If you’ve been following my blog, you may remember a piece that I wrote on a great piece of freeware called Xobni. The program is an addon for MS Outlook and makes finding emails much more efficient.  Since I first started using Xobni, another email addon has started gaining popularity, Xoopit.

While Xobni is great for users of Outlook, Xoopit is designed with millions of Gmail users in mind. The service adds a toolbar to the top of your Gmail inbox that lets you search your inbox for photos, videos, and files with the click of a button. Xoopit will also show you which people send you the most items in their emails.

The major concern with Xoopit is that you have to supply them with your email login information which causes concern for many people. I’m sure that the serivce is fully secure, but I still wouldn’t feel comfortable using it on an extremely important email account. If you’ve got a personal account or aren’t concerned by the security risks, it’s a fun email service to try out!

If you prefer Mozilla’s Firefox 3 brower to Internet Explorer, you are probably familiar with some of the many add-ins and extensions offered for the program. Mozilla recently finished up its Extend Firefox 3 contest and annouced the winning programs.

Three add-ins were awarded the grand prize. The first winner was Pencil, a tool for GUI prototyping and diagramming. The program is not likely to be very useful for most users, but it is a great tool for anyone needing to create a GUI prototype in short order.

The second winner was an addon called Tagmarks. The program adds a set of icons to your toolbar that makes it easy to create tags in your bookmarks. Tagmarks also allows you to save pages to your delicious bookmarks, as well as your  local ones.

The final grand prize winner was HandyTag. This little tool will automatically suggest tags for your bookmarks based on tags suggested by delicious users and through the use of its internal keyword extractor.

Given the popularity of the many web 2.0 sites, the fact that two of the three winners are tagging utilities is not a big suprise. There are many other useful addon programs for FireFox, so be sure to explore and have fun.