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Once you've added x-ray vision to your email inbox, you'll never go back to life without it. The latest service to offer just that is Xobni, a high-profile startup that brought its Outlook plug-in out of Beta status a year ago next week. Today Xobni comes to Gmail and it looks really nice. The first 100 ReadWriteWeb readers who visit this link and enter the code XOBNI-RWW will be provided access to it. The company says iPhone and Android versions will open for testing within 90 days.

Xobni competes with Rapportive (my favorite to date) and Gist, which was recently acquired by Blackberry company RIM. Another service called eTacts (site now down) was recently acquired by Salesforce. Xobni was funded by Blackberry Partners a year ago, but remains independent. Check out the screenshot below to get a feel for how it looks, what it offers and how it's different.

Google has just announced a new feature in Gmail aimed at helping us address the pain of the email inbox. It's a follow-up to some of the recent changes that Google has made to help tackle email overload, most notably with the addition of the Priority Inbox.

The new feature, only available in Labs at the moment, is called Smart Labs and it adds filters to your incoming email based on their type - Bulk, Notification, or Forum.

If you go and look at your inbox right now, we're willing to bet that there's some email in there that's completely stale. There's no reason to reference it, search for it sometime down the road or keep it around for sentimental value. It's just expired.

If Other Inbox CEO Joshua Baer has his way, this email could simply delete itself, rather than lurking in your inbox and continuing the clutter.

Last December Google announced a new service from its Postini acquisition called Google Message Continuity. The service allows administrators to backup their on-premise Exchange servers to Gmail, so that in the event of an Exchange outage users can still access their e-mail. Today, Google announced the service is now available for Exchange 2010 servers as well.

We've been hearing good things about Sparrow, an OS X IMAP e-mail client, since its beta release last fall. The app hit the new Mac App Store earlier this week, quickly shooting up to the top paid app spot.

That speaks volumes about Sparrow as the app costs $9.99 while the web-based access to Gmail, the only email currently supported by the app, is of course free.

Wouldn't it be great if you could have one email address for all your friends, one email address you use to sign up for potentially spammy services and sites you don't really want to get in touch with you, another for business and then one more for all your gamer friends?

That's exactly the idea behind the new aliases feature announced this afternoon for Microsoft Hotmail's 350 million users.

Attorney-client privilege does not extend to emails sent from a work email account, a California Court of Appeals has ruled. The unanimous decision was handed down by the Third Appellate District Court in Sacramento last week.

The court's decision means that a company has a right to access any email sent via a company computer - so use caution, perhaps, when using your work email account to consult with an attorney about suing your employer. These emails, writes the court, "were akin to consulting her lawyer in her employer's conference room, in a loud voice, with the door open, so that any reasonable person would expect that their discussion of her complaints about her employer would be overheard ."

When I attended Google's one-day summit with Oregon teachers and tech-coordinators this fall, I heard about the myriad struggles faced by schools trying to implement Apps for Education - and this in a state that was already completely on board with the process of moving schools to the cloud.

One of the concerns that I heard most often expressed centered around students' access to and usage of email - concerns about safety, privacy, and acceptable use. Will students mis-use email? Do parents approve of giving students accounts? At what age should a child get an email account?

As 2010 draws to a close we're taking a look at a few enterprise startups that show promise and that we haven't covered on ReadWriteEnterprise.

DokDok wants to bring document management into your email. Unlike Mainsoft's harmon.ie (which we covered here), DokDok doesn't seek to eliminate email attachments. The DokDok team accepts that attachments aren't going away, so instead they're trying to make attachments work. DokDok currently offers a Google Apps gadget and a Chrome extension that displays attachment version history in Gmail. The Chrome extension also offers API-based integration between Gmail and Highrise.

Earlier this morning we reported on the shut-down announcement of email data enhancement program Etacts and said that it was most likely the result of an acquisition. Now someone has told TechCrunch that the little startup has been acquired by enterprise CRM giant Salesforce.

Still as yet unreported, though? It appears that Palo Alto based Etacts isn't the only YCombinator-incubated email add-on startup that Salesforce has acquired today. San Francisco's EmailOracle, a smaller startup that lets users track when individual recipients have opened emails you send to them, also announced today that it's closing down. That site used the exact same language in its announcement that Etacts did, too. In other words, welcome to Salesforce, teams Etacts and EmailOracle. Update: TechCrunch reporter Jason Kincaid responds in comments with a theory that these may in fact be the same company. While we don't know whether that's true or not, it doesn't seem unlikely given the way YCombinator has been known to tell founders that they like their people, but that they need a different product. We'll update this post when we find out for sure. Further update: Turns out the two companies sit on the same server.