Need a shovel for your e-mail?

Two truths are evident in the growing popularity of NEO and the more recent emergence of competing products such as Bloomba by Stata Labs and IntelliMail by Open Field Software: E-mail overload has moved beyond being an annoyance for power users to where it’s now getting on the nerves of ordinary office workers.

Caelo Software is a tiny speck of a company located in a tiny speck of a Canadian town.

Caelo’s product – Nelson Email Organizer (NEO) – is said to save huge amounts of time for Microsoft Outlook users who find themselves facing enormous mounds of messages every day.

Two truths are evident in the growing popularity of NEO and the more recent emergence of competing products such as Bloomba by Stata Labs and IntelliMail by Open Field Software: E-mail overload has moved beyond being an annoyance for power users to where it’s now getting on the nerves of ordinary office workers.

And the major e-mail vendors – Microsoft, in particular – are not doing enough to help.

Tom Gibson, a Caelo founder and vice president of product development, claims NEO users report carving “two or three hours a day” off their e-mail processing time.

That sounds like an exaggeration, but NEO does receive glowing reviews from technology journalists, who are a notoriously ornery bunch when it comes to products they actually use.

“There are two reasons why there is an e-mail overload problem,” Gibson says. “The biggest is poor e-mail practices by users.”

That might smack of blaming the victim, but it rings true given the amount of utterly useless junk that lands in my in-box every hour from friends, co-workers, and – the worst offenders – clueless public relations professionals who won’t take the time to aim their pitches at only appropriate targets.

“The second problem is that there are inadequate tools,” Gibson says. “The tools that are out there don’t really match how people deal with their e-mail. . . . Search is so slow that it’s not viable in Outlook.”

NEO helps by creating easily searchable links to individual messages that are automatically sorted into multiple views that product fans say work better than the familiar folders of Outlook. While NEO is targeted at the small office/home office market, an enterprise version is slated to debut later this year.

Despite the rising pain of ever-growing e-mail levels, user inertia is likely to remain the most daunting challenge facing companies such as Caelo.

“It doesn’t occur to people that there’s a better way to do e-mail,” Gibson says.

Stupidity is stranger than fiction

Buzz was sitting next to a fellow from the State Department at lunch recently when the topic turned to spam, and, in particular, the notorious Nigerian con game that still reportedly separates the gullible from their bank accounts. I’ve long suspected that reports of this scam bilking hundreds of victims had to be an urban legend because, well, because people just can’t be that stupid.

You can add that to the list of things I’ve been wrong about.

My lunch companion says it’s not unusual for U.S. embassy personnel in Nigeria to receive frantic phone calls from relatives of Americans who have traveled to that country to claim their promised rewards. Only when embassy workers actually knock on the dupe’s hotel room door do these noodle-brains finally accept that they’re about to be victimized. “The look of realization that washes over their face is something to see,” he said.

He also told of a twist to the scam that will forever disavow me of any notion that there is a limit to human stupidity or greed.

It seems the spammers are telephoning earlier victims of the scam and claiming to be from the Nigerian government. They say they can get the victim’s money back . . . for a fee of $1,000. . . . Believe it or not, a few bite.

You say that’s not all I’m wrong about? The address is buzz@nww.com.