Xobni is a new email overlay/addon which is currently in Beta and is initially targeting Outlook 2003/2007 but is suppose to later work with other email interfaces (Xobni please make Gmail your next target, read my previous post My Gmail IMAP experience for my reasons why Outlook to Gmail via IMAP is not the answer and also since my Outlook usage is continuing to fade). So anyway I just received my invite for Xobni today and proceeded to load it up and let it loose on Outlook. My initial reaction is I like what Xobni is doing to improve email and so far no major problems. I really like the speed of the search capabilities although I wish I could get Google results vs. Yahoo. One area that still needs improved speed is when reading through email sequentially Xobni takes at least 10 secs. sometimes considerably longer to pull up information on the next person when I move from one email to the next. Not sure why the Xobni search box is so fast but moving from one email to the next is not.
In the meantime I will do additional testing of Xobni for Outlook but I'm really hoping for a Gmail version sooner rather than later. If you need an invite to Xobni I currently have 4 available so let me know by adding a comment with your email address.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Xobni Insight for Outlook Beta
Thursday, January 03, 2008
My Gmail IMAP experience
Well I have been testing the Gmail IMAP feature and so far Mozilla Thunderbird is the winner from the client side. First a little background I have roughly 79,000 pieces of mail in my Gmail account which takes about 1.6GB of storage.
In addition to Thunderbird I have also been using Outlook 2007 and MailStore. Well Outlook took forever to pull down my mail and in general Outlook is now so slow I'm going to have to remove the IMAP account for Gmail from my account list. In addition Outlook times out trying to pull updates from Gmail. Well MailStore has a similar problem it also times out and took over a day to pull in all my mail from Gmail. MailStore is also very slow to pull in new updates. Now the reason Thunderbird may be working well is the fact that Thunderbird does not pull in all the mail from my various folders until you click on the folder the first time. Also to be fair as far as being slow pulling in mail all 3 programs average about 300kbps so that would seem to be a Google or IMAP protocol issue since I can consistently access other sites at a sustained rate of well over 2Mbps on my 6Mbps DSL connection.
In case your wondering why I'm testing Gmail IMAP it's because I'm hooked on Gmail but wanted to have a backup in case Google happens to mess up my account, delete my Inbox etc.
