KARLA PORTER

Before you crit­i­cize me for not just using web based email, I love Out­look for a cou­ple of rea­sons to include con­tact man­age­ment. Ver­i­zon is my DSL provider but I have never used the email account that comes with it. I used to use Hot­mail until Gmail came around and I became a hard core con­vert. But, like many peo­ple, I have more than 1 email account and not all of them are POP so I can’t con­fig­ure Gmail to con­sol­i­date all of them. How­ever, Out­look does that for me very nicely and on my per­sonal lap­top that’s what I use. I have a vari­ety of accounts that down­load into it and I have no complaints.

Except that Microsoft didn’t build in an Out­look fea­ture to auto­mat­i­cally cap­ture con­tact infor­ma­tion pro­vided in sig­na­tures and con­vert it to a con­tact in the address book.

How silly of you Microsoft.

You have no idea (well, maybe you do), but I have super heavy email traf­fic and it all comes with a ton of con­tact info which is very time con­sum­ing to cut and paste into a con­tact card. Often, because I don’t have the time or desire, I end up sav­ing email in a folder just to keep the con­tact info. Then I have to go hunt for it when I need it. I needed help and I was painfully aware of it.

Last week­end I decided to stop pro­cras­ti­nat­ing and find a solu­tion. I did a Google search for Out­look sig­na­ture to con­tact con­verter (or some­thing like that) and came across a few dif­fer­ent pos­si­ble solu­tions like Con­tact­Copy, Sig­na­ture 2 Con­tacts and gwab­bit™.

gwab­bit won rab­bit ears down.… here’s why…

All 3 prod­ucts per­form the basic func­tion I was look­ing for, take sig­na­ture con­tact infor­ma­tion and con­vert it to a con­tact in my Out­look address book. So I spent a lit­tle time com­par­ing to see which one I should give a try.

Con­tact­Copy

• Cost $39.95 / 14 day free evaluation
• High­light the con­tact info, click a but­ton on the tool­bar it installs and a con­tact card opens with the fields pop­u­lated. Save and voilá.
• A slightly inter­est­ing fea­ture, you can click on an address and it opens a map in your browser. But, it’s not inter­est­ing enough.

Sig­na­ture 2 Contacts

• Cost $24.95 / Free trial but I couldn’t find where it said how long it is for #FAIL
• High­light con­tact infor­ma­tion found in open e-mails, pre­view panes, other Out­look items, web­sites, or other appli­ca­tions. Copy and click on Signature2Contacts and the con­tact data is inserted into the Address Book
• Ini­tially I was inter­ested because there is a “Sync2 with Google Gmail Con­tacts” fea­ture. I had dif­fi­cult time find­ing good infor­ma­tion about that on the site.
• Sorry, I gave up inves­ti­gat­ing because the web­site just wasn’t doing it for me. I’m using Fire­fox and it must be opti­mized for Inter­net Explorer. I admit to being too lazy to test my theory.

gwab­bit

• Cost $19.95 / Trial ver­sion 14 days, save up to 20 contacts
• Auto­mat­i­cally scans incom­ing Out­look emails, finds con­tacts, and instantly trans­forms them into con­tact records within your address book with a mouse click!
• Puts your con­tact fields away in their proper place in the address book and even checks your address book to see if you’ve already saved a con­tact pre­vi­ously before re-prompting you to “gwab” it again.

It seemed to be just the email con­tact magic I was look­ing for so, I down­loaded the trial ver­sion. It went smoothly so I decided to check out their Twit­ter and Face­book accounts to see what oth­ers were say­ing. This is really another advan­tage I appre­ci­ate as a con­sumer that the other prod­ucts do not offer. I saw happy peo­ple on the Face­book page and tweets from happy users. I left a Face­book com­ment about gwab­bit being bet­ter than sliced bread and sent a tweet of my own to let them and oth­ers know how I was lik­ing it. They were very quick to respond with acute friend­li­ness and cour­tesy ask­ing for feed­back on how they could make it even better.

Whoa.….… they were speak­ing my language.

I could go into the pars­ing tech­nol­ogy described on the web­site but you can go read that if you are really inclined to have to under­stand it. I am not. I am proud to be awed by the magic of it. When I click on an email and the lit­tle gwab­bit bunny pops up and asks if I want to save the con­tact info I just click yes and a con­tact card appears for me to review and add notes if I care to. I click save and voilá… it’s actu­ally fun!

There is some­thing else you need to know if you are a Black­Berry user like me. Black­Berry App World car­ries gwab­bit too! No more thumb­ing addresses and phone num­bers — WOOT! They offer a FREE and paid ver­sion that do the same func­tion with a lit­tle twist on the free one.

Can this get any better?

I wanted to buy the paid ver­sion because I was almost out of my 20 trial gwabs. There was just one thing left to know and truth­fully regard­less of the out­come I was going to buy it any­way. I had a ques­tion on using one license on two dif­fer­ent machines because I use Out­look at work too on another com­puter. My email to gwab­bit sup­port was promptly answered by Lau­rie Shaf­fer, every bit as pro­fes­sional, friendly and effi­cient as the prod­uct, brand and website.

Gwab your­self a copy for your Out­look or Black­Berry and be sure to observe “Talk like a gwab­bit day” the fifth Mon­day of every February.

Too cute!

Note: I was floored when I received the answer to my cus­tomer sup­port ques­tion along with a com­pli­men­tary prod­uct key, cour­tesy of Todd Miller for being such a huge fan.  Trust me for all the time it saves, gwab­bit would have received this prod­uct review any­way. The rest of this is CYA because it’s always bet­ter to be safe than sorry:

© 2010 gwab­bit, LLC. The gwab­bit logo is a trade­mark of gwab­bit, LLC. The gwab­bit word mark is a reg­is­tered trade­mark of gwab­bit, LLC.
Microsoft Out­look is a reg­is­tered trade­mark of Microsoft cor­po­ra­tion in the United States and/or other coun­tries.
The Trade­mark Black­Berry is owned by Research In Motion Lim­ited and is reg­is­tered in the United States and may be pend­ing or reg­is­tered in other coun­tries. gwab­bit, LLC is not endorsed, spon­sored, affil­i­ated with or oth­er­wise autho­rized by Research In Motion Limited.