Rapportive, Richer Contact Profiles For Gmail
When you read or reply to emails on Google's mail service Gmail, you see the email addresses and contact names of the recipients and senders. But that's it. Sometimes you may want to find out more about a person on Gmail, for instance before you reply to an email.
While you could do that by opening a web search engine in a new browser tab, it is not the most comfortable thing to do, especially so if you have to do it on a regular basis.
That's where the Firefox (and Google Chrome and Safari) add-on Rapportive comes into play. Rapportive integrates into the Gmail interface naturally. The extension displays a new sidebar on the right side of any email that you open on the Google Mail website.
The sidebar displays the contact's name and email address, location, a profile picture if available, the contact's occupation, recent social media usage (Twitter) and options to connect on social networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn. Another interesting feature added by Rapportive is a note taking module that is displayed in the sidebar. You can jot down notes which are displayed whenever an email of that contact is opened in the Gmail interface.
You see who you are communicating with, and have options to add the person to your social circles. This works best if Rapportive was able to find the user on one of the social networking sites it uses to display the contact information. This does mean that you won't get any useful information, that is information that go beyond the user's email address, if Rapportive cannot find or link the user on one of those sites.
Users can hover over any email address in Gmail, for instance in emails with multiple recipients, to see their information on the screen as well.
Rapportive does not need access to your Gmail's login credentials. The company gets limited access to your Gmail inbox on the other hand, and users with sensitive information may want to pass on this one because of it.
What I really like about Rapportive is the ability to "see" who you are communicating with. You get instant access to information about your Gmail contacts that you would otherwise only have access to if you'd run searches on sites like Google, Facebook or LinkedIn.
Firefox, Chrome and Safari users can download Rapportive from the official website.

You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!