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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to make me start saving a substantially larger number of Outlook contacts -- and it updated my contacts that had old, outdated information.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.
你可能因为很久没有更新电子邮件通讯簿而感到内疚，但你不是唯一一个有这种感受的人。有很多人和你一样，不想浪费时间把电子邮件中附带的联系方式剪切并复制到通讯簿上。相反，他们会从某人近期的电子邮件中查找最新联络信息，比如电话号码和地址等。
然而，电子邮件很容易丢失或被删除，而电子通讯簿更持久，并能同步到智能手机上去。
最近我测试了Gwabbit软件(Gwabbit.com)，这是一个收到邮件后能在内容中自动找到相关的联系方式，然后保存到通讯簿里的程序。它会自行启动，并弹出一个通知窗口，告诉你这封邮件含有可以存到通讯簿里的联络信息。
Gwabbit是Technicopia LLC公司开发的，用一只粉红色的“傻兔子”(Gwabbit Wabbit)作为吉祥物，这给单调无聊的信息保存功能带来一点好玩的感觉。目前，该软件只能作为微软Outlook的插件，但Technicopia正在研制能在黑莓手机(BlackBerry)上使用的版本，预计于2009年5月底推出。随后，公司计划为苹果电脑和基于互联网的电子邮件服务开发相应的版本。
我最开始测试的是Gwabbit的免费版，可以试用14天或执行20次任务，然后就得更新到付费版本，费用是20美元。一般而言，Gwabbit的准确性－－即在电子邮件中找到正确信息并将其放入Outlook通讯簿相应位置的能力－－是很可靠的。该软件通过寻找“@”字符来定位电子邮件地址，或寻找“括号”来定位电话号码，以及寻找那些跟签名在一起的信息。
在大多数情况下，Gwabbit每添加一次通讯簿只需几秒钟时间。它并非十全十美，但已足以给我的通讯簿里加上很多联络信息，而且还能更新原来那些老的、已经失效的联系方式。
Gwabbit安装后会开启几个不讨人喜欢的功能。如果你像我一样经常收到很多陌生人的来信，Gwabbit就会经常弹出通知窗口，让人不厌其烦。但如果把通知功能关掉，就可能不记得使用Gwabbit。
让我觉得不舒服的是，Gwabbit在每个创建的联系方式中都插入自己的广告。如果你用Gwabbit在Outlook中生成一个名片，备注栏上会有一个声明，说你使用了Gwabbit软件，还有一个产品网址－－即使用付费版本也一样。Technicopia表示将在下一个付费版本中消除这些内容，大约还需三周时间就能推出。
Gwabbit的竞争对手包括微软Outlook和苹果电邮(Apple Mail)中内置的联络信息捕捉工具，但这些程序不像Gwabbit那样能自动从所有邮件中提取信息。其他第三方软件，如Signature2Contacts等，在邮件包含新联系信息时不会自动弹出提醒窗口，你必须自己启动信息提取功能。
下载并安装Gwabbit后，它会在Outlook中加入自己的工具栏中，并可以选择隐藏。
启用Gwabbit的自动抓取功能后，如果收到一封内含新联络信息的邮件－－包括那些自上次保存在通讯簿后个人签名又发生变化的联系人－－就会在Outlook上出现一个小气泡。Technicopia公司称，Gwabbit的气泡会过几秒钟才显现出来，给你留下足够的时间阅读邮件。但如果你滚动打开一长列邮件，气泡就会不断出现，从而让你快速浏览每封邮件的速度有所放缓。
当Gwabbit找不到一封邮件的签名时，就会生成一张该发件人的空白名片，让你选择该人的签名部位，从而提取联络信息。在我的测试中，只有几次出现过这种情况－－通常是在阅读一封多次往返的邮件时产生的，因为Gwabbit在那么多的往返内容中找不到正确的签名部位。
如果Gwabbit弹出通知气泡，而你不想保存发件人的联络信息，就可以点击气泡中的“忽略该人”选项，这样Gwabbit以后就不会再提示保存此人的信息。如果你想保存信息但又在忙着做别的事情，就可以点击通知气泡的“X”按键，关闭通知但以后不会忽略该联系人。
Gwabbit似乎是个简单的工具，但它能找到你通讯簿中没有的联络信息，或与现有内容不一致的信息，这是你自己难以定期做到的。因此，你不必再为不更新通讯簿而感到内疚了，用Gwabbit吧。
