Xobni vs. Gist- E-mail Indexing

This is pretty much the heart of these products.  Both pretty much do the exact same thing, but they do it well. 

Just like a search engine would, they scan ALL of your emails, look at every "To" and "From" line, and creates contact entries for those that are not already in your Address Book.

Xobni only scans the messages in either Outlook or your Blackberry.

Gist will scan any inbox that has IMAP access, Outlook (with a plug-in), GMail, and Hosted Gmail Web Domains (ie- Google Apps).  [However, as of this writing, my Gmail Hosted App Email has not sync'ed and it would appear as though there is a known issue they are working on.]

That's right.  Every email address associated with a newsletter, online order confirmation, e-mail support requests, autoresponder, etc.... becomes a contact. 

• I don't need a contact for everyone who replies to a mailing list I subscribe to.
• I don't need a contact entry for that support or warranty email I sent out and only have for record keeping. 
• I don't need a contact entry for that confirmation email of that website I signed up for.
• I don't need a contact created for any online purchase receipts. 

After they finished indexing my account, my contact list went from somewhere in the mid-300s to over 1000.  As you can imagine, I was extremely grateful that these contacts WERE NOT consolidated into my local address book, or else it'd take forever to clean up.

Um, sorry.  I've got a huge problem with that.  I didn't like it when Google did it, and I would've hoped that companies would've learned that we don't like it now. 

[Sidebar- I keep one or two of these emails for purposes that I choose not to discuss or make public.]

The only positive side to the indexing of the emails is that if you have a contact that is missing information, and they have an email signature, both of these services will pull that information out of the email and add it to the contact entry automatically.  That...I think is cool.  I like that, so you can keep that in.

Then, these services take all those emails, and see who you've communicated with the most frequently and the most recently.  They then take that information and prioritize those contacts for you.  While this is a nice automated process from both, I do like the fact that Gist will allow me to manually change those priorities as well as modify who to watch for changes, and whom not to.

Winner: Gist

• Address Book Integration
• Desktop Access
• Mobile