PRESTON’S PICKS

Poor overlooked e-mail. Everyone uses it; no one thinks about it. But the truth is, you can get a whole lot more out of e-mail than you do today. You can power up Outlook, get e-mail add-ins that will do everything from kill spam to encrypt your messages, and you can send multimedia greetings. How to do it all? Check out some of my favorite e-mail downloads this month.

Freshen your Outlook

Like a big chunk of the computing world, I use Outlook as my e-mail program. No, it's not perfect, but compared to a lot of Microsoft software, it does a relatively good job. Of course, there's a lot it can't do--and that's where downloads come in.

Nelson Email Organizer is the best addition to Outlook I've ever come across. It performs the magic of organizing all of your e-mail for you automatically, even if you're not particularly organized. It groups mail on which you need to act into an Active Mail area; lets you drag and drop mail into a "To Do" area; and groups mail you've sent and received into today's mail, yesterday's mail, this week's mail, and last week's mail. It also organizes mail by sender and recipient and, best of all, performs lightning-fast searches on your mail. There's a lot more as well, so if e-mail is an important part of your life, check this one out.