Peter Sinclair: e-mail evolution

By PETER SINCLAIR

You've got mail! E-mail is probably the most important new means of communication since Alexander Graham Bell secured Patent No. 174,465 back in 1876 and Thomas Alva Edison casually recited Mary Had A Little Lamb the following year.

But your average e-mail is hardly an all-singing, all-dancing affair. In fact, it's usually downright dull.

All that may change, you'll be glad to hear, with Zaplets. New from FireDrop, Zaplets are e-mail with a twist — dynamic features once associated only with the web and instant messaging.

Zaplets continue to update in your inbox as recipients reply and add new information. You can set up a meeting, share an idea, make a group decision.

Watch a Zaplet come alive as you poll colleagues interactively about something as complex as a current project or as simple as where everyone wants to go for lunch.

And while you're at it, why not give your e-mail client a complete makeover?

You could begin with something simple like EzPop, a versatile and colourful notification add-on — it comes complete with a number of skins. More ambitiously, try File Mine's e-mail add-on pack — @loha — which is fun for creating your own multimedia greetings cards to send as e-mail. The recipient doesn't even have to have @loha to play the message back, because the programme sends its own small player (its files are much smaller than average graphics files).

For slightly geekier readers, a visit to the always lively DaveCentral software archive, home of the Linux alternative, is also a must for its update and notification tools.

CVideo-Mail, brainchild of a faintly sinister surveillance outfit, offers a software package which lets you send cool video e-mail to friends, family and business associates — the software costs about $US119, so it's worth trying out the demo.

For those of an incurably frivolous disposition, like me, Email Trivia lets you quickly append a piece of trivia to your e-mail messages — Ascii Art, On This Day (the kind of irrelevant anniversaries radio stations are fond of), poems, quotes, jokes and weird facts.

Mary Houten-Kemp's Everything Email is one of the most comprehensive sites of all, with free e-cards, useful tips, a glossary of common net terms (plus e-mail acronyms, e.g. ROTFL: Rolling On The Floor Laughing), and a list of sophisticated software including solid security apps.

It includes the very handy HotSend, which specialises in self-viewing e-mail attachments for less wired friends who may not have the right viewers or applications — e-mail those holiday snaps to Nana without giving her (more) grey hair.

Softseek's "Listen! You've Got Mail" audio e-mail is fun to at least consider, while adventurous gadget-lovers can take it a step further with VideoMail based on Real's reliable video technology.

After all this, I'll be expecting some inventive and colourful e-mail at the inbox below ...

Links:

Alexander Graham Bell

Thomas Edison

Zaplet

EzPop

FileMine

DaveCentral

CVideo-Mail

Email Trivia

Everything Email

HotSend

SoftSeek

Peter Sinclair e-mail: petersinclair@email.com