Gwabbit, Xobni add-ons work nicely with Microsoft Outlook

— -- Lots of us depend on Microsoft's venerable Outlook for e-mail and contacts. And after all these years, there's still plenty of ways it can improve. Just try to dig up an old e-mail with Outlook's primitive search tool.

At least Microsoft has encouraged a cottage industry for third-party Outlook add-ons that can help. I've been testing two handy ones — Gwabbit from Technicopia in Carmel Valley, Calif., and Xobni from a San Francisco start-up of the same name.

Gwabbit, which I first saw at the Demo tech conference last month, provides a simple way to add contacts to your Outlook address book using information pulled from incoming e-mails.

Xobni was unveiled in September 2007 at the TechCrunch conference. But the versatile plug-in ("in-box" spelled backward) just shed its beta label at the end of March. Xobni's most appealing function is to provide an easy way to sift through your Outlook in-box so you can rapidly find people, conversations and file attachments.

A closer look at these potentially helpful tools:

Gwabbit: Look, Ma, no typing

Typing contact information into your Outlook address book is tedious — all of those phone numbers, company names, job titles and such. Gwabbit automates that drill — within limitations — so contacts can get added whenever you receive e-mail from a new person. Because of the time it saves, Gwabbit is worth the one-time $20 fee, which kicks in after a 14-day free trial. It will soon cost $10 to load Gwabbit on a second PC.

Gwabbit lifts — or "gwabs" — data from the "signature" or text block in an e-mail, assuming there is one. A Gwabbit alert pop ups about 3 seconds after you open a message. Inside is a button you click to automatically populate the new contact fields in Outlook. You can ignore a contact, too.

Gwabbit claims to get it right about 80% of the time. It uses character recognition (knowing the @ is part of an e-mail address) and mathematical probabilities (the job title usually comes after the contact's name but before the company's name). Gwabbit invites feedback to bolster the results.