Do you prefer using outlook or Windows mail instead of your gmail / yahoo mail ? Consider again after using this useful plugin ( only for gmail ). This plugin lets you add contact info, social networking info and other interesting and usefull statistics to your gmail sidebar. Also you get social information, conversation history, and advanced sending preferences right in your Gmail sidebars.

There have been previous utility tools like Xobni which do a similar task as this plug-in but this one has numerous extra features which are quite useful. It automatically adds detailed contact information to the sidebar of the messages. Along with getting the links to social networks that the contact is a part of, you get further information such as occupation and location etc. You also get detailed summary of the mailing history with them along with simple to understand charts and graphs which makes understanding the stats so much better.

The plug-in also packs in number of other features as well related to follow up messages. If you an specific conversation you want to look out for,  you can opt to send the message and have Gmail remind you if you haven’t heard back within a specific period of time. you can also add a category in your left sidebar for all messages awaiting reply, so you can view them all at once if you want to.

Some have questioned the security issues with such services. Ofcourse, you would need to provide your gmail details as the plug-in needs to acess the gmail account. It stores the email subjects, from, to and time headers but doesn’t store the body of the messages. It also does not store the passwords. All the info which is kept with the plug-in is not shared with any other 3rd party.

Etacts is available as a free extension for both Firefox and Chrome, but if you use a different browser, you can still get all of Etacts’ features with the Etacts bookmarklet, also available on their site—just click it every time you open up Gmail and want Etacts’ features. The plug-in works for both Gmail and Google Apps accounts, although it won’t work in both at once (you can only be logged into Etacts with one account at a time).

Download etacts plug-in