Thanks to Ken from ipadventures who sent me an invitation, I have been trying out an add-on to Outlook called Xobni, which is inbox backwards and pronounced Zob-Nee. What Xobni does is provide you with additional information about the email you are currently looking at based on the analysis of all of the emails you have, irrespective of what private folders you may have filed them away in. The analysis of your emails uncovers the vast social network that exists within these stored documents, and I am finding it provides a different and easy way to find things that my nested folder structure is supposed to help with but never seems to. It provides quick access to other people who are currently or have been in emails that have been sent by the person. It displays previous conversations, linking email threads together, it provides a list of attachments, extracts phone numbers from within emails and even gives a graph of the time of day for conversations. The downside of it is that Outlook takes longer to start up. This is not too much of a concern as I have that running most of the time anyway. It also takes more storage for index files which is currently less the 100 MB for me at the moment.

I note that yesterday the Xobni folks opened up the beta to anyone so there is no need for an invitation anymore. I think this is an add-on that is worth looking into if your filing system of archived emails gives you trouble or if you just like to see what your email social network looks like.