Inbox Backwards April 14, 2009
Posted by Brian Coventry in Collaboration, Email Management.trackback
A few weeks back I sent an email to my team, I wanted to deal with two issues. First was to acknowledge that I was struggling with the amount of email I received on a daily basis and secondly to let them know that any email that had me in the cc box would be moved out automatically and reviewed at some point in the next week. If you don’t make use of Outlook rules then I stongly suggest trying a few to see what difference they can make.
I have created a number of rules over the years but the thing I noticed about my last effort was that having declared ‘email bankcruptcy’ (to a degree) the team have responded by not copying me in on as many conversations. The outcome has been a much reduced inbox and one that focuses more on inward email from clients and business partners.
Today I have gone one step further but in another direction, I have installed Xobni, which is the word “inbox” spelled backwards.
Xobni offers a new way to organize and search your Outlook email. It creates profiles for each person that emails you. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, social connections, threaded conversations, and shared attachments. It’s free to download with the knowledge that a premium version will follow at some stage down the line.
Xobni is a San Francisco, California based startup that is revolutionizing the way people manage email relationships. Xobni was started because they believe that people spend too much time searching for conversations, attachments, and other important information in their inbox. I agree.
At APS we use and market Worksite Document & Email Management from Autonomy. This is a great asset for storing a retrieving email and other electronic content but at the end of the day you still have an Inbox to worry about. The latest enhancements to Worksite are great in that we can see which emails within an Inbox have been filed in the DM system but as Xobni show there are other threads and connections that need dealing with within the the Inbox.
Every little bit helps – have a go 
Brian Coventry
I had heard of xobni before, but I had not checked it out until just now. I use GMail and had thought for a long time that I should be able to create a graphical analysis of who’s sending me emails. Then I could tag every email I get in terms of its usefulness and whether it was necessary for me to receive it.
After a while, I could look to see who’s ‘spamming’ me. Too bad xobni doesn’t work in GMail.
I had the same comment from a contact in the Big 4 I know who uses Lotus Mail. He was disappointed too. You could use Outlook and have your Gmail delivered to it. Then Xobni would work.