outlook

iLook struggles to make Outlook more social

Improving Outlook is no easy feat given that it's notoriously anti-social when it comes to social networking. The free Outlook plug-in iLook Social and Outlook tries to make Microsoft's ubiquitous e-mail client a bit more sociable by including souped-up searching and filtering, Skype integration, e-mail controls, content and attachment exporting, and Facebook support.

For a sidebar pane, it's a good list of features with an interface that integrates smoothly into Outlook 2007. Desktop e-mail clients are going to have to adapt to social networking far better than they have to survive, especially if the future of e-mail … Read more

Xobni commits to mobile version for BlackBerry

After making a splash helping Windows users quickly search for conversations and contacts in their endless Outlook in-boxes with Xobni, the e-mail organizer company shared its plan on Monday to make the same service available for BlackBerry.

Xobni wouldn't elaborate on any program details, like how exactly it will look and work on the BlackBerry, but they did say that it will involve integration with the phone's address book.

"The app will be focused on contact and relationship management and bring a lot of the relationship features people like from Xobni in Outlook to the BlackBerry," … Read more

OutlookDeck brings Twitter concepts to e-mail

How many competing streams of information do you need to keep track of?

I monitor three e-mail accounts, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook to keep current with life and work. Those are my streams of continuous personal input, separate from the items that we all handle on an interrupt basis: phone calls, Skype, IMs, and people dropping by.

I don't think I'm unique in feeling overwhelmed. There's a ton of information we're all getting in real time today, and we need modern ways to process it.

Some of the services responsible for generating floods of personal information … Read more

What I hate and love about Gmail

I've had a love-hate relationship with Gmail ever since it was introduced in 2004. Among the things I love about Google's free e-mail service is the vast storage, terrific spam filters, fast search, and the ability to automatically forward mail to another address or access it from any e-mail program. What I hate is that the only way to look at your mail at Gmail.com is through a threaded or conversational interface.

Most e-mail programs and Web-based e-mail services present mail in reverse chronological order so that the most recent message is always on top, on a … Read more

Save Outlook e-mail to your hard disk

Last week, somebody contacted me about a problem they were having with Outlook:

"I work for a general contractor and have multiple projects going on. When I get e-mails pertaining to particular jobs, I place them in Personal Folders that I name with the job name. When the project is completed, I would like to move the folder onto my hard drive without losing the date.

"I have over 242 e-mails for one job alone. When I move them, they all come up with the date that I transferred them and the subject matter is gone. There has … Read more

Improve your Outlook with Xobni

Freeware Xobni integrates into your Outlook installation and shows you more about your e-mails than Outlook can by itself. For each person who sends you e-mail, it shows you who else they frequently communicate with--their de facto social networks--and it also finds their phone number from inside their e-mails. It shows you all conversation threads you've participated in with the person, and all the attachments they've sent you. You can drill into message threads, and it has a snappy but redundant e-mail search engine built-in.

Xobni the app runs on Xobni the platform, which has hooks deep into … Read more

Needs a better algorithm

At the end of the day, Gwabbit's Outlook add-on application is a good idea that doesn't work as well as it should. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try it. When in top form, Gwabbit added contacts' names, titles, phone numbers, and Web sites to the Outlook address book using information gleaned from an incoming e-mail. When it failed, Gwabbit didn't recognize anything apart from the contact's name and e-mail address, which Outlook can also do. It then prompted us to fill in the rest by scrolling through the e-mail in a separate window … Read more

Gwabbit Outlook add-on is pwetty wame

Gwabbit (covered here and here) is one of those programs I sincerely want to like. The Microsoft Outlook add-on that can populate an Outlook contact field in a click has a catchy name invoking all manner of iconic "wabbit" images, and a concept applicable to the breadth of office employees. However, it also has a finicky algorithm, at least in my case. It required too much manual labor to finish populating an incomplete contact record, and a $20 price tag for a version 1.0 application that may only work half the time.

In Gwabbit's defense, when … Read more

How I became a prisoner of Outlook

Last year, I decided to give Linux a try. Everything was going well, until I started working for a company that uses Microsoft Outlook for e-mail. There's simply no straightforward, reliable way to run Outlook on Linux. I tried Outlook Web Access, but the service strips code from HTML attachments, among other limitations.

(The company I worked for prior to my current employer used Lotus Notes, which is probably the only e-mail program in the world more proprietary than Outlook. Organizations must get some huge benefit from using these closed e-mail systems, because they sure make life difficult for … Read more