E-mail - among the least glamorous of applications, but arguably the most essential - is a logical focus of developers showing productivity tools at the Demo 2003 technology conference here this week.

As the tech economy struggles to recover, Demo--once a launching pad for bleeding-edge technologies--is focusing more on the practical than the radical. And existing e-mail clients offer lots of opportunities for improvement.

"E-mail is the place where we're spending our business lives, and those products have to get a lot easier to use." said Chris Shipley, Demo executive producer, when introducing a session on e-mail. The event is produced by IDG Executive Forums, a sibling company of PC World.

E-Mail Overview

A few of the mail-related products and services unveiled here:

Bloomba: New e-mail clients don't come along every day, or even every year. But start-up Stata Laboratories Inc. hopes to lure mail mavens to Bloomba. Although its streamlined interface looks much like Microsoft's Outlook Express, this POP3 client replaces folders with Google-like tools that dynamically organize your in-box according to search terms you specify. Bloomba also dispenses with a traditional address book in favor of an auto-fill feature that grabs names from your incoming messages. A free beta version is available for download.

Ella: Like Bloomba, Open Field Software Inc.'s Ella aims to help tame overcrowded in-boxes. But Ella is a plug-in for your existing e-mail client. You train it to sort incoming messages into folders organized by priority--for example, folders for business mail, personal messages, newsletters, and spam. A beta of a basic version of Ella for Outlook is due soon; the more powerful Ella Pro for Outlook and Lotus Notes is planned for later this year.

Oddpost: This strange name yields an interesting service. Oddpost is a new browser-based competitor to Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. It has a slick, speedy drag-and-drop interface that looks and performs more like a desktop app than a Web client. A US$30 annual fee gets you 50MB of storage space, too.

Kubi Client: Another new add-on for Outlook and Notes is Kubi Software Inc.'s Kubi Client. The program tries to make groupware palatable by integrating it tightly into e-mail. Scheduled to ship in the second quarter of 2003, the program adds shared calendars and contact databases, discussion boards, document folders, and timelines to Outlook's and Notes' standard interfaces. Cross-platform compatibility will allow Outlook users to collaborate with Notes types and vice versa.

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