Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research

Analytics for Personal Email

For the most popular internet application, email, there has been relatively few advances for the majority of users in recent years. Most of the advances have been behind the scenes using text mining and other techniques in anti-spam applications to reduce the volume of spam we get.

The other day our CTO suggested I might be interested in trying the Xobni application (inbox spelled backwards) to my outlook. He generally prefers not to add brand new applications, so I was intrigued. For someone who likes analytics, it’s quite a fun tool and rather useful too.

Xobni makes searching for email information faster than when done using the search function in outlook. Not only that but other benefits/statistics include:

• Tells you how quickly your individual contacts respond to you on average.
• Tells you how quickly you respond to your individual contacts on average
• Shows you the network (who this person has ever cc’d on emails)
• Lists all attachments you have received or sent a specific person
• Lists all conversations with a slider bar for more detail
• Charts showing what time you typically receive and send email (nice to know when someone is there)
• Ranks everyone in your outlook in terms of # emails received and sent
• Looks up persons telephone# from past emails
• Looks for persons picture in Linkedin
• Looks into your calendar and pulls your available times into emails when scheduling

Just a few of the things I learned about my own email include:

In 2008 so far I receive about 70 emails per week day, and send about 32 per day. Per month I send between 500 - 1100 emails from my outlook, I receive between 1,000 - 2,500 emails.

I’ve been using the tool for several weeks now, and highly recommend it.

Has anyone else used it or have suggestions for similar productivity tools?

-Tom