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Software Improving Outlook

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The New York Times

Published: May 5, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO - Adam Smith was 12 when Microsoft introduced its desktop e-mail program, Outlook.

Outlook is now the most popular e-mail tool in the world, used by hundreds of millions of people. And Smith, 23, thinks the program is so poorly suited to most people's intensive e-mail habits that he has a co-founded a company, Xobni, intended to fix it.

"Using Outlook today is like taking a Volkswagen Beetle into space," Smith said. "People are kind of exerting all these stresses upon it that it wasn't originally designed to withstand."

Xobni, based in San Francisco, is introducing a new tool today that plugs into Outlook. Smith's general complaint - one that is shared by many users of Outlook - is that the more the program is used, the slower it gets and the harder it is to search for e-mail addresses and phone numbers.

To solve these problems, Xobni ("inbox" spelled backward and pronounced zob-nee) has produced free downloadable software that, once installed, indexes all the e-mail in Outlook and makes those messages quickly and easily searchable.

The software, available at www.xobni.com, also will be sold to companies.

Programs such as Google Desktop already perform the same basic index-and-search function.

But Xobni, which its creators call an "intelligent filter," adds more features. When it scours the inbox, it extracts phone numbers it thinks are associated with the sender.

So when a user searches for a person, Xobni presents the number in a side panel to Outlook.

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