Getting started is straightforward: Download and install the plugin (versions available for both Windows and Mac) and give it your Gmail account credentials (which are only stored locally on your machine, as it’s not a web app). It uses IMAP to connect to your Gmail and Google Apps accounts; once connected, it trawls through your emails looking for contacts and attachments. As soon as it’s finished indexing your emails, you’re ready to go.

MailBrowser sits as a sidebar in your browser that you can expand or collapse as needed, and sports two main tabs: “Contacts” and “Files.” By default, it opens on the “Contacts” tab, displaying an alphabetized list. If, like me, your list of contacts is long and unwieldy, the built-in search functionality is useful. Clicking on a contact’s name gives you a more detailed view, with a photo (if available), URLs, a bio and any recent conversations. You can add tags and notes, “star” important contacts and create Google Calendar events for a contact right from the interface.

The “Files” tab displays a list of files you’ve received, with rich previews available, enabling you to skim through them quickly to find the files you need. The search functionality also works well with attachments.

MailBrowser is currently in beta so you may find some gremlins (I had some problems importing mail from one of my older Gmail accounts, for example), but it’s nonetheless a useful plugin that adds better contact management capabilities to the Google mail service. While it doesn’t yet have the power of tools like Xobni and Gist, it’s a great platform to build on, and Webyog’s Rohit Nadhani says that there are plans for many more Xobni-like features in MailBrowser, including social media integration, integration with enterprise apps (like Salesforce) and the ability to sort contacts by importance.

Have you tried MailBrowser? let us know what you think of it, and how it compares to tools like Xobni and Gist, below.

The other new feature that most people might have missed in a previous update (I know I did) is the ability to access each contact’s Twitter account information. This was also a very popular request from Xobni’s userbase who’ve previously been able to access their contacts’ Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Adding Twitter and SalesForce connectivity to your address book makes a great deal of sense.

Here’s an example of what the Xobni panel displays next to your email message. Not only will you see the usual information such as phone numbers, email addresses and threaded email conversations, but now you can actually view that contact’s Twitter stream (once you connect the right Twitter account, based on the email address used). Notice how you can actually send a tweet right from Xobni as well as unfollow the contact and view their Twitter profile for even more information.

Personally, I love this hot trend of infusing intelligence into our otherwise under-utilized address books. Services such as Xobni, Gist and the one that started it all, Plaxo, are providing tremendous value by allowing us to get more from our contacts. It’s baffling to me that Google has not done much with contacts in Gmail. Things will become even more interesting when (not if) Google finally adds social networking power to its address book.

Do you use Xobni?

The iPhone does have Spotlight search already built-in, but Spotlight has a limitation. It can only search what is stored on your phone. For an email account, this means that it can only search a couple hundred messages, not the account’s entire archives. And how often is the email you are searching for one of the most recent two hundred? In my case, the answer is rarely.

reMail works by connecting to your Gmail or other IMAP-enabled email account. It downloads the entire archives of the account onto your phone, making it searchable in the app. reMail suggests leaving your phone on a WiFi connection overnight to download mail the first time. I was impressed it recognized my Google Apps email address as a Gmail account and connected to it without a problem via the app’s Gmail protocol. In my experience, other applications can’t always do that (including Google’s own). reMail currently only supports usage with one email account.

Unlike Spotlight, which only searches headers and titles, an email’s entire content is searchable in reMail. The app also allows for more advanced searches than Spotlight does. For instance, exclusion searches are possible, as well as “OR” searches, and searches limited to terms in only an email’s header or body (header:term, for instance). Auto-complete suggestions are made as you type your search.

Once an email has been located, it can be replied to or forwarded using the app’s email client.

One aspect of reMail is its greatest asset and its greatest weakness at the same time. Because the app downloads the entire archives of an email account onto the iPhone for archiving, searches are faster than using similar tools such as Gmail’s search, especially if you don’t have a 3G connection. Searches can even be done offline, when roaming, or when on an airplane, to reference material.

But at the same time, large email archives take up storage room on an iPhone that the user may wish to devote to other things. My relatively small archive of 6800 messages took up 26.9MB. reMail says that as a rule of thumb to estimate it will use 5MB of storage for every 1000 emails, which is fairly in line with my usage.

Xobni includes advanced email search as part of a suite of features that integrates search of contacts, calendar items and tasks, and integration of social media profiles with contact listings. Could this be the future of reMail on the iPhone? I’d say that’s unlikely, given Spotlight and Apple’s history of rejecting apps that duplicate functionality it already provides.

reMail is a powerful search tool. If you need to frequently search your email archives for reference material and have the storage space to devote to it, reMail might be a time-saving tool for you. But if your archives are massive it may leave you pinched for space on your iPhone.

How often do you search your email archives? Is power search capability worth giving up iPhone storage space?

We’ve previouslycovered the impressive Microsoft Outlook add-on Xobni. The company behind it has just released a new premium edition of the product called, appropriately enough, Xobni Plus, available for a one-time fee of $29.95. There are a number of productivity-boosting features that are exclusive to the new edition.

Social Inbox

Xobni Plus reveals a great deal about your contacts, and provides instant access to their profiles on some of the most popular social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. This can really come in handy when trying to connect with a new colleague, partner or customer.

I like how these services are integrated with the Xobni interface; with one click you can either add them as a contact on the service or go to the site for more information. The exciting part is that Xobni is continuing to add more popular services, such as Skype.

Another feature that I like is the integrated Google search box; it’s very useful for instant access to a Google search for that particular contact.

I must admit that it’s impressive how many useful features Xobni was able to cram into such tiny screen real estate without making it look too cluttered.

SmartMail

Xobni Plus includes some interesting new options that give Microsoft Outlook some much-needed smarts. For example, right out of the gate you’ll notice the much-improved autocompletion feature while filling out the “to” field for a new email message. Outlook is extremely feeble-minded when it comes to filling that address out, seemingly only supplying the most recent of most-used email addresses. Xobni Plus provides a boatload of names to choose from thanks to its powerful new search engine, which indexes all contacts, including those only found in the “cc:” field. Another useful time-saver is the way it can find an email address just by typing a part of an address, such as the company name.

These are all features that Outlook should have built in by now. Over the course of a few days, these seemingly small time-savers made a big difference to my productivity.

Search and Rescue

Also available in the Plus edition is a souped-up search feature. You can not only search for contacts but also any keyword or phrases in the subject and message body. There’s also an advanced search query builder for ultra-detailed searches.

There’s also the very handy ability to search and filter within threaded conversations and within each contact’s network, which would allow you to look for that colleague of one of your contacts that you have forgotten the name of, for example.

The Bottom Line

Here are some other benefits that come with the Plus edition:

• One year of tech support
• No ads
• Multiple .PST file search

The free version of Xobni is very useful and might be sufficient for many people’s needs. However, for power email users, Xobni Plus offers more than enough features to warrant the one-time expense of $29.95 (with a charge of $9.95 for each additional computer you want to use it on).

If you’re a Xobni user, will you be upgrading to Plus?

As well as dropping the beta tag, the latest version concentrates on performance improvements. According to Xobni, Outlook now starts 31 percent faster, while Xobni itself loads 42 percent faster. Users with large inboxes should notice even greater benefits. You can also now choose not to start Xobni until you need it.

Xobni is a free download, although the company is working on a premium service due to launch this summer.

Do you use Xobni?

I’ve detailed my week with Xobni experience in the past and continue to find Xobni a nice addition to my Outlook experience. Recently they added LinkedIn integration and today they are announcing a whole slew of additional connections.

In this latest release, Xobni brings integration with Yahoo! Mail, Facebook, Hoovers and greatly enhanced Skype functionality.

Each of these services is opt-in and are neatly integrated into the Xobni Sidebar upon activation.

The capabilities introduced vary but highlights include:

Yahoo!Mail : Message previews are availabe from within Outlook and are fully searchable using Xobni. Contacts and attachments from your Yahoo! Mail accounts appear in the Xobni sidebar.

Facebook: View status messages, profile pictures and other recent updates your contacts have made via Facebook

Skype: Big improvements here as you can now view status, send messages and initiate Skype to Skype calls all from the Xobni sidebar.

Hoovers: Pulls company information like description and size based upon the email domain of your contacts.

I am seeing a big increase in the number of aggregators and universal inbox applications like Gist, which seeks out more information about your contacts, or Fuser which brings all of your communications together in one place.

As we connect with people through so many various channels, having a way to tie these communications together and connected to your contacts is becoming more critical. If you’re an Outlook user, these Xobni improvements look to be a step in the right direction.

Xobni is a free download and is available for computers running Windows and Microsoft Outlook 2003 / 2007

Can tools like Xobni turn Outlook into the ultimate communication interface?

After a long private beta period, the much anticipated Xobni plug-in for Microsoft Office finally went mainstream last week as they opened up the offering to the general public. Press has seemingly always been good to Xobni, they are a favorite of our parent site GigaOm, and their announcement elicited a lot of buzz, including here on WWD.

With all the attention the product was getting, and the promise of “a whole new look at your email” I couldn’t resist giving it a thorough look to see how well it lived up to the hype.

Installation and set up of Xobni was quick and easy. The download was painless with not even an email address required. The installer did alert me that because I connect to my mail via IMAP indexing of my recent items might take a while, and indeed it did take about an hour. The fact that it broke down the set up and indexing into stages was nice though. It let me get started with the product as quickly as possible while it worked on creating a full index at a later time.

The indexing is critical as that is what powers the search, and the Xobni search really shines. The filtering is nearly instantaneous as you type, and the display provides contextual cues as to where your search term appears. I give them really high marks how well they did on this front.

The search box is front and center on the sidebar but it is also filled with a lot of useful information that changes based upon the email that you have selected. It creates a dashboard of sorts for that person, displaying a phone number from their contact card or pulled from the email. It also displays other email conversations (threaded ala Gmail) while another box collects and displays any files you have exchanged.

Particularly handy is the ability to further define your search criteria once you are within a user profile. For example to find specific words within a conversation between you and another party. Again, the filtering is lightning fast.

The social networking aspect of Xobni is getting a lot of attention and indeed Xobni shows you who else a person has emailed and any commonalities that it can determine between you. It’s an interesting take on connecting folks, although I didn’t discover anything earth shattering. I think an eventual hook into other social services like Twitter could enhance this further.

Xobni also offers a time scheduling function where it will automatically extract free time from you calendar and submit some proposed meeting times to your chosen contact. It’s a nice feature if you fully populate your calendar but it would seem that most schedules would require a bit of tweaking before sending.

One of the things that I really like about Xobni is that is useful without being obtrusive. It provides additional, useful functionality without taking over or requiring a change in the way that you work. It’s just there when you need it. The sidebar can take up a bit of screen real estate, especially in Outlook 2007 if you have the To-Do Bar visible, but it can be minimized and tucked out of the way.

I’m not a heavy Outlook user as my mail and calendaring is all done through Google Apps, but I do sync mail via IMAP and find the sorting and grouping features in Outlook to be really useful. The addition of Xobni isn’t going to make me give up my Gmail, but it does make Outlook infinitely more usable, and after just a week I can’t imagine trying to search for anything without it.

At one point, a message at the bottom of the sidebar asked me if I was happy and gave me the opportunity to give them feedback. I didn’t take advantage of it then but hopefully they’ll read this and see what a good job I think they have done so far.

Xobni is currently in beta and runs on both XP and Vista in conjunction with Office versions 2003 and 2007. Their site indicates that support for XP Service Pack 3 is forthcoming but they currently recommend sticking with SP2 if you are running Xobni.

Are you stuck with Outlook? Do you think Xobni could help you use it more productively?