I have just been introduced to a really useful tool that has helped stop me from drowning in email.  xobni creates a sidebar on your Microsoft Outlook screen, where a wealth of information is displayed for every email that arrives.

Xobni is a San Francisco, California based startup that is revolutionizing the way people manage email relationships.  The name Xobni, which is the word "inbox" spelled backwards, is an affirmation of our mission: to "take back" the email inbox for our users.

After a quick install, you’ll see the new Xobni toolbar appear in Outlook – and suddenly information will become much easier to find.  When a new email arrives, the sender’s full communication history appears in the Xobni sidebar, including past conversations, attachments and contact details. Xobni also includes a blazing fast email search tool.

Email analytics.

Rankings, graphs, and statistics detailing how you and your contacts use email

Web services integration.

Use information from the web to learn more about your contacts.
I links to LinkedIn an Facebook.

Hello, threaded conversations.

Email how it was meant to be read, with conversations in context. This is a really helpful aspect of the tool as it makes email threads easier to read.

Phone numbers extracted from emails. 

This  automatically extracts a contact’s phone number from their signature. No more searching. It’s just right there in the sidebar:
And if you have Skype, you can just click to call.

I’m sold – oh and it’s free!