) computer is a featherweight laptop with a 12.1-inch screen, and the view gets a little crowded when you add Xobni into that small space.

That’s a sign of its age; I’m told the newer laptops all have wider screens.

But, now that I’m covered by age discrimination laws, I have empathy with my new “old” laptop and we’ve bonded. More to the point, Xobni is “collapsible,” so that it moves to the far side of the screen to give you more room to read your e-mails when you click on the appropriate prompt. Or, if you click on Xobni’s Options, you can set it so it doesn’t automatically open every time you open Outlook.

Bottom line: There are many more potential uses of Xobni that I have yet to discover and add to my repertoire, and I give it a big thumbs-up.