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If you're feeling guilty about how rarely you update your email contacts, you're not alone. There are loads of people just like you who would rather not waste time cutting and pasting contact information from emails into digital address books. Instead, they search through email messages for the most up-to-date information, like phone numbers or addresses.
But it's easy to delete or lose emails. Contacts in a digital address book are more permanent, and they synchronize with smartphones.
This week I tested Gwabbit (Gwabbit.com), a tool that automatically hunts through your emails as you receive them, finding contact information that can be captured -- 'gwabbed' -- and saved in your contacts. It starts on its own without prompting and uses pop-up notifications to tell you that a message has contact information you might want stored in your address book.
Gwabbit comes from Technicopia LLC and uses a pink Gwabbit Wabbit as its mascot, which adds a little whimsy to the dull task of saving contact information. Currently, it works only as a Microsoft Outlook plug-in, but Technicopia is working on a BlackBerry application that will come out at the end of May. Down the line, the company is planning products for the Mac and Web-based email services.
I started with the free version of Gwabbit, which lasts for 14 days or 20 Gwabbit uses, then upgraded to the paid version, which costs $20. Gwabbit's accuracy -- its ability to find the right information in an email and put it in the right field in an Outlook contact card -- was usually reliable. The product works by looking for symbols, like '@' to designate email addresses or parentheses to indicate phone numbers, as well as where information appears in a signature.
In most cases, Gwabbit took only a few seconds to work, per contact. It wasn't always perfect, but worked well enough to make me start saving a substantially larger number of Outlook contacts -- and it updated my contacts that had old, outdated information.
Gwabbit installs with a few annoying features turned on. If you're like me and you get a lot of emails from people you don't know, Gwabbit's notifications will pop up often, which could be irritating. If you turn the notifications off, you may not remember to use Gwabbit.
I found it irksome that Gwabbit installs its own promotion in every contact that it creates for you. If you used Gwabbit to make a contact card in Outlook, the notes field will be filled with an announcement that you used Gwabbit, including a Web link for the product -- even in the paid version. Technicopia says that it will eliminate this in the next paid version of Gwabbit, which is due out in about three weeks.
Competitors to Gwabbit include the built-in contact grab tools in email clients like Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail. But these programs don't automatically extract information from all email addresses the way Gwabbit does. Other third-party programs like Signature2Contacts don't pop up automatically when an email contains information that you don't have; instead, you must initiate extracting information.
When Gwabbit is downloaded and installed, it adds to Outlook its own toolbar, which can be hidden at will.
When Gwabbit's auto-grab feature is turned on, a small bubble appears in Outlook when any highlighted email has contact information that isn't saved in your address book -- including people whose signatures have changed since the last time you saved them. The Gwabbit bubble takes a few seconds to appear, which Technicopia says allows enough time for you to read an email. But if you're scrolling down a list of emails, this bubble will keep popping up for many different emails and can slightly slow down your ability to arrow down through the list.
When Gwabbit can't find signature information in an email, it creates a bare-bones contact card for the person, and then gives you the option of highlighting the person's signature block, from which to extract information for the contact card. In my experience, this problem occurred only a handful of times -- usually when looking at a recent email in a string of messages back and forth, because Gwabbit couldn't find someone's signature buried within the correspondence.
If a Gwabbit notification pops up and you don't want to save the contact information for the person who sent that email, you can hit an 'Ignore this Contact' option in the notification. This sets Gwabbit so it never tries to save that person's information again. If you want to save information but you're in the middle of doing something else when the notification pops up, you can hit the 'X' button in the notification bubble. This closes the notification but doesn't ignore the contact in the future.
Gwabbit seems like a simple tool, but its ability to find contact information that you don't already have -- or that differs from what you already have -- is a task that you aren't likely doing regularly. So stop feeling guilty about your contacts and just gwab them.
你可能因為很久沒有更新電子郵件通訊簿而感到內疚，但你不是唯一一個有這種感受的人。有很多人和你一樣，不想浪費時間把電子郵件中附帶的聯系方式剪切并復制到通訊簿上。相反，他們會從某人近期的電子郵件中查找最新聯絡信息，比如電話號碼和地址等。
然而，電子郵件很容易丟失或被刪除，而電子通訊簿更持久，并能同步到智能手機上去。
最近我測試了Gwabbit軟件(Gwabbit.com)，這是一個收到郵件后能在內容中自動找到相關的聯系方式，然后保存到通訊簿里的程序。它會自行啟動，并彈出一個通知窗口，告訴你這封郵件含有可以存到通訊簿里的聯絡信息。
Gwabbit是Technicopia LLC公司開發的，用一只粉紅色的“傻兔子”(Gwabbit Wabbit)作為吉祥物，這給單調無聊的信息保存功能帶來一點好玩的感覺。目前，該軟件只能作為微軟Outlook的插件，但Technicopia正在研制能在黑莓手機(BlackBerry)上使用的版本，預計于2009年5月底推出。隨后，公司計劃為蘋果電腦和基于互聯網的電子郵件服務開發相應的版本。
我最開始測試的是Gwabbit的免費版，可以試用14天或執行20次任務，然后就得更新到付費版本，費用是20美元。一般而言，Gwabbit的準確性－－即在電子郵件中找到正確信息并將其放入Outlook通訊簿相應位置的能力－－是很可靠的。該軟件通過尋找“@”字符來定位電子郵件地址，或尋找“括號”來定位電話號碼，以及尋找那些跟簽名在一起的信息。
在大多數情況下，Gwabbit每添加一次通訊簿只需幾秒鐘時間。它并非十全十美，但已足以給我的通訊簿里加上很多聯絡信息，而且還能更新原來那些老的、已經失效的聯系方式。
Gwabbit安裝后會開啟幾個不討人喜歡的功能。如果你像我一樣經常收到很多陌生人的來信，Gwabbit就會經常彈出通知窗口，讓人不厭其煩。但如果把通知功能關掉，就可能不記得使用Gwabbit。
讓我覺得不舒服的是，Gwabbit在每個創建的聯系方式中都插入自己的廣告。如果你用Gwabbit在Outlook中生成一個名片，備注欄上會有一個聲明，說你使用了Gwabbit軟件，還有一個產品網址－－即使用付費版本也一樣。Technicopia表示將在下一個付費版本中消除這些內容，大約還需三周時間就能推出。
Gwabbit的競爭對手包括微軟Outlook和蘋果電郵(Apple Mail)中內置的聯絡信息捕捉工具，但這些程序不像Gwabbit那樣能自動從所有郵件中提取信息。其他第三方軟件，如Signature2Contacts等，在郵件包含新聯系信息時不會自動彈出提醒窗口，你必須自己啟動信息提取功能。
下載并安裝Gwabbit后，它會在Outlook中加入自己的工具欄中，并可以選擇隱藏。
啟用Gwabbit的自動抓取功能后，如果收到一封內含新聯絡信息的郵件－－包括那些自上次保存在通訊簿后個人簽名又發生變化的聯系人－－就會在Outlook上出現一個小氣泡。Technicopia公司稱，Gwabbit的氣泡會過幾秒鐘才顯現出來，給你留下足夠的時間閱讀郵件。但如果你滾動打開一長列郵件，氣泡就會不斷出現，從而讓你快速瀏覽每封郵件的速度有所放緩。
當Gwabbit找不到一封郵件的簽名時，就會生成一張該發件人的空白名片，讓你選擇該人的簽名部位，從而提取聯絡信息。在我的測試中，只有幾次出現過這種情況－－通常是在閱讀一封多次往返的郵件時產生的，因為Gwabbit在那么多的往返內容中找不到正確的簽名部位。
如果Gwabbit彈出通知氣泡，而你不想保存發件人的聯絡信息，就可以點擊氣泡中的“忽略該人”選項，這樣Gwabbit以后就不會再提示保存此人的信息。如果你想保存信息但又在忙著做別的事情，就可以點擊通知氣泡的“X”按鍵，關閉通知但以后不會忽略該聯系人。
Gwabbit似乎是個簡單的工具，但它能找到你通訊簿中沒有的聯絡信息，或與現有內容不一致的信息，這是你自己難以定期做到的。因此，你不必再為不更新通訊簿而感到內疚了，用Gwabbit吧。
