I would like to take issue with this quote, “It provides functionality that Outlook should deliver natively, and does so without affecting the e-mail client’s performance.” I have been trying to use Xobni for quite sometime now with a lot of difficulty because, it has so adversely affected my Outlook performance. Many of my co-workers tried Xobni too because we get an enormous amount of emails a day and the functionality that you are trying to provide is so desired by all Outlook users. All of my co-workers have had to uninstall the product because it has slowed their outlook down so much. I am the last hold out and maybe that is because I am so desperately in need of more Outlook functionality, or maybe it’s just because I’m stubborn, but it’s not working. I’m actually writing this post because I clicked on a Xobni button to show more emails than the initial list and it has hijacked my Outlook for the last 25 minutes. I’d just kill outlook but I’m afraid of corrupting a pst file. I’ve contacted your support about this but they always reply with an email that says something along the lines of, “We don’t believe that is a real problem and thank you for using Xobni, the newest best software ever.” I realize that the product is free and I’m not expecting much from your support in the way of speed, but I would expect them to be generally interested in information that might help your organization improve you product. Your product is a great idea, but the execution seems like it is leaving a lot to be desired.

Alex ladd, on June 5th, 2008 at 9:03 am

Alex, we take and use feedback from any of our users that are having problems. Xobni isn’t perfect, and we would never claim that is. As you can expect with desktop software, there are a lot of different configurations of Outlook, Windows, etc and some user’s computers respond to Xobni better than others. It sounds like your team has some unique conditions that lead Xobni to act up. We are working on making Xobni work for all Outlook users. However, there are thousands of people happily using Xobni on a daily basis and that makes us feel good.

Matt, on June 5th, 2008 at 2:12 pm

I also tried xobni and like its features. However, I too had significant performance issues. I am running a high end new Dell laptop with 4g of RAM, Vista Enterprise, and Office 2007 Professional. Xobni often slowed Outlook to a crawl. I finally had to uninstall it. I believe the problem may be the shear size of the index file.

At any rate, I like the product and it has tremendous potential but only if the performance issue can be addressed.

Barrett L. Mosbacker, on June 5th, 2008 at 9:20 pm

Me too man. I pulled the plug on Xobni. Its a neat concept with a tremendous value to someone like me that deals with lot of emails. But unfortunately it was choking my outlook.

Hopefully one day it is more usable.

Upsi, on June 6th, 2008 at 11:02 am

I love the idea but I am also having performance issues at times. I will keep it installed and hope for an update because it works very well most of the time.

Andrew, on June 6th, 2008 at 4:17 pm

Hey guys,

I hear your pain with respect to Xobni’s performance on some machines. We have a dedicated 3 person QA team focused on finding and fixing the performance issues that occur when Xobni is used with certain configurations of Outlook and other window’s software. We are punching through these issues along with reducing the total resource consumption of our application. Each version gets better and we will never stop improving Xobni because we think the problem of email overload is an important problem to be working on.

Cheers,
Matt
co-founder, Xobni

Matt Brezina, on June 9th, 2008 at 2:13 pm

I had similar performance issues. Running XP and Outlook 2003 on a Dell D620 with dual core 1.6 GHz processors and 1GB RAM.

Without Xobni the OUTLOOK.EXE process consumes around 4MB, but with Xobni that number climbs to – I kid you not – 100MB. Outlook startup and shutdown times are drastically increased, as is the time taken to even open a Reply window.

That’s too big a performance hit for me to ignore.

- Dimer

Dimer Jhol, on June 10th, 2008 at 1:31 am

Hi,

I have a large email collection, which, including my PST files, comes to (according to the xobni about stats):

85,059 emails; 237 Folders; 10601 People

the Xobni index folder is around 1GB and the Xobni memory usage is 281.67MB

Build is 3843 V1.2.3

I like the features in Xobni, but I suspect I may have to uninstall as the performance in Outlook is not great since installing.

Do you have any figures for the scalability testing you have done? did you reach the sizes above?

Would sending my log file help in your general QA? I am not too bothered about a specific fix for me. Let me know if it will help.

PS it is a real pain to have xobni default to C: for it’s index files. I think in general, the ‘options’ dialog for xobni needs maybe an ‘advanced’ mode which can be used to tweak various options and settings.

Keep plugging away. Great idea. Hope you guys make good when MS eventually buys you up!!

Alec Kemp, on June 12th, 2008 at 2:00 pm

Me and my co-workers have installed xobni and so far its been prefect for me, I havent noticed a performance issuse and I end up using the attachment search function on every sales call i make. Some of my co-workers have had a few issues but no more than you would expect with a beta.

FazMan, on June 12th, 2008 at 5:45 pm

I use Xobni 1.2.3 build 3842 in exchange mode (non-cached) on a big mailbox (71653 mails)- apart from start up it is lightening fast (far faster than windows search on XP) and has revolutionised my email usage.

Thanks very much

Ron, on June 13th, 2008 at 11:22 am

FYI, I’ve been using Xobni for over a month now, and haven’t noticed any performance hits, on my standard config (2GB) ThinkPad R52.

Exchange 2003, Outlook 2007 (cached Exchange mode), Mail: 17867, Folders: 1029, People: 2353, Xobni Memory Usage: 17.70 MB

Ron M, on June 16th, 2008 at 2:34 pm

I’ve been using XOBNI for a week on a Dell laptop w/2GB’s RAM and XP will all the patches, and have not encountered any significant performance issues. The product is amazing and I’m telling everyone to try this out. Feature-wise you have hit a big mark in adding core functionality that all the Kings’ Horse’s and Men of MS didn’t bring to market. So Bravo.

As to performance, I’ll let you know if it becomes an issue. For now, it’s not. So go help those other guys!

8string, on June 18th, 2008 at 2:46 am

I was struggling with my desktop cum mail search tool and was looking for an alternative. That is when my colleague introduced me to this amazing dynamite of a software called Xobni.

It digs through the mailbox in a flash. Also, has pretty cool features.

I am loving the experience and also giving it as much publicity as possible.

Sunish, on June 19th, 2008 at 1:29 pm

I love the search fom Xobni, but the performance hit to Outlook is pretty significant. It seems like it locks up while it reads from the disk as I open or delete messages. I receive log emails from applications we develop in my email, so it isn’t uncommon for me to get 15,000 messages a day and I suspect this is causing it some difficulty.

I have 4GB RAM on my machine, so swapping shouldn’t be an issue.

I haven’t dumped it because I really do like the search and the list of attachments.

Loren, on June 26th, 2008 at 4:11 pm

What a great tool!!! I *LOVE* Xobni!!!

Unfortunately, I’m going to have to uninstall it due to the significant performance issues it has introduced with the startup and shut down of of MS Outlook. I run Outlook on a Dell D620 with 1GB RAM, Outlook 2003, and a fully up-to-date Win NT. My Outlook with Xobni consumes 204,476 MB RAM. Without it, Outlook consumes approximately 40 MB. This morning, I was in a meeting, and had to open Outlook to pull up an email for the project team to read. Outlook took over 10 minutes to open to a point where I could get to the message. Outlook was non-responsive the entire time, and I couldn’t get it off my screen.

Once Outlook is up and running, the hit isn’t too bad, though the responsiveness is sluggish compared to running Outlook without Xobni. It’s a fair price I’m willing to pay most of the time for the great features and reporting.

I’ll keep an eye on Xobni to see if the performance improves. When it does, you can definitely count on me to install the latest version!

Mike, on August 14th, 2008 at 10:26 am

i love xobni. my only complaint is that my company requires that I archive mail frequently, and teh indexes don’t seem to get updated, so after I archive, teh xobni datamart knows about the email, but it can no longer find the email…even if I re-index. Any suggestions?
thx

Richard, on September 3rd, 2008 at 8:29 am

I love this product. I had to uninstall it though because it kept locking up Outlook. I was running Outlook 2003, XP Pro, 1GB Ram. It simply made Outlook impossible to use because Reply and Forward would freeze Outlook in its tracks.

Corey, on September 10th, 2008 at 5:08 pm

I’ll add myself to the increasing list of users who love your product, but can’t use it because of performance reasons. Clearly, your functionality is great. At this point you should dedicate most of your resources to addressing the performance issues.

Personally, I don’t care about all the statistics. I just like the intuitive, and friendly search features. If I had an option to disable the stats, and it made it work faster, that would be great. Good luck!

JPK, on October 14th, 2008 at 10:14 am

Also, I’d really like to have an easy way to disable Xobni, without uninstalling it. So that if I needed fast response time, I could turn it off, and just use Outlook. When performance wasn’t an issue, I could turn Xobni back on.

Would also be nice if there was an easy and/or automatic way to keep it updated, so I always had the latest version. Thank you.

JPK, on October 14th, 2008 at 10:21 am

I’ll add that I uninstalled Xobni many, many months ago due to the same perf issues people are describing here. Today, I’ve download and reinstalled it. The need for better email management is just too grand and Xobni is free and it has a nice interface. Hopefully the performance will be better than it was back in early 2008…

Todd, on February 11th, 2009 at 4:11 pm

JPK,
You can disable the Xobni plugin by opening the Outlook Options dialog. go to the Other tab and click the Advanced Options button. In the Advanced Options dialog, click the Add-In Manager button and uncheck XobniRdo.

The version I installed is very recent and I have no experienced any performance issues. My PST is large and is stored on a network share in another state 800 miles away. You would think that would pose a problem, but after the initial indexing, everything is working fine. Memory usage is stable, between 20-40 MB.

Now if only I could gray out some of the features for my enterprise users…

Geno, on April 17th, 2009 at 3:41 pm

I’ve tried to use Xobni on and off for months, and I can vouch that it is, indeed, a resource hog. I’ve tried in on 3 machines – an XP with 2 GB RAM, a Vista with 4 GB RAM and an XP with 3.5 GB RAM, and *in all 3 cases* it slowed Outlook **and** other programs to a crawl, especially with starting up.

I’ve been doing what JPK did – disabling Xobni when I needed performance, and re-enabling it when I didn’t mind if Outlook took 20 minutes to start.

I agree that it’s a good tool to have, but until its resource problems are ironed out, it’s not worth installing. I too will add myself to the list of users who like the product, but I cannot use it because of performance reasons. Xobni should address the performance issues asap.

John, on August 27th, 2009 at 11:05 pm

I am using Xobni for the 4th time across various win xp and Win 7 machines. for both personal and official use. In all of these instances, i have found that it severely kills the performance of Outlook 2007 and it takes a good 2-3 min before i get control back just trying to reply or a new email. I have Win XP SP3 with 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD on Dell Latitude D520 for about a month now. I uninstalled it and my Outlook performed much better and relieved that it returned back to normal productivity. Xobni, this definitely needs to be fixed.

Rahul, on February 23rd, 2010 at 4:07 pm