IT PRO: Blogs: Nicole Kobie: Xonbi has renamed me

Home

Nicole Kobie's Blog

Xonbi has renamed me

Posted in Uncategorized on July 28, 2008 at 1:22 pm

Xobni is a handy and free plug-in that helps make sense of your Outlook — and given my complete lack of email management, this is useful for me when it comes to, y’know, finding stuff that was sent to me before, say, today by someone whose name may or may not start with an ‘H’.

(We can’t all be like PC PRO’s Tim Danton when it comes to reading and then deleting things as they come in…that just blows my tiny mind.)

I downloaded Xobni after our Tech Editor Benny told me to (don’t worry, I don’t do everything he says, and take great joy in not ‘fixing’ the resolution of my monitor) and have loved it ever since. Not only does it search emails in a useful way, it does it quickly, too — something Outlook doesn’t seem to manage. And, it offers up intriguing statistics about who you email the most, and names who’s the most likely to reply, and who’s your top ranking contact.

But it has inexplicably renamed me. Apparently this identity crisis a fairly common error, where Xobni mixes you up with one of your contacts, but the name I’ve been given — “Chris Abbott” — wasn’t even showing up in my inbox. (Turns out, he once posted a comment on this blog, and I got emailed about it ages ago, which has since been archived. Exciting, eh?)

It’s not a huge deal, as it doesn’t show up in Outlook or show up in outgoing emails (it doesn’t for me, at least) and it’s apparently been fixed in an update released today. But it sure is confusing to see this:

… when it is indeed not you. Especially on a Monday morning, before you’ve had a cup of tea… It’s one thing to forget who exactly sent you that email two weeks ago, but it’s generally best to keep your own name straight.