There are a bunch of virtual personal assistant apps that will help you dial into conference calls and remind you to leave for your next in-person meeting in time. It’s useful stuff, but c’mon, you could surely do it on your own.
EasilyDo Now Searches Email Text History for the Hundreds of Contacts You May Be Missing
EasilyDo says it can find phone numbers and addresses that are contained in the body text of your emails.
One such app, EasilyDo, is launching a new feature today that seems more useful than most. The company certainly thinks so; it’s charging a hefty one-time fee of $59.99. Called “EasilyDo Contacts Catch All,” it will scan your email history to find contact information you may have missed. That includes phone numbers and addresses that are contained in the body of the text, rather than in a formal contact or a preset signature.
Available for iOS at the start, Catch All then formats all that new information together so you can save the contacts directly to your phone address book. It goes back through two years of email, which in testing produced hundreds of new contacts for some users.
This works for just about any email provider, including Google, Microsoft Exchange, AOL and anything that’s IMAP compatible. Scanning two years of mail generally takes a few hours. Catch All also works with Yahoo Mail, but because of issues with that service’s APIs it’ll take more like 24 hours.
The trick behind this is EasilyDo’s work to process language and context to understand that when someone says “Call me at this number…” in an email, it’s a number you may want to later find again. I haven’t used Catch All yet and can’t vouch for how it works or how well it works, but it seems like the kind of thing that people like me who email with a lot of people could find quite useful.
(Also, it seems worth saying: though Mountain View, Calif.-based EasilyDo has a good track record so far, small startups don’t always stay alive or independent, so you may want to carefully consider whether to hand over your email credentials and history.)
If you want to keep up with detecting and syncing your contacts on an ongoing basis, that’s actually one of EasilyDo’s main features, and it costs — separately — $49.99 per year. The app is also available on Android, and it’s being heavily promoted by Samsung for buyers of its new phones.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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