matching outlook email address to Zoho contact does not work terribly well
The Zoho Outlook plug-in does not look for partial matches when attempting to add an email to a Zoho contract record from Outlook. This necessitates manually altering the suggested string in order to find the right contact (or a suggested list of contacts in the case of multiple hits).
Given that email addresses are often stored in Outlook as both an address and a label (i.e. [Doe, John <john.doe@acme.com>]), in cases where an exact match to the outlook-formatted contact information isn't found, the plug-in should look for the predictable alternatives (i.e. just the email address, just the name, common variations such Mike / Michael, Dave / David, etc.)
I think that this should be high-priority, as it is the single biggest time-waster in using the plug-in...it basically doubles the time / attention it takes to add an email that lives in both Outlook and in Zoho. It is also a structural / inevitable problem, because Outlook always stores email addresses differently than Zoho does. To make matters worse, Zoho doesn't store the matches - you have to do it every time you send an email to a contact which is also maintained in Outlook.
Another alternative might be to have Zoho maintain a list of the matches so that the user only has to do the manual search one time, similar to how Microsoft's dictionary feature works. This would greatly reduce the overhead for the user.