The Complete Guide to E-mail

John Fried has written a pretty damn comprehensive article for Inc.com called The Complete Guide to E-mail

In it he covers a whole bunch of stuff like

  • How to Avoid Scammers, Spammers, and the Rest of the Bad E-Guys
  • Spam Glossary
  • 5 Ways to Avoid the Junk Mail Folder
  • The Coolest PDAs and Who Needs Them
  • 5 Things You Didn’t Know About E-mail
  • Software Buyer’s Guide
  1. Microsoft Outlook 2003
  2. IBM Lotus Notes 7.0
  3. Qualcomm Eudora 6.2
  4. Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0
  • The Secrets of E-mail Stash
  • Is Instant Messaging an Instant Menace?
  • The Government’s Take on E-mail
  • The Rules You Make about E-mail

Worth a look.

Also worth a look is the Beta of Zimbra, an open source webmail and calendar suite: Your first reaction will probably be ” This looks a lot like Gmail,” and your second will probably be , “This is open-source software??”

This puppy is seriously slick, there’s a lot of Gmail in there (this is a compliment not a criticism): The popular conversation view–a feature I hope every e-mail client includes a year from now–is there, though it works a bit differently when reading messages and can optionally be turned off. Labels are there, too, though Zimbra calls them tags and uses a nice color-coded icon approach. And like Gmail, each conversation’s subject is accompanied by a snipped of the body, you can add a flag to any message akin to Gmail’s stars, and there’s a big search bar right at the top of the app.

Other nice touches. Hovering over a message yields a short preview of the message, and hovering over a contact’s name or e-mail address wherever it appears will show you all of their stored information, e.g. company, title, phone number, etc., and you can drag-and-drop messages onto folders or labels. And then there’s the calendar, which is integrated into the e-mail compontent in a very handy way: when you see a date in a message you can hover over it to see if you have any appointments scheduled that day or right-click to add a new appointment to your calendar.

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