SomeZing to help you with messaging

Procomsoft’s newest offering is Zing, a messaging service designed to help users prioritize and manage the messages that they receive and to insulate them from spam, particularly those unwanted messages that they receive via SMS and instant messaging.

Procomsoft is a British company that provides messaging and related services through an ASP model.

The concept behind Zing is simple. A subscriber establishes an account with the Zing service and receives a single e-mail address to which anyone can send messages via a Web browser. The subscriber can then configure the service to receive these e-mail messages in a manner that suits them.

For example, the user can configure the service with multiple e-mail addresses, an SMS address and an AOL Instant Messaging (AIM) screen name. The user can then tell Zing how he or she would like to be contacted if the sender’s message is given urgent, high or normal priority. For example, an urgent message could be sent to the subscriber’s SMS address, a high-priority message could be sent to AIM, and a normal-priority message could be sent to e-mail. Backup addresses are provided for each message venue.

Zing also permits the subscriber to invisibly change the default priority of messages based on keywords regardless of the priority given by the sender. For example, while all messages can be assigned a normal priority, a message that contains the words “server” and “crash” could be automatically assigned an urgent priority and routed based on the configuration that was already established by the Zing subscriber.

Zing offers a couple of important benefits. Since only the Zing address needs to be distributed publicly, it insulates subscribers’ other e-mail addresses from the outside world and may be able to reduce spam, which is particularly important for bandwidth-restricted devices. It allows subscribers to receive messages via their SMS or AIM accounts without having to make these addresses public. It also allows subscribers to modify how they receive messages based on what is important to them, not based on what is important to the sender.

Zing is priced at $8.20 per month, $41 per six months, or $74 per year.