I’ve just discovered Rapportive a Gmail add-on which adds information about the person who sent an email. Think of it as a very basic CRM system.

The data replaces the right-hand advertising panel on a Gmail screen – which probably won’t endear Rapportive to Google.

There’s a similarity to Xobni, which works with Microsoft Outlook. But Rapportive is lighter. Xobni runs on your PC, which Rapportive lives in the cloud.

Rapportive pulls its information from social media accounts linked to the person’s email. This means the results are variable. I’ve noticed there is plenty of information and even photographs for some of my contacts, but for many there is nothing at all.

I’ve written before about Xobni and about Gist, which is another, far more complex, variation on the same theme. I prefer Gist to Xobni.

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Gist is designed to cut through the deluge of incoming email, tweets and other messages. It sorts, highlights and presents your most important material in a simple format.

After one day of using the application I can see it has potential. It may become a lynch-pin. But I’m yet to be convinced I’ll use it over the long term. Here’s why:

Gist works with Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook inboxes, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Salesforce. The software is a free web-delivered or cloud application. There’s a paid subscription version in the pipeline.  Read the rest of this entry »

This is partly based on the the Wired How-to Wiki Ditch Your Old E-mail Addresses. I’ve expanded on it here because along the way I stumbled over a couple of traps that may confuse other people.

First: Gmail

Getting a Gmail address was trivial as I already had a number of existing accounts. I’ve decided to forward everything from everywhere to a single Gmail account and gradually stop using all my old email addresses.

If you don’t already have Gmail account, just hop over to gmail.com and sign up – you’re late to the party so there may not be a great choice of available names. This doesn’t matter as nobody ever has to see your Gmail address.

Second: Domain name

Again this was straightforward, I chose a .co.nz name partly because New Zealand is a small country with a relatively uncrowded domain name register which made it easy to get exactly the domain name I wanted. It cost me about NZ$40 to own billbennett.co.nz, but New Zealand names have to be renewed annually which is a pain.

Third: Host

My existing web host was good enough. There’s a minor technical problem with my host which is causing problems elsewhere, but the one I use isn’t expensive and (most of the time) the company is easy to deal with.

I’m paying around NZ$130 a year for 100MB of storage and plenty of bandwidth. You don’t need much of either to handle an email account, so opt for the smallest possible hosting plan unless you aim to use the service for something else.

Fourth: Set-up mail account

My host uses a program called Cpanel. It allows me to manage the site through a web browser. I opened Cpanel and clicked on the Mail icon. A list displayed with a number of options, I chose Add/ Remove/ Manage Accounts. From here I added the email account bill@billbennett.co.nz.

You need to set up a password and a quota at this point – which is an amount of storage space to set aside for email. I’m not planning to keep any email on the server, but just to be safe during the testing stage I set aside 2MB of storage. This turned out to be a good move, because I hit a minor snag.

Fifth: Redirect

This stage looks easy in the Wired How-to Wiki, but I struggled  finding out how to redirect email traffic from my host using Cpanel. That’s because I used the Email Domain Forwarding option. While this looks like the right tool – it isn’t. I then tried, incorrectly, setting up forwarding from Cpanel’s built-in Horde web mail program. The correct tool to use at this point is cryptically listed in the Cpanel/Mail menu as Forwarders.

Here you simply need to click on Add Forwarder and then enter the new email address followed by the Gmail account where you plan to receive your mail.

Sixth: Tell Gmail about your new account

I did this by logging on to Gmail, clicking the Settings link at the top right of the window and then on the Accounts tab. Here I added the new address, verified it, then made it the default.

It’s a good idea to test your new email address at this point. When I did this I had some problems with the redirecting and found my emails sitting in the Horde web mail inbox on the server at my host.

Now, my next job is to make sure the new address appears everywhere online. This will take some time to fix. I made a good start by Googling my old addresses, but there are hundreds of instances so it’s not going to happen overnight.

While the latest upgrades to Xobni give Outlook another shot in the arm, they only serve to underline the shortcomings of desktop email. Giving up on Outlook and moving to Gmail or another online mail service may be a better option.

Xobni (that’s inbox backwards) turns everyday email into a relationship management tool by focusing on people rather than messages.

In technical terms, the program is a Microsoft Outlook plug-in. It sits on top of the desktop application and digs down into Outlook’s data, slicing and dicing it to emphasis your links with other people.

Once the plug-in is loaded and data is synchronised, Xobni’s toolbar occupies the right hand side of Outlook’s main display providing contact information about the person who sent the incoming message.

You’ll see the person’s name at the top of the Xobni pane along with their photo if you’ve stored one in your Outlook Contacts. You’ll also find statistics on how often you have communicated with them and a rank – so you’ll know something about that person’s relative importance to you.

If there is a phone number to be found anywhere in the messages or contact details, that’ll be shown – and it’s clickable. Likewise there’s a link allowing you to quickly schedule a calendar appointment with that person.

Xobni shows recent conversations and email threads between you and the person in question along with clickable links to any attachments that have travelled between you. There are also improvements to Outlook search – though Microsoft’s updated desktop search nullifies the value of this.

Instant productivity payoff

On their own, none of these features are earth-shattering, but together they deliver an instant productivity payoff. You’ll find you won’t need to switch between your messages and contact database – that’s a timesaver in itself. You’ll also need to run fewer searches – just about everything relevant to an email is quickly to hand.

Some of Xobni’s features seem advanced. For example, the program does a pretty job of figuring out when someone uses more than one email address and lumping all their messages together. Another neat trick is the way it mines emails for the names of other people in your contact database, then displaying them in a clickable form.

Xobni isn’t just about improved productivity; it also delivers a fresh people-oriented way of looking at information that will allow you to build better relationships.

So why am I not convinced?

I used Xobni for a few months when it first appeared this time last year. While the application looks good and may deliver a productivity boost to some types of user, I quickly found it wasn’t helping me in any practical way. If anything, it’s reports were a distraction. They are pretty to look at and moderately interesting at first – but that’s about it.

What’s more, Gmail’s functionality has improved to the point where it’s now borderline perverse for a person working alone to prefer Outlook over webmail. Ironically, Gmail’s weakness is the way it handles people. If Xobni’s functionality could be added to Gmail, the developers would have a killer product on their hands.

Finally, I’ve noticed Xobni slows Outlook down and on occasion stops it from working — albeit temporarily.

Xobni may make sense if you work for a company where you have to use Outlook, live in Outlook and the support policy is liberal enough to allow you to install it.

To me Xobni is the chrome plated hubcaps and giant tailfins on those beautiful, but dinosaur-like American cars from the 1960s in an era when we’re all driving more practical Toyotas. It an anachronism.