On the other, we despise how it makes Outlook feel as if it’s running on a virtual machine hosted on a Commodore 64, forcing most of the team to reluctantly uninstall it.

However, I’ve taken rather a shine to the company’s new iPhone app, Smartr Contacts. I should explain that the last time I actually saved someone’s contact details into Outlook was circa 1997. I’m appalling at maintaining a contacts book, normally relying on finding the relevant details by searching through my enormously bloated inbox.

Smartr Contacts uses all the data it’s scraped from previous Xobni installations in Outlook and Gmail, plus contacts harvested from Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, and presents all that data in one gigantic searchable contacts book.

Across all of my accounts it’s managed to find almost 1,600 contacts, 90% of which I’ll probably never voluntarily contact again, yet comprehensive enough to ensure it has captured the email and telephone details of most of the people I’ve had previous contact with.

Wisely, it doesn’t flood all of this data into the default iPhone contacts app, keeping it in its own separate app container. Nevertheless, you can still call, text or email contacts directly, simply by pressing on the relevant number/address in the app.

Contacts can be searched by name, company or title. Better still, each contact has a list of related contacts, so if you can’t get hold of someone at a particular company, chances are you’ll find one of their colleagues in your address book.

It’s not perfect: Smartr Contacts often lists two or three phone numbers/email addresses for the same person, and is clearly unable to tell when someone has moved jobs or changed their mobile number. There doesn’t appear to be any way to even delete outdated entries manually.   The social networking profiles on the home screen are also erratic, sometimes appearing, sometimes not.

Nevertheless, for a disorganised lummox like me, this app does a decent job.

This morning, I received an email from a reader I hadn’t heard from for a year. How do I know? Not due to my enclopeadic brain (my brain is anything but), but because the moment the email dropped into my inbox it came up with a brief history of my correspondence with him.

As it happens, that’s just two emails – but it’s enough to prompt me to look at the previous emails and give them a quick read.

This is great for me, but for a company that thrives on customer relationships it’s surely invaluable.