The Net Goes Postal

Remember those alerts that made email feel like so much fun: "You've got mail!"? Now that you're getting scores of messages a day, you probably feel like shooting the messenger. The ubiquity of Internet email has brought with it new opportunities; it's also created a whole lot of headaches.

The good news is that electronic messaging has finally grown up. But that only means you have to get smarter about realizing its full potential -- sending Web pages and video-embedded notes, tracking discussion threads, adding multiple attachments -- while eliminating the flotsam that comes in its wake. Analysts at Forrester Research estimate that in 1996 more than 100 million email messages were churned out each day in the United States alone. By 2005 the daily count may hit 5 billion. (And those numbers only measure personal email traffic; including business email would increase the total exponentially.) If you're not adroit at tracking the hundreds of messages you receive, you'll miss out on critical information.

To help you take control of email and use it to your advantage, I'll walk you through the three biggest Internet email packages on the market, tell you how to leverage them to meet your needs, and offer tips and strategies on running your own electronic post office -- without going postal.

Your CyberLife: DisOrganization Man. Your inbox is an Irish stew of spam, cc's, and forwarded messages. And where's that urgent email from the CEO?

Power Tool: Netscape Messenger ($59; free 90-day-trial version available)

Netscape's Navigator has always been a great Web browser, but its email capabilities were singularly lackluster. Now Netscape has fixed that problem with Messenger, the email portion of its all-in-one Communicator package.

Messenger is so easy to use, you don't have to crack the manual. Big, graphic buttons at the top of the screen make sending, receiving, forwarding, and filing email messages a snap. Below the tool bars is a drop-down menu of folders. Select one to view a list of messages in the top half of the screen and individual missives in the bottom half. Messenger helps you to keep tabs on your most pressing messages by letting you sort them according to such criteria as date, subject header, sender, and priority.

Need to track down a lost message? A search function lets you hunt through individual folders or scan all of them at once. It then lists all the files in which the subject heading, the sender's address, or the message itself contains the sought-after word or phrase. Messenger offers a handy threading capability for following online discussions. Just click on the box next to the "Sender" heading, and Messenger reorganizes the original email with replies and counter-replies all grouped together. That way, you don't have to dig through your inbox for the previous "re: re: re:" message. As a side benefit, the software lets you look at newsgroup threads in the same way.

If you're missing the email address of a key contact, Messenger can help you track it down. By using something called Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, you can search for people's email addresses by keying in their names on one of the online directories, such as Bigfoot, Four11, SwitchBoard, or WhoWhere.

Messenger also lets you send and receive entire HTML Web pages. It displays them in the message window, so you don't have to open a browser to retrieve them. If you find a competitor's page on the Net and you think the boss should see it, just type in a quick message, attach the page, and the Big Cheese will get everything in one email -- your note and the page, including graphics -- without going to the competitor's site. Best of all, you don't need to do any special formatting.

Netscape's email software has one notable drawback: it can't conduct sophisticated filtering, such as automatically filing each outgoing message into the folder of your choice (although it can route incoming messages into particular folders). Then again, Messenger runs on more than a dozen operating systems, including Windows, Macintosh, and Unix.

Coordinates: Netscape Communications, 800-638-7483; home.netscape.com

Your CyberLife: The Multitasker. You're juggling email accounts for your day job, your night job, and the skunk-works project that's become your in-between job.

Power Tool: Outlook Express (free)

Microsoft's copycat approach to managing Internet email has always left the software giant several steps behind Netscape. Until now. Outlook Express, the email software that works with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 browser, at last offers a full-fledged email package.