Description: Xobni is a free program that adds a sidebar with a slew of organizational functions to your Outlook. Principally built around organizing your Outlook data around people (similar in many ways to the Gmail model), Xobni provides a quick way to view threaded conversations with other people, view exchanged attachment history, view contacts you might have in common with another person, perform "lightning fast" searches, view email analytics data, and other functions.

Xobni ("inbox" spelled backwards, pronounced zob-nee) is an add on that aims to provide an alternative way to access your emails and data. Although currently it is only available for Outlook (apparently the world’s most used email client), there are plans to release this for other clients in the future.

I’ve been using this for a while now, waiting for it to move beyond the "invite only" beta in order to post it on Freewaregenius, which just recently happened. You might have had a glimpse of some degree of publicity surrounding Xobni, being featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, etc., and if you were wondering whether it lives up to the hype the answer is a definite yes. Xobni to Outlook is just what the doctor prescribed; it takes a somewhat dysfunctional, top-heavy and unexciting piece of software and adds a set of functions that are innovative and exciting, but - most importantly - it is fast and it works.

Here are the top five things I like about this program:

1- People-centric organization: search for someone by name and Xobni will construct and display a "profile" for that person that includes contact info, statistics, network of contacts, and other info. It will also display the email history with that person with the most recent messages displayed on top. You will like this person-centric approach if you like and/or used to Gmail (although it doesn’t quite replicate Gmail’s "conversations", it’s a good approximation).

2- Quick attachment discovery: search for someone and Xobni will display a history of exchanged attachments with that person (to and from) for easy access. This surprisingly useful in practice, probably more useful than you would expect at first.

3- Extremely fast search: forget about Outlook’s search; Xobni does its own indexing of your Outlook data when it is first installed and will keep all subsequently data indexed as well. The result: extremely fast searches without having to install the bloated and top heavy MS desktop search.
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Description: MailStore Home is a free program that can backup your email from multiple email applications/accounts and consolidate these into a single, centralized archive that it can burn into a backup CD. Also offers the ability to perform advanced searches and quickly view archived email. Supported email clients include Outlook, Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Exchange, as well as POP/IMAP accounts (including all webmail services that IMAP or POP support such as Gmail and Yahoo), and local files.

This program can backup your email from a wide range of supported applications and services (including webmail services such as gmail) into a single centralized archive. It offers a high degree of configurability in terms of what you want and do not want it to backup, and allows for exporting your email across applications (so, for example, you can export your Outlook email into Thunderbird). More notes below:

• Backup options: you can tell it which folders you want backed-up and which ones you don’t. This might be useful if, say, you send a lot of email newsletters to certain folder(s) and do not care to have these backed up. Note that backups are incremental, such that Mailstore will add to the existing archive only those emails that have been added since the last backup.
• Exporting mail: if you need to you can select a folder structure or email/emails and export these into a another supported application (e.g. Outlook to Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc.). You could also back them up to CD, save them individually to IMAP or hard disk , or even forward them by SMTP to an email address.
• The user experience: is tremendous. This is a sleek looking program that is well designed overall intuitive to use.
• Supported email clients/services: Outlook, Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Exchange, as well as POP/IMAP accounts and local files. Archiving webmail: such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL is possible, but Hotmail is not (Mailstore can archive any service that have a POP3 nor an IMAP server, which Hotmail doesn’t). See this page and this page for more info on configuring webmail.
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Description: Note2Email is a website that allows you to send quick emails to yourself or others through a simple form. You can optionally enter in a special encryption key such that the recipient will only be able to read the email if they know it.

Have you ever logged into your email account in order to send a note to yourself ? (I know that I personally have done this numerous times). With Note2email you can send notes by email quickly and easily without needing to log into your email account. All you need to remember is the note2email.com URL. Here’s more info on this service:

• Your email will be from "note[at]note2email.com",which enables you to set up a filter in your email service or program and create a repository folder for notes sent to yourself.
• Note2email relieves you from needing a web-based email if sending email notes from a computer that’s not your own.
• Note2email relieves you from needing to log into web-based email in order to send email notes from a computer that’s not your own. This is both more secure (alleviates any risk of compromising your account password) and will save you time otherwise spent logging in.
• You can send email with a special encryption key that you specify. Your recipient will only be able to view the email if they can enter in your key.
• Spam protection: you will need to identify the note2email logo from other random images to send email with note2email. This protects against random spammers using the service for junk mail.
• Lastly, I should mention that note2email allows you to send email fairly anonymously to any address. (Note: anybody with little technical skills can send an email disguised as being from anyone they choose. At least with note2email the sender is "note2email" and not some fake identity).
• Bookmarklet for taking quick notes by email is in the works.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 4.4.1.0

[Note: this review was co-written by Freewaregenius contributor Pcfreakske2000 from Belgium]

Description: Dreammail is an E-mail client that can handle SMTP, eSMTP, POP3, and web mail (Hotmail and Yahoo). Offers a wide range of advanced functions including multi-user and multi email account support, advanced email search, RSS feed aggregation, viewing email directly from the server, spam filtering, and others.

If you’re looking for a solid email client that is an excellent alternative to Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird, then you’ve found it. Dreammail covers a lot of ground and what it does not do very well it nonetheless does quite adequately. Here are some notes on this program:

• The user interface: The user interface is clean, easy to use, and looks good. Employs a navigation pane on the left of the screen reminiscent of MS Outlook that’s used to access the different parts of the program (mail folder, contacts, search, webmail, and RSS feeds).You can customize the columns to view in your email view.
• Multi-accounts and Multi-user feature: You can set up different e-mail accounts in the program for multiple POP3 and webmail accounts. You can also check for new emails for all accounts simultaneously.
• Multi protocol management: POP3, SMTP, and eSMTP supported, as well as Yahoo and Hotmail web mail (yes Gmail is supported as POP3). However, it does not support IMAP email accounts.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 2.0

Description: Amic Email Backup is a small, free program that can backup and restore the data associated with most major email clients, including identities, email and news messages, address book, accounts, message rules/filters, signatures, and even the blocked senders list. It works with a number of email clients including MS Outlook, MS Outlook Express, Eudora, Pegasus, The Bat, PocoMail, Netscape Messenger, Opera Mail, and Incredimail.

There are 3 things you can do with this program: backup data, restore data, or schedule a backup; what I like is that these are handled in a very simple and straightforward manner. Here are some notes on this program:

• You can use Amic Email Backup to sync your emails across multiple machines (you cannot, however, back up your email from one application and restore it into another; e.g. PocoMail to Outlook).
• The are 2 user-interface modes; standard mode and wizard mode. Both are self-explanatory and easy to use, although wizard mode looks way cooler.
• The Scheduler: this is a fairly sophisticated feature. You can tell it the date and time to start the backup, as well as what period to wait before executing subsequent backups (how many months or weeks or days or hours). The options tab allows you to specify weather you want to override your original backup when a new backup takes place, or you could choose to keep a number of the latest backups (say, keep only the latest 3 backups).
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Rating: 4

Version tested: 1.2.1

Description: ODIR is an add-on for Outlook that can detect duplicate items and move them to a special folder; these include contacts, appointements, tasks, notes, and emails (sent, received, and unsent). Does not work with Outlook Express.

I used this program with Outlook 2007 to scan around 18,000 emails for duplicates. Of these, approximately 10,000 were duplicates (after migrating my email from Thunderbird to Outlook, I somehow created 2 copies of 5,000 of my emails). Here are some notes on my experience with this program:

• Running the program: the installer creates an ODIR menu alongside Outlook’s original menus. Deduping begins when you select ’Remove Duplicate Items’ from this menu.
• How it works: items are considered duplicates if the following criteria are found duplicated: for contacts: first and last names, company name, and email address; for appointments: subject, location, start date, and end date; for tasks: subject, start date, due date and status; for notes: contents of the body and color; for emails/posts: internet message ID (for received email), email subject and the time sent (for sent email), and the subject alone for unsent emails.
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