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Mining Email for Contacts

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 01:00:02 +0000

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.

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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to make me start saving a substantially larger number of Outlook contacts — and it updated my contacts that had old, outdated information.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 (MSFT) and Apple Mail (AAPL). 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.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

Helping Your Data Decamp to a Mac

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:52:02 +0000

With the holidays fast approaching, plenty of shoppers are heading toward their local Apple stores with plans to buy a new home computer. Amid all this excitement, it’s worth taking time to consider how to transfer content from the old Windows PC to a shiny new Mac.

Apple (AAPL) has promoted this PC-to-Mac switching concept heavily over recent years — particularly with its “I’m a Mac” commercials, which bluntly compare the Windows and Mac operating systems. Windows Vista has been a source of consternation all its own, and some people have opted for the Mac rather than risking problems with a Vista PC. Apple recently reported that about 50% of the people buying Macs in the Apple stores are new to the Mac.

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If you buy a new Mac from the Apple store, staffers there (”Geniuses,” as they call themselves) will transfer your files over to the new machine free. This process takes place in the store, though Apple says it generally isn’t a “while you wait” task. If you buy a Mac elsewhere, such as online or at Best Buy (BBY), Apple stores charge $50 for this transfer.

But some people aren’t comfortable with the idea of handing a computer filled with their personal files over to a stranger. If this is the case for you, some other viable options include copying your old PC’s data onto a portable hard drive or onto discs that are compatible with the new computer. If several home computers are networked, files can be transferred onto a drive accessible by all the machines.

This week, I tried yet another method, copying data from a Windows machine over to a new MacBook using a special transfer cable from Belkin International Inc. The aptly named Switch-to-Mac Cable plugs into USB ports on two computers. It came out a month ago and is available for $50 at places like Best Buy and Apple stores. Like other transferring methods, it moves only files and not programs or applications, such as Microsoft Word (MSFT). (Windows applications can run on a Mac using programs like Boot Camp, Fusion or Parallels.)

The Switch-to-Mac Cable makes it easier to transfer data from a Windows PC to a Mac.

I tested the Belkin Switch-to-Mac Cable by transferring data to a new Apple MacBook from my two-year-old Lenovo ThinkPad X60, which runs Vista. (Most people will transfer from an older PC that doesn’t run Vista.)

After installing the software included and connecting the transfer cable to both the Mac and Windows PC, short, on-screen prompts walked me through the steps for copying data from one computer to the other. On one instructional screen, I checked boxes to indicate what I wanted to transfer, including documents, pictures, music, videos, Internet Explorer bookmarks, desktop wallpaper and desktop files. Here, I could also opt to transfer a custom folder as well as personal information from Outlook like email, contacts and calendar.

I liked Belkin’s simple approach, including unintimidating software and a straightforward cable with a glowing, white indicator. But the files didn’t all properly transfer from my Windows laptop to my Mac. Most notably, the software prompted me to move files on my desktop, but the cable moved only five of the 23 selected files stored there.

Also, I use Mozilla’s Firefox as my default browser, but Belkin doesn’t move Firefox bookmarks to the Mac. Still, my Internet Explorer bookmarks moved over into Safari, Apple’s browser. Belkin explained that it left out Firefox transfers, instead focusing on programs like Safari that come installed on Macs. Even without a cable, Firefox itself will export bookmarks to be moved to the Mac in just a few simple steps.

I had no problems transferring everything else, and things like photos and music moved to the Mac appeared there in logical places. For example, photos stored in the “My Pictures” folder on my Windows PC automatically moved over to iPhoto on the Mac and retained their original folder labels in iPhoto.

In most cases, newly transferred files were clearly labeled on the Mac in folders marked “Windows PC.” After my initial transfer, I used the cable for additional transfers, and the data moved in those follow-ups were labeled “Windows PC-2″ and so on. When my email, contacts and calendar transferred from my Windows Live Mail desktop client, I wasn’t sure where this data had moved within Apple Mail because I didn’t see a “Windows PC” folder. A Belkin representative explained that files transferred to Apple Mail are stored in an “Import” folder.

If your transfer doesn’t work perfectly the first time, try moving stray files into a folder that transferred successfully in a previous attempt. I did this with some of my desktop files when they didn’t move over and it worked, albeit with an extra step.

Over the phone, I walked through numerous troubleshooting scenarios with Belkin to figure out why my desktop files didn’t transfer over to the new Mac, but nothing helped. Belkin said it hadn’t seen my desktop transfer problem in its tests.

I was frustrated to find that Belkin doesn’t offer much in the way of detailed instructions for users, such as a FAQs Web site or troubleshooting steps for common hiccups. Its simplicity is an asset, but when performing an important task like transferring data, I’d rather have the option of knowing more than less. Belkin says it plans to add more help for users in the future.

As its name indicates, the Belkin Switch-to-Mac Cable isn’t designed to transfer data from one Mac to another, nor from one Windows PC to another. Nor will it transfer data from a Mac to a Windows PC. Additionally, all hidden directories and system directories are ignored, as are all files with the following extensions: .exe, .com, .dll, .scr, .ini, .db, .lnk.

Not tested was a competing product from Detto Technologies, the $50 Move2Mac, which comes in two versions: One enables transfers from older PCs without USB ports, the other enables transfers from PCs with USB ports that are running Windows 98, Millennium, 2000 or XP — but not Vista, which the Belkin enables.

If you’re moving away from a Windows PC, Belkin’s Switch-to-Mac Cable is one tool that can make this transition easier.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com