Every once in a while something comes along that you just know will not be a flash in the pan and this - for sure - falls into that category.

Xobni is an add-in for Microsoft Outlook that is amazing. It indexes all your email and displays relevant, contextual information in the Xobni bar no matter what you are doing be it messing with your mail, calendar, tasks, contacts, whatever.

Already with Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 it's hardly necessary to file messages into folders as the native search in Vista is so powerful but this takes it to the next level. Now you can see stuff like how many messages you have sent to a particular person, what dime of day you usually correspond, your recent correspondence, what attachments you have sent back and forth (I LOVE this feature, no more hunting for messages to find attachments!) and much, much more.

And the best thing? It's so intuitive to use! I had almost no learning curve and was able to just reap the benefits. Gotta love that. Nothing worse than some obscure tool for power users only. Except for that power user obviously but hey, it's never going to get much traction if it's insanely complicated.

I heard that as soon as Microsoft saw this they began to incorporate all of the features into the next version of Office. Duh...